Slate " Do Not Lose Sight of the Fact That Every Aspect of This Is Absolutely Insane"

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://slate.com/business/2020/11/the-election-was-insane.html

It's possible that all of this will have a happy ending.

Maybe the polls are right, and Joe Biden is on course for a dominant 7 or 8 point win over Donald Trump. He could pick up a couple of decisive swing states that are supposed to finish counting votes on Tuesday night—North Carolina and Arizona, for instance—and short-circuit the president’s plan to first claim victory, then sue his way to a second term. There’s a chance that Democrats will eke out a Senate majority, too, so that they can actually govern come January, and deal properly with the deadly plague that’s reshaped our lives and crippled the economy. Perhaps there won’t be any violence at voting places, and people will be able to cast their ballots without getting hurt. Knock on wood.

But even if this election does bring an orderly end to the Trump era, do not for a second forget that absolutely everything about it, and the year that has led us to this point, has been utterly, incalculably insane, a 50-car pileup of reminders that we are a broken society with a broken political system that seems ever-more untenable, whether or not we are doomed to spend four more years with our addled president.

It is insane, for starters, that he even has a shot of pulling this race out. Nobody, least of all Trump, believes that he will win the popular vote. It is not even a discussion at this point. But we’re all trapped in a mad house erected upon the Electoral College, an anti-majoritarian barbarism that, according to conventional wisdom, now requires Democrats to win by at least 3 percent to have a shot at the White House and drives otherwise sensible Americans to spend sleepless nights and precious emotional energy freaking out over early voting patterns in Miami-Dade.

snip...more at link

[fleur-de-lisa]

1. From the article, by Jordan Weissmann:

But even if this election does bring an orderly end to the Trump era, do not for a second forget that absolutely everything about it, and the year that has led us to this point, has been utterly, incalculably insane, a 50-car pileup of reminders that we are a broken society with a broken political system that seems ever-more untenable, whether or not we are doomed to spend four more years with our addled president.

It is insane, for starters, that he even has a shot of pulling this race out. Nobody, least of all Trump, believes that he will win the popular vote. It is not even a discussion at this point. But we’re all trapped in a mad house erected upon the Electoral College, an anti-majoritarian barbarism that, according to conventional wisdom, now requires Democrats to win by at least 3 percent to have a shot at the White House and drives otherwise sensible Americans to spend sleepless nights and precious emotional energy freaking out over early voting patterns in Miami-Dade.

Other countries—the ones we like to think of as our peers, even if they see us more like a tragic, strung-out uncle these days—don’t do this to themselves. In normal, advanced presidential democracies, the candidate who gets the most votes actually wins. We’re the only one where the person who comes in second can still somehow end up in charge. There is no good argument for it, in this year of our collective misery 2020. It is nuts.

It is also pure lunacy that after four years of family separations, tax cuts for the rich, transparent corruption, and deadly ineptitude, more than 4 in 10 Americans are apparently ready for another round of Trump. We are literally living through one of the worst-case scenarios experts anticipated when he was first elected: A pandemic that has killed 231,000 Americans, thanks in no small part to the White House’s botched response, and is set to ravage the country for months more, since Republican leaders seem to have mostly decided to let COVID rip and hope for the best. This a man who caught a deadly pathogen because he wanted to look tough and felt silly wearing a mask, turned a White House Rose Garden party into a superspreader event, and ended up dragging the country through a week of steroid-fueled psychodrama as doctors blasted him with experimental treatments to save his life, then somehow concluded that, hey, the disease wasn’t so bad after all. Since then, he’s moved on to talking openly about firing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most trusted disease expert in America, after the election as payback for criticizing the administration’s response.

[Roisin Ni Fiachra]

5. It's pretty frightening that *anyone* votes for him. Why?

I think the simplest answer for why so many people vote for a corrupt, total low life sociopath loser like Trump is the correct answer.

Trump voters are illiterate, or semi-literate, ignorant, hate driven racists, homophobes, and misogynists.

[fleur-de-lisa]

6. They live in the Fox 'News' confirmation bias bubble.

They only watch or listen to news that confirms what they already believe, so they never learn any actual news.

They want to be lied to, I believe, because they are just racist, violent assholes and Dump tells them, every day, that it's okay to be racist, violent assholes.

[brush]

7. Correct, FDL, it's way past time to get rid of the Electoral College,....

a vestige of enslavement designed as a workaround (actual human beings, the enslaved, devalued as only 3/5s of an actual human being) to please slave holding states and boost their count in presidential electors, representation and federal tax calculations.

The fact that we are still living with such a dehumanizing system to select our president is horribly shameful, and the fact that it has bestowed upon us Donald fucking trump is well deserved in the sense that we've never gotten rid of such a deplorable arrangement (and "deplorable" is so apropos in describing the situation).

We'll be vulnerable to another, more polished, less stupid, non-popular-vote-winning, wannabe dictator until we ditch the EC. Which actually looks like never because the EC benefits the racist and power hungry republican-run states.

[dalton99a]

2. The bullshit anachronistic Electoral College gives us the worst kind of democracy among democracies

[BeyondGeography]

3. Spot frigging on

Punditry with a long shelf-life right there.

[honest.abe]

4. So true.