The 2020 election and the problem of trust

Five days.  Five days until things are set in motion for the Supreme Court to re-elect Donald Trump.  Just kiddingnotkidding.  But that's my point for today.

According to the averages at RealClearPolitics as of this morning, Biden is up by 7.5 points nationally.  If we look briefly at some key states, Biden is up by 3.8 points in Pennsylvania.  He is up by 6.4 points in Wisconsin.  Michigan?  He's up by 8.6 points.  I could keep going, but the point is that Biden is leading.

Can we trust the polls?  I've written about this, but it is a legitimate question.

And what if they are right?  Do you trust that the votes will all be counted?  Including absentee ballots?

Do you trust that they will be counted correctly?  I wrote about the problem of central count optical scan, and the disparities the method creates.  A big shift to absentee means that's where we are...  So, do you trust this process?

Do you trust the Supreme Court?  Do you trust Clarence Thomas?  Amy Coney Barrett?  Donald Trump said very directly that he plans to appeal any loss to the courts, and he wants Barrett there to rule on the case.  So do you trust how the court system will respond?

Do you trust how other institutions will respond to any given outcome, including the almost inevitable Supreme Court ruling?

Do you trust how your fellow citizens will respond to a contested claim of whoever won?

Whom do you trust?  Do you trust that the American political system is still capable of running a presidential election?  However you answer these questions for yourself, I strongly suspect that your levels of trust are rather lower than they would have been in any previous election.  And whatever happens next week, that's a big problem.

And this is the irreparable damage that Donald Trump has done to the country.  Some of it is his direct doing.  He is stoking paranoia and encouraging people to prepare for violence, while preparing frivolous legal briefs.  Some of it is the problem of trying to figure out how to not make 2016 mistakes.  Yet distrust itself is currency for a candidate, a president, and a party that operates on the basis of conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories are false.  All it takes is one or two people to blab, and a conspiracy gets exposed.  That's why they don't work.  And no, "Q" isn't a guy blabbin'.

Where we are, though, is that we have a combination of solipsistic postmodernists and conspiracy theorist nutjobs who have decided that their sources of objective truth are liars and fools.  Telling the difference is both difficult and irrelevant because either way, getting them to look at actual facts is about as difficult as getting an illiterate child to read a Pynchon novel.

Yet the breakdown is so complete that those of us who adhere to the Philip K. Dick principle-- reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away-- have been forced to ask the kinds of distrustful questions with which I began this post.

And they are not conspiratorial questions.  Polling amid a pandemic is difficult, particularly if Trump supporters may just... lie because they don't want to admit it.  Absentee ballots will be counted by central count optical scan, which is suboptimal, which will lead to counting problems.  I did the fuckin' research here, by which I mean, "me, personally."  It isn't a conspiracy theory to suggest that Trump will do what he says, openly, that he will do:  challenge a loss in the courts, with the goal of having Amy Coney Barrett rule on it.  And it isn't a conspiracy theory to think there's something fishy when Barrett pointedly refuses to say that she'll recuse herself, and won't even acknowledge the clear fact that the Constitution prohibits the president from postponing the election.

Originalist, my fucking ass.  Ain't no such thing.  "The attitudinal model."  Learn it.  Know it.  Live it.

Why do I distrust the political system right now?  Not because there are people in smoke-filled back rooms pulling strings, but because of what is happening in the open.

As a general rule, distrust benefits the party of paranoia and conspiracy theories, but the problem is when it becomes logical to lose trust.  And it has become logical to distrust.  How do we come back from that?

Even if Biden wins?  Even if, somehow, the Supreme Court votes against whatever looney-toons briefs Trump's lawyers are writing, how does the country come back from that?

I don't know.  And it is far from certain that the Supreme Court will side against his looney-toons lawsuits.

One of the long-running themes here has been that democracy depends on truth, and a common understanding of fact.  Relatedly, a breakdown of trust in our capacity to do something as basic as run a presidential election is difficult to manage.  And it has become rational to distrust this process, from the perspective of October 29.