"Voting rights" is (are?) mostly a bullshit issue

 Watch the grammar nerd twist himself into knots over the question of whether putting "voting rights" into quotation marks permits the treatment of the phrase as a singular when the phrase references a plural.  This matters.  What doesn't matter?  The political fight referenced.  Fuck.  That wasn't a complete sentence.  (Neither was "Fuck," for those keeping track.)

Right now, the Democratic Party is in an apoplectic fit over its inability to pass various bills at the federal level to block states from implementing a variety of measures that the party equates, exaggeratedly, with Jim Crow.  I have stated my position on these state-level laws before.  I find them unethical and unconstitutional in part.  Put me in a legislature, and I'd vote against them.  Put me on a court, and I'd rule against the parts that I find unconstitutional.

We must, though, keep in mind several things.  First, remember what we learned from voter ID laws.  In terms of election outcomes, they mostly don't matter.  For all of the Democratic pants-wetting about voter ID laws, here's the thing.  Were they to have an effect, the effect would be to create larger poll-to-election-result discrepancies in the states with such laws than in the states without them, tied to voters being turned away.  Evidence of that?  Zilch.  OK, there are a variety of ways we can try to measure the impact of voter ID laws, which Democrats expected to fuck them over, and the effects we saw were trifold:  zip, nada and squat.  Like "snap, crackle and pop," but silent.  So, way better.

Second.  Why?  There's a countermove-- mobilization.  Get people the fucking IDs.  Hard?  Sometimes.  Disproportionately burdensome on protected classes?  That's why it was unconstitutional, motherfuckers!

But, and as they say, everything before the "but" is irrelevant...

To say that a policy is unconstitutional is not the same thing as to say that it is substantively important.  Our currency is all imprinted with an unconstitutional violation of the establishment clause.  It just doesn't fucking matter.  In Canada, you can "Spock your fives."  That's cooler.  Make me Newton, in charge of the mint (yes, Isaac Newton ran the English mint!) and your currency will have Spock, John Coltrane, Isaac Newton, and of course... George Carlin.  No Latin, just Germanic!

But does it actually matter that all of our currency contains a violation of the establishment clause?  No.  It does not fucking matter.  Not one bit, nor two, and neither a half-wit nor a quarter-wit (see what I did there? it took about a quarter of a wit) thinks that the establishment clause violation is ever goin' anywhere.

Maybe I should change my mind on bitcoin.  It may be the dumbest fucking thing ever, but at least it isn't imprinted with an establishment clause violation.

Then again, the point is that the establishment clause violation doesn't fucking matter.  Stupidity does.  And nobody is actually affected by that particular establishment clause violation.

Track... there's a track around here somewhere... Ah, there it is.  As we turn our attention to the state level changes to voting law, some matter a bit.  Or even two.  Restricting extended voting hours and such?  This kind of change is all about the following:  the calculus of voting.  At this point, we turn to Anthony Downs, and An Economic Theory of Democracy.  I love this book, even in its myriad forms of wrongness.

Anyway, we define B as the utility differential between the victory of a voter's most preferred and least preferred candidate.  We define P as the voter's probability of being pivotal, and C as the cost of voting.  It is rational to vote if and only if PB > C.

Of course, that inequality is never true because P is functionally zero in an electorate of any realistic size.  However, the mechanics of electioneering are often about what we call, in game theoretic terms, "comparative statics."  In calculus terms, the derivatives.  What happens as one variable varies.  What happens to any one voter's probability of voting?

Consider.  Can we increase an individual voter's likelihood of voting by reducing the cost?  Or similarly, can we decrease an individual voter's likelihood of voting by increasing the cost?

Yes.  This is all measurable, and there is a horse that has been beaten way to death on the topic.  Political science glue for sale!  Political science glue for sale!  For example, give someone a ride to the polling place, and that person is more likely to vote.  Hence... "souls to the polls."  This is a mobilization effort performed by black churches.

Which... state laws are trying to prohibit.  They are all about that C-term.  The churches are trying to bring down the C-term, so the states are trying to stop the churches from bringing it down.

But you know what?  There's always a countermove.  When states enacted voter ID laws, there was a countermove.  Get people the fucking IDs.  Stop the churches from bringing people to polls on Sundays?  You have taken away a cost-reducing move.  That does not mean that none of the people previously so-mobilized vote.  It means that voting, for them, either reduces to the baseline level, or other mobilization tactics need to be used.  Countermove.  Go door to door on election day, set it up in advance, and yeah, it's harder.  That's the point.  It does not mean that they're going to be hanging from fucking trees as "strange fruit."  That's what the song means.  "Strange Fruit" refers to lynched African-Americans hanging from trees.  Did you not know that?

