I’ve been pretty sick for most of the last week, which has been making writing extremely difficult. But a bunch of stuff I’ve been seeing in various feeds, most which amounts to variations on the theme of, “how can anyone stand by while this is happening?” reminded me of this essay I posted on Zuckerberg’s gross little platform back in October. So, since I’m too gunked up to produce original content, here’s a flash from the past that seems worth thinking about in the future:
October 31, 2024 ·
This is an essay about how I feel, about the election. I may write more, later.
There's a guy in Moscow, Russia, named Andrei Bilka. I don't know him. I looked him up with Google. He's the Studio Director for a marketing company called Ultimate GG, that specializes in video games, streaming, and esports. He's youngish, mostly bald, unshaven, and he has neck tattoos. Everyone on the company's team page are dudes. Most of them have tattoos, and cool facial hair. They look like hipster bros from Seattle, or Portland, or San Francisco. Ultimate GG is hiring, but doesn't list salaries for openings. Based on averages for Moscow, one could reasonably infer that Andrei makes about $3500 a month, and pays about $650 for a one-bedroom apartment if he's single. He looks single. He's probably doing okay. He probably gets up every day, showers, goes to work, hangs out with friends, goes home, and goes to bed. Or maybe he skips hanging out with friends and goes straight home to stare at his computer. A lot of us do.
Russia's unemployment rate is something like 3%. Most people in Russia are doing more or less what Andrei's doing. Probably for less money. A bunch of them probably work in crappy factories and fast food places, and probably have a longer commute and a smaller apartment than Andrei does. But mainly they go to work, go home, and stare at the Internet.
It's hard to say with certainty how long it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Russia's elections were totally subverted, but it seems likely that Russia hasn't had a free election since 1996 — 2000, at the latest.
Vladimir Putin didn't put Andrei in a camp, and he didn't cut off Andrei's access to the Internet. Andrei can probably travel, if he wants to. If I had Andrei's number, I could probably direct-dial him on his cellphone. Andrei hasn't been drafted yet, though he almost certainly knows people who have. Putin's a dictator, and an authoritarian, and he's turned Russia into a one-party totalitarian state. How that manifests is that Andrei, and millions of people like him, go to work every day, come home, play on the Internet, and buy stuff. They pay taxes on all that economic activity, and their dictator, Vladimir Putin, uses those taxes to buy guns, planes, bombs, and tanks, that he's now using to invade Ukraine. He uses those tax dollars to tap the phones, and monitor the Internet traffic, of people who might speak out against him. And if someone becomes a problem, he uses those tax dollars to pay hitmen, trained and maintained with those same tax dollars. The hitmen find the person who's causing Putin a problem, and they throw that person out a window.
I don't know how Andrei feels about all this. But I know he mostly doesn't have to think about it, if he doesn't want to. At least not yet. And certainly he hasn't had to think about it for most of the 24 or 28 or however many years since Russia's last free election. For the overwhelming majority of the time that Andrei has lived under an authoritarian dictatorship, worrying about it has been optional. Democracy has been deader than Marx in Russia for at least 20 years. Andrei works at an esports marketing firm. Esports. Marketing firm.
I think most people who pay attention to international relations, looking at what's happening in Russia as a result of the invasion of Ukraine, think Putin probably broke the country. Even if Trump wins in the U.S., and tries to cut support from the U.S., other NATO countries are likely to keep pushing back against Russia in Ukraine. Win or lose, Russia's going to need to rely on China almost entirely to survive the economic consequences of the invasion. Russian satellite states may sense weakness, and try to break off again. Things could get pretty Mad Max in Russia over the next few decades. Andrei may have to rethink his retirement strategy. Or he may not. But if Russia were to violently devolve in the next few years, the political and economic machinery that made that devolution necessary wouldn't actually be the invasion of Ukraine. The invasion of Ukraine, or something like it, was always a likely outcome of Vladimir Putin having dictatorial control of the country since 1999. Putin may be throwing people out of windows today, but the political choices that made that possible were made 25 years ago. Dictatorships are a little bit like global climate change; by the time you start getting hot, you're already cooked.
The danger of authoritarianism in western democracies isn't, actually, that they lead to labor camps and genocides and goose-stepping. Like, yes, those are all things that can happen. But the danger of an authoritarian takeover of a heavily industrialized nation-state with relatively strong institutions is that a leader, or a party, then has control of the power and wealth of that country; a whole country full of Andreis, going to work every day, buying stuff, and paying taxes. A dictatorship can use that money and power to do whatever they want. And, past a certain point, the voters of that country become helpless to stop their leaders. That's a one-party state. That's a dictatorship. The problem with the Electoral College isn't that it's unfair (though that's a problem with it). The real danger posed by the Electoral College is that it provides a mechanism through which relatively small attacks on the voting rights of people in key constituencies can be leveraged to allow a numerical minority of voters to keep their party in power indefinitely. Donald Trump has never won a popular vote.1 He spent four years in the White House and appointed three Supreme Court justices, and may get a second term2 — also without winning a popular vote.3 If you've got a system of representation that puts a fascist in power twice, without him ever winning an election,4 you may not have a one-party state — but you've definitely got a problem.
It's a problem Republicans want us to have. Whenever the Supreme Court hands down a decision that shaves off another part of the Voting Rights Act, or supports the ridiculous voter fraud narrative Republicans have been pushing for the last decade, they're eroding the principle of one-person-one-vote, damaging the credibility and the viability of our democracy, and taking us closer to that one-party state, and authoritarianