Simple question has simple answer
Claiming fraud is not, in fact, self-sabotage
For four years, commentators have argued that claims of fraud in the 2020 election would only fortify the 2024 election in favor of the Democrats — this argument, which was never rational to begin with, has been revealed as false.
A new era
Presumably yesterday was a date of great significance for American affairs; possibly an existential pivot from destruction to greatness. At the least we can hope for good light bulbs to come back.
Regardless of what the future holds, it will remain true that Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election on the night of November 5, and that this declaration, even though it ultimately came from the mainstream media consensus, constituted an absolute rebuke not only to the left (in Kamala), but also the liberal center, especially to centrist anti-Trumpism, and most significantly to the centrist consensus that the 2020 election was legitimate and any refusal to cow-tow to this consensus renders future victories impossible.
First, the material
In material terms, was yesterday a “replication crisis” for the consensus position that 2020’s election results were definitely not a fraud?
If 81 million Americans submitted votes for Biden while locked down for a virus, then something close to 81 million Americans ought to have been able to submit votes for Harris sans lockdown.
This may yet prove to be the case — California, despite being called already, still has 8 million votes to count. It is plausible that Kamala’s final total will “find” the bulk of these missing 15 million voters (those who did not legitimately switch to Trump). I count myself as very curious, for now.
Second, the meta
The possible mysterious evaporation of over 10 million Democratic voters is not, however, the limit of upsets effected by Trump’s come-back in the ballot box. Yesterday finally demolished a meme of “intellectual voodoo” that has been bandied about by centrist mid-wits for the last four years; relentlessly in 2021 and 2022 and less often as Trump’s poll numbers became stronger this year. But a perfect souvenir of this trend of “voodoo” was offered by one of twitter’s most engagement-savvy centrist mid-wits last week:
I call this voodoo because it is a specific application of the mid-wit confusion between [expert / consensus] claims about things and things themselves: In this case, it is imagined that one’s enemies, i.e. those who disbelieve experts, can be made to suffer harms by incanting rhetorical conclusions that follow expert claims.
Fundamentally, however, this idea that Trump daring to question one election would doom him to lose another election was always irrational.
Elections are contests, and in contests the opposing teams pursue tactics that might work. Claiming that a contest is rigged does not prima facie rule out the possibility that legitimate play will not work; a might-work without the claim remains a might-work with it, and remains a rational tactic, unless it is understood that the game is rigged in such a manner as to actually, specifically rule out legitimate play.
Of course, until yesterday finally arrived and played out, no one on either side really knew whether that was the case. Like the possible fictional “normie Trump friends” in the quoted tweet above, I was prepared to witness a rerun of the map reversal on 2020’s election night — I did not know whether Trump’s tally would (be allowed to) exceed whatever wonderful math the other side produced. The mid-wit centrists, who feel no responsibility for any disconnect between expert consensus and reality, are however unable to model for uncertainty and this includes within their voodoo doll of a Trump supporter’s mindset. This produces the insufferable result of their asking, essentially, “Why would Team Trump try to score 5 goals if Coach Trump says the other team [who would naturally score 3 goals] will cheat [to add one goal]?” Well, because 5 is more than 4, morons.
Obviously it was always possible to win despite the other side cheating. But until the game was actually over, the mid-wit centrists were left an avenue to a false epistemic victory of their own: If Trump lost, whether due to dissatisfaction from his would-be supporters or the other team’s cheating, the mid-wit centrists would be able to bray that their Pseudo-Principle of Self-Defeating Election Denialism had been validated as a known aspect of human behavior (but not even one which acknowledges that it is still just behavior, subject to the specific character of those who behaved, and not actually universal or rational). Only now that Trump has won — despite denying the legitimacy of 2020 — have the mid-wit centrists been denied the possibility of this false vindication. Team Trump scored 5 goals.
Abusing the unknowns of 2020
The question the mid-wit centrist commentators (MWCC) were in effect posing — “why score 5 goals if the other side scores (x+y)?” — insults the intelligence of their readers and listeners, but also abuses their voodoo-doll Trump supporter and Trump himself for entertaining uncertainty. Since again within the mind of the MWCC there is no daylight between expert consensus and reality, they are patently unable to model what might be true if the expert consensus is wrong.
Say the 2020 election were stolen, then “how much was it stolen” and “will it be stolen the same amount next time” would obviously be relevant to the expectations of a 2024 Trump supporter whether voting is or is not a “might-work” tactic. In the absence of a reputable viewpoint (such as expert consensus) to provide an estimate for these numbers, the voodoo-doll Trump supporter isn’t really able to provide a concrete answer to the MWCC’s question, and must simply bear the MWCC’s rhetorical pins and flames day after day until the next contest plays out.
Despite such a dimly-drawn model of the Trump supporter’s mind I think the MWCC must intuit that in donning themselves in an expert consensus backed with unwarranted certainty, they are giving themselves permission to behave in this unfair way in their one-sided intellectual pantomime (the “beautiful imagined” devastation of the 2020-election-denier); likewise I think certain intuitions permit them to put Trump himself on the stand in their mind and pretend that his failure to answer their rhetorical question validates the assumption that his election denial is self-destructive.
What should Trump say, to answer the question of whether denying 2020 would dispirit his supporters in 2024? Essentially what he did — everything and nothing. Given that the amount of stealing in 2020 and 2024 were both uncertainties, one past and one in the future, the best way to claim stealing without dispiriting future votes is not to acknowledge that the amount of stealing is uncertain, nor to offer a specific claim for the amount. In other words the response which on the stand, in the mind of the MWCC allows them the freest remit to abuse their voodoo-doll of an election denier is in fact the one most likely to allow Trump to win the next election despite questioning the previous.
The Mid-wit Centrist Commentator who has spent the last four years berating Trump supporters for self-sabotaging in their “beautiful imagination” has in all that time never stopped once to consider what their own “beautiful” moment of epistemic schadenfreude would look like. Unable to ask “what if the expert consensus is wrong, and the 2020 election was stolen,” they are unable to ask, “what if, for whatever specific reason related to the practical details of the stealing, it isn’t stolen as much again?”
If it turns out to be true that over 10 million Democratic votes vanished into thin air, everyone who refused to acknowledge that a steal was even possible will of course look forever like an absolute boob.
Once again, perhaps the final counts will not turn out to be so humbling. But it will be nice to spend the next few days knowing the mid-wits are the ones in danger of embarrassment (perhaps they should band together to put out a call for same-day, in-person voting with ID, to remove all these uncertainties?).
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Very nice Brian. Actually, the MAGA crowd played this perfectly. 'Too big to rig' was the absolute right play. Even our midwits should have noticed that what they were positing about 'election deniers' didn't match the actual behavior of the deniers.
"...one of twitter’s most engagement-savvy centrist mid-wits last week." Such a perfect description of that account. Thank you for the laugh!