"All votes matter" vs "Conservative rule of law"
This post could have been called: Why we're seeing the "All votes matter" ethoses pushing ballot counting one way while "Conservative rule of law" is pushing it another.
Written another way, it comes out as
- "doing the right thing by people" by way of "if it just saves one life" heart-string-tugs / villainization
- save the system by giving up what seems compassionate for the moment, but which kills boundary maintenance & system trust (by way exploitive manipulation guard erosion).
In practice, the rhetoric of white supremacist (intersectional logic) emerges as essential for understanding what is happening. See James Lyndsay's twitter or New Discourses to see why.
THE HEARTLESS TRAP
The "all votes matter" logic is impossibly hard to refute: at least within large populations where individuals are largely insulated from the direct effects of their aggregated individual decisions. For instance "all votes matter logic", where you always have to stretch to accommodate just one more thing/item/person, is not a general feature of aboriginal populations. These groups have great intra-support networks. And individuals within them go to great extents to avoid greed & grift. But, if you break norms there is absolutely no slack given. The tribe does no sacrifice itself for individuals who violate (logical or irrational) survival norms. They are EXTREMELY conservative.
THE INESCAPABLE PROGRESSIVE VECTOR
The rhetorical position of "all lives matter", represented by ballot counting norm changes & open border logic, is an inescapable vector in human groups.
This means, in the long run, you really can never beat the State (as Trump has found out). The State will always tend to grift and enlargement. This follows Evolutionary Transition literature.
According to this literature, systems are selected for:
- dependency increases (eg big gov, social state, we riot if you don't support us)
- role specialization (eg elite classes, sacred identities)
- coordination (eg media, state collusion)
- conflict minimization (eg the application of law which "solves" noisy voices, authoritarianism, selective prosecution, special rules for key organs)
To expect these tendencies not to be expressed in government means fighting the inescapable current of human evolution. That states like revolutionary France, revolutionary US, etc. have been able to do this for a time is rare.
1800's European critiques of the survivability of Jeffersonian democracy are apt. The US was always a rare blip.
For example, here is the classic "heartless" take on the election. It reflects what modern discourse would call a white supremacist racist ideology whose structural basis is (and always will be) discriminatory.
ReplyDelete"Here’s how this must work in our great country: Every legal vote should be counted. Any illegally-submitted ballots must not. All sides must get to observe the process. And the courts are here to apply the laws & resolve disputes.
That's how Americans' votes decide the result." - Mitch McConnell