Monday, October 24, 2016

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

....about Trump's charges of a "rigged" election, and the brethren's defense thereof.

Among the bits I had no room to include was the libertarian perspective of Reason’s Sheldon Richman, “The Election Is Rigged, But Not as Trump Would Have Us Believe.” Some of his observations are reasonable enough, if suffused with the rarified air of the ivory tower or perhaps a distant planet where human behavior is an exotic subject ("viewers are more likely to reach for the remote when they hear about transcripts of speeches to Wall Street than when they hear 'locker-room banter' and insults"), but then Richman gets down to the real problem:
But there's another side to the "rigged election" charge that's bound to go unnoticed. The American political system, like all political systems, requires a good deal of peaceful cooperation to operate. This is obviously relevant to the transfer of power, which gets so much attention nowadays. This cooperation goes on in two respects: first, between the government and the subject population—government cannot rule purely through force because the ruled always substantially outnumber their rulers—and second, among the many individuals who constitute the government's branches, agencies, and bureaus...
On and on it goes for hundreds of words and with citations of Hobbes, Locke, and Roderick Long ("Now this of course does not mean that anarchists have achieved their goal of a society based purely on cooperation") till the merciful conclusion: "Finally, I think we can say that the elections are rigged but not as Trump would have us believe. They are rigged in the sense that the outcome is predetermined for power and against liberty. It'll take a change in ideology to change that." Well, with material like this, that's bound to come any day now.

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