What “voter fraud” really means

Jamelle Bouie (gift link) says something that LGM has been insisting on for many years now, which is that under Donald Trump the Republican party has become an unambiguously white supremacist, patriarchal, and Christian nationalist party, which logically entails the following conclusion: The Democratic party winning elections is per se illegitimate.

Why? Because the Democratic party, while quite ideologically diverse, is at least in theory openly opposed to white supremacy, patriarchy, and Christian nationalism. Which means that, if you’re fundamental political commitments are to those things, democracy is less important than they are. This is not some sort of hypocrisy, in other words: When these people complain about “voter fraud,” they are quite sincerely complaining about the wrong people winning elections, which is a far more insidious form of fraud than things like rigged elections. The latter are merely procedural objections. The more substantial objection is that when democracy undermines the natural God-given hierarchy of the world, then democracy has failed, and must be discarded.

As he often does, President Trump washed away all doubt when, in a recent interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he raged against supposed fraud. “The election was rigged,” he said of the 2020 contest. “It was a dirty election. And it’s happening again in California.” American elections, Trump continued, are “like a third-world country.”

Recall that last year, Trump targeted Los Angeles with National Guard troops and agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. And consider the regularity with which the president says things like, “if you import people from Third World Countries, you quickly become a Third World Country.” The logic is straightforward. A city of immigrants, like Los Angeles, must also be a city of voter fraud, even if those immigrants are legal voters, entitled to participate in the political process.

“Voter fraud” is not about fraud. It is about who votes and how. It is about the breadth and scope of the political community. It is, as with most MAGA obsessions, about who can call themselves Americans — entitled to govern as equals — and who are mere subjects. Trump’s obsession with voter fraud is just another expression of the reactionary populist belief that the people who inhabit a place are not equivalent to the people, who are entitled to rule.

We should treat this contretemps in Los Angeles, as silly as it is, as a dress rehearsal for what will probably happen in November, if and when Republicans lose control of Congress. Any result short of victory for Trump and his allies will be denounced as “fraud.” Not because there is anything wrong with the system, but be because, as they see it, this is their country and theirs alone.

I think it’s next to impossible for bien pensant liberals of the bipartisan comity is important despite our differences variety to grasp that white supremacists truly believe that white people should rule the country because white people are hierarchically superior to non-white people, and that men should rule the country because men are hierarchically superior to women, and that Christians should rule the country because Christianity is true, which means it’s God’s religion, which means it’s true, because the Bible says so.

A big problem in this regard is that, in mainstream American political discourse, “white supremacy” is supposed to mean something like the Klan in The Birth of a Nation, while patriarchy is supposed to mean something like Saudi Arabia. That a huge percentage of Americans consider the “facts” of white supremacy and patriarchy to be simple common sense observations about the nature of the world, akin to the laws of gravity, is not something that the standard discourse has ever been willing to admit, and indeed continues to resist with all its might, despite the current tsunami of evidence that this is the case.

I’m old enough to remember the complete befuddlement, followed by outrage, felt by white men in the 1970s and the 1980s, when the theoretical insight that being white and male were specific identities, rather than the default nature of what it means to be a human being, was presented to them at that time. I’m not going to look it up at the moment, but I specifically remember a column by Standard Good Liberal NYT columnist Russell Baker on this topic, in which he treated the proposition that he wasn’t just Russell Baker, but actually a white man, as something as puzzling and counter-intuitive as quantum field theory. And this was a completely standard reaction at the time.

Speaking of the Times’ op-ed page, remember the piece a couple of days after the 2016 election about how Donald Trump had gotten elected because the Democrats had gotten too invested in “identity politics?” That guy — a political scientist IIRC — got a whole book out of that!

Good times.