Conceptualizing elections: The House GOP is a mess because they don't think that voting is about measuring preferences

 This is a bit of a hobbyhorse for me.  I suppose, technically, it is more than a hobbyhorse.  I wrote my first book, Hiring & Firing Public Officials: Rethinking the Purpose of Elections, about conceptual models of elections, and a professional obsession is something different from a hobbyhorse.  Regardless, what is an election, stripped of pomp and ceremony?  What are we doing, or trying to do?

At the core of democracy, there is a mathematical problem, and a paradox, because what we are trying to do-- those of "us" who believe in the compound word created by demos- and -kratia-- is trying to measure and aggregate the preferences of a group and find an outcome that reflects the preferences of the group.  The problem, on which I harp, turning democracy into a lyre [ducks rotten fruit], is that it is mathematically impossible to aggregate the preferences of a group in any multidimensional space.  Blah-blah, Kenneth Arrow, jargon-jargon, professor-y blather, there goes the contrarian egghead again.  Yeah, I get it, but the thing is, most of the time, we clap our hands and pretend that fairies are real, or at least, that we can put everyone cleanly on the left-right dimension (that would solve the problem).  We pretend, because we must.  We pretend at least because democratic processes are better.  Set forth the rules for voting under the best rules we can devise, constrained by circumstances, try to win, and if we lose, we accept it and try again next time.

That, of course, is how things used to work, and when I write it that way, a reader might think that I am writing about the 2020 election, January 6, and related matters.  I am, and I am not.  The most destructive thing that Donald Trump did was convince the Republican Party that elections are not contests that one wins by getting the most votes, and if you don't, too bad, try again next time.

He convinced the Republican Party that an election is a contest of wills.  Having fewer votes doesn't matter.  What matters is having the will not to concede, never to concede, to use any and every lever.  The votes are not even secondary, nor even tertiary.  Votes do not factor into an election at all.  If I simply refuse to concede, ever, and find the right lever, I can "win," no matter what the vote tally said.

What is a vote tally:  a measure of preferences, or the venue for a contest of wills?

Mike Pence was weak.  He wasn't strong enough.  Notice the critique.  The belief underlying the claim is the notion that underlying preferences and vote tallies are irrelevant.  All that matters is will.

And if reports are right, even Mark Meadows did not believe the claim that Trump won, claims he made in his new book.  A contest of wills, not a measure of preferences.

What is happening in the House of Representatives?  Not much!  Why not?  Because House Republicans are, in technical terms, a "hot mess."  If one treated an election as a preference-aggregation mechanism, as literally every other congressional conference in history has done, this would be simple.  Hold a vote.  Whoever gets the most votes wins, take that to the floor, and the representatives who lost acknowledge it, back their party's nominee just like they always do in presidential elections, and we'd have Speaker Scalise right now.  In presidential nomination contests, if the contest is at all interesting, your first choice may not win.  You suck it up and vote for your party's nominee, most of the time.  You may recall the debacle of Hillary Clinton trying to steal the nomination from Barack Obama in 2008, which was a special kind of shitshow, but that did get resolved.  Clinton caved, grudgingly, eventually, and the "PUMAs" mostly quit kvetching.

You do not always get your first choice.  You do not always win.  Suck it up.  Quit whining.

Mostly, people do because if they didn't, democracy wouldn't work.  In fact, a refusal to suck it up is essentially the death of democracy.  One of the greatest challenges we face is that Donald Trump has convinced an entire party that they don't have to suck it up.  Fortunately, we saw relatively little Trumpian sore loser-ism in 2022, although it is harder to create such problems when you are just some down-ballot schlub, like Kari Lake.  Yet we see the dysfunction wrought by the mentality in Congress right now.  The old way, the small-d democratic way, the normal way, the sane way would have been for the party to say, OK, Gaetz extracted his pound of flesh, but Scalise won the internal vote, for whatever reason, baggage-less David Duke wants the job.  The party puts him on the floor, badda-bing-badda-boom, Bob's your klan-adjacent uncle.  You may think he's too Duke-y, or not Duke-y enough, but Scalise won the vote, so, you know, gun-to-the-head, what are you gonna do?  (What, too soon?)  Point being, once he wins the internal party vote, a normal party just unifies around.

But if you think that a vote tally is irrelevant, and that the process is merely a contest of wills, then the vote means nothing to you.  Jordan supporters merely say no, we don't care what the rest of the caucus wants, we reject the vote, we're staring you down.  Contest of wills.

Back to conference.  The conference votes for Jordan, who is apparently not smart enough to realize that the same tactic he employs can be wielded against him.  1!  2!  3!   TIM-BER!

Emmer?  Oh, who cares if he wins a conference vote.  Let's check with the guy under multiple criminal indictments, who according to his own Chief of Staff, who cut a deal with the Special Counsel, was lying about everything.

He doesn't like Emmer.  Emmer's out.

Mike Johnson?  Isn't that the conspiracy theory Senator from Wisconsin?  No, that's Ron.  Fuck, I can't keep these fuckers straight.  Is Mike Johnson the next Speaker?  I have no idea.  My point is that this is happening because within the Republican Party, nobody believes that losing a vote means anything.

The ritual of the vote is merely a vehicle for a contest of wills.  That's it.  We see the destruction caused at the national level with Donald Trump and January 6, but if you require a demonstration that the center cannot hold when a party adopts this view, just observe what is happening in the House of Representatives.  This is the apotheosis of the belief that a vote is merely a vehicle for a contest of wills.

Gary Lucas, "King Strong," from Gods & Monsters.