Vaguely related to the January 6 Commission: Is democracy's downward spiral a statistical "inevitability?"

 Congress will not authorize a bipartisan January 6 Commission.  That much is now clear.  There are two joint reasons for this.  First, the Republican Party is still a Donald Trump personality cult.  Trump's grip on the party's base is as strong as it ever was.  Since any such Commission would inevitably place blame on Trump, Republicans must protect him and his co-conspirators by blocking the Commission.  Second, Donald Trump has set a new direction for the Party, and we are seeing that not only with January 6, but with the Arizona audit, and similar moves around the country.  Never accept a loss.  That is why Donald Trump incited January 6, that is why we are seeing attempts to undermine confidence in the democratic process, and that is one of the greatest dangers America now faces.  Others have written far more eloquently and elaborately than I about this.  So instead, I have a simple observation, or perhaps question, about whether or not this is simply inevitable, in the sense that any process may be statistically inevitable.

Consider the basic statistical property that any event that is possible will, eventually, happen given enough trials.  Play the lottery enough times, and eventually, you will win.  You will just lose more money in lottery tickets than you will make in the payoff, so actually, don't play the lottery.  Among us math-types, we call it "the stupidity tax."  That said, if you actually did play the lottery enough times, you would, eventually, win.  The probability asymptotically approaches 1 as the number of lottery tickets you buy increases.  Of course, Western Civilization will probably fall first, but we're just doing the math thought experiment.

Anyway, let's take the following as a basic premise.  You should have noticed-- and I regularly note-- that no political side wants to accept a loss as just a normal, fair-in-square process.  Lefties have long blamed their losses on low voter turnout (irrelevant to electoral outcomes), "big money" (inconsequential), and other such boogeymen.  Lately, it's all about "voter suppression," which empirically has far less of an effect than the rhetoric would seem to imply, but everyone needs a boogeyman to explain a loss.

The left has turned Stacey Abrams into some kind of hero, who will inevitably disappoint them (hey!  try not deifying people!), but she never conceded to Brian Kemp in Georgia.  Hillary Clinton did concede in 2016, but Stacey Abrams did not.  Abrams was pulling the "voter suppression" thing.  As opposed to "Democrat running in Georgia" thing.  The surprise is the Democrat winning in Georgia, like Biden in 2020.  But everyone needs a boogeyman to explain a loss.

I spent the aftermath of the 2004 election trying to explain to Democrats that, no, the voting machines in Ohio did not rig the state and flip it to George W. Bush, the election was clean, and there was nothing untoward.

Sound familiar?

It should.

So what's the difference?

Trump.

Donald J. Trump is the difference.

There is a basic, human impulse to reject a loss, and explain it as corrupt, and illegitimate.  Nobody likes losing, so everyone tries to explain away their losses for the purposes of ego protection.  At the personal level, the political level... it's damn-near universal.

I've been dealing with people who claim that January 6 was some kind of attempt to impose "white supremacy" or something like that, because if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail, but no, it was actually quite simple.  The political base is always primed to reject a loss.  And then Donald J. Trump came along, lying demagog that he is, and not only did he say it out loud, he told people to march on the Capitol for those lies.  That's the difference.

There have been moments.  Moments when things could have gone very badly.  2000, obviously.  Could 2004 have gone so badly?  John Kerry never had a Trump-like cult, but the conspiracy theories circulating around the Democratic base about voting machines were the bane of my existence.

The 2008 Democratic nomination contest wound up getting ugly, and there was a weird sort of meeting among Democratic muckety-mucks to avoid a replay of 1968, which did devolve into riots, but that's partly because the rules at the time basically said that the voters could go fuck themselves.  What I'm talkin' 'bout are the points in history at which someone could have pulled a Trump.

I suppose there's always 1876, but in the pre-internet era, well...

But let's postulate that each party's base is "primed" to reject a loss.  Half the polity rejects the election and violence ensues, then, when the following conditions are met:  One party nominates someone who (a) is a subhuman, lying shitbag, (b) is narcissistic, (c) has no shame, (d) cares nothing for democracy or the good of the country, (e) who somehow commands deep, personal loyalty among the party base, despite (a) through (d), and (f) appropriately, the party flunks loses.  When these conditions are met, the subhuman, lying shitbag with narcissistic personality disorder, no shame, and no consideration for democracy or morality will respond to the loss by lying, and claiming that the election was "stolen."  Our subhuman, lying shitbag will do anything up to and including inciting violence in an attempt to secure or maintain power, while convincing half the country that democracy itself has failed.  What's more, the subhuman lying shitbag's party will see this happen, see the party base descend into madness, and feel a need to follow, rejecting losses in the future, even if some thread to democracy survives the subhuman lying shitbag.

Right?

So if that's the case, the probability of survival of democracy over any period of time is dependent on the probability of a party selecting a candidate who meets conditions (a) through (e).  And... who loses.  If the shitbag wins, we're back to the superposition argument I have made many times in the past, but I'm not gettin' into that today.

Yet if that is the case, and all of this is probabilistic, then as time passes, the probability of the emergence of a democracy-obliterating shitbag will asymptotically approach 1.  You may not get a Trump in Election 1.  But a democracy, over the long haul, is a sequence of Election 1, Election 2, Election 3... Election N.  As N approaches infinity, the probability of a Trump-like shitbag approaches 1, and if that's all it takes to poison democracy because people across the spectrum are primed to reject a loss, then in the long-term, democracy is intrinsically unstable.

The structure of this argument is dependent on the notion that the Trump-shitbag permanently poisons democracy.  That, of course, remains to be seen.  I'm not sanguine about our future, but the wrangling over the January 6 Commission demonstrates why.  We need two parties, and both of our parties are fucked.  One of them is really, really, really fucked.

And it may have been asymptotically inevitable that we'd find ourselves here.  Which is a cheap claim to make as a retrospective claim.

Calculus is on my mind right now, for a bunch of reasons.  I'm thinking about Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.  You may get a lot about that soon.

Anyway, yeah, things are bad.  The modern GOP cannot be salvaged, and that pretty much means we're fucked.  We bumped our heads on that asymptote.  Anyone got an icepack?

And some music.  This is not my typical choice, but it is appropriate, and I can at least appreciate some truly virtuosic guitar work.  Animals As Leaders, "Arithmophobia," live.