This is not that.  Every time you see a reference to Jim Crow... no.  Just... no.

There's a countermove.  There is no countermove to a lynching.

If there's a countermove, then here's what's goin' on.  I am not a member of the Stacey Abrams fanclub.  She's a little too Trumpian for my tastes, having refused to concede her loss to Brian Kemp, and there is no fucking savior, ever, so whenever the left tells you that their new, great love is the savior... no.  Just, fucking no.  This is a politician who wouldn't concede her loss, even though she fucking lost.

On the other hand...

Or perhaps I should say, "but..."

You know what she did then?  She worked.  She put in the work to mobilize, register people to vote, and while all of the "Stacey Abrams is solely, personally responsible for Georgia going Dem" stuff is hero-worshipping bullshit, she did demonstrate my point.  Quit whining, and fucking mobilize.

Also, stop worshipping Stacey Abrams.  She's basically the Donald Trump of the left because she lies and won't admit she lost.

Anyway, are the laws fair?  No, but fuck fair.  Life ain't fair, and it never will be.  If the problem is solvable, then don't whine about its existence.  Just solve it.  Where Abrams deserves credit is doing that.

Unlike the fucking lefty idiots in Congress and throughout the country who have been obsessed with pressuring Joe Manchin to vote yes on a doomed bill.  'Cuz.

This shit doesn't matter.  Because there's a countermove.

You know what does matter?  There are provisions in some of these bills that remove the independence of state election officials.  These provisions matter.

Because there's no countermove to the legislature saying, "fuck it, we don't care what the tally says, we declare the Republican the winner 'cuz we say so."  If the law actually permits that, there's no countermove.  You can't mobilize to stop that.  They'll just fucking steal the election.  Legally.  Or some Trumpist state election official will ignore the tally.  That's where we're headed.  These are the only provisions that matter.  Everything else is bullshit.

If there is a countermove, you quit whining and make the countermove.  The problem is that the country is moving towards a set of legal institutions without countermoves.  Yeah, I wrote about how "democracy" is an illusion the other day, and mathematically speaking that's true.  But now, go read William Riker's Liberalism Against Populism.  Yes, his name actually was "William Riker," which is not as cool as "Spock," but if he were still around, I'd give him a high five.

Riker acknowledged the basic problem of democracy, about which I reminded you the other day, and wrote the following argument.  True, you cannot aggregate the preferences of the electorate, but you need elections as a check on power.  You need to be able to throw the fucking bums out when they pull some shit.  He was somewhat more erudite than yours truly, but he wanted to be able to say up yours.  Truly.

So while no election result is a precise reflection of "the will of the people," because there is no such thing, in the absence of an election with the capacity to throw the motherfucking bums to the motherfucking curb, there is tyranny, which is a thing, and while "democracy" may be a mathematical impossibility, an electoral mechanism, even in its failure to achieve true "democracy" can prevent tyranny through the pursuit of classical liberalism.

And where this brings us for the morning, or perhaps twilight of democracy, depending on whether we examine time in terms of when I am writing this, or the underlying metaphor, is that the GOP's attempt to set up institutions that will allow them to ignore election results is an attempt to subvert even the Riker argument on democracy.

This way truly does lie tyranny.

And it's not about "voting rights," or any of that shit.  And this isn't Jim Crow, or anything like that.  Where we are headed is somewhere altogether different.  Democrats are obsessed with the wrong fights and bad metaphors, partly because of a desire to racialize everything, which is at the core of the modern left.  This is not about race, centrally, anyway.  This is about party and power.  Race is mostly incidental.

Where we are headed is a political world in which one party will not accept a loss.  It is setting up institutional rules that will allow them to reject their losses at the state level.

And when that doesn't work, we'll see January 6 again.

And when it does work, what are you gonna do?

After January 6, I posed the following question.  In my nervousness and cynicism about the 2020 election, I thought that Trump and his team would do a better job in their attempt to steal the election, so after January 6, I asked Democrats how they would have responded had Trump been successful?  Would they have been peaceful?  I doubt it.

Where this leaves us is somewhere bad.  We have an honest vote-tallying system, and one of two things happens.  Either the GOP steals the election, and the Dems riot, or the GOP fails to steal the election, and the GOP riots again.

Peaceful transfers?  Are we done with that?  Maybe.  Donald Trump may have killed democracy in America with his constant lying, aided by the grotesque, paranoid stupidity of his cult followers.

And this.  This is what matters.

Not that "voting rights" bullshit.  I know this is hard for the left, but pay attention to what matters.

Music.  Billie's version is more famous, but Nina has always been my favorite.  "Strange Fruit," from Pastel Blues.  This is also my favorite Nina album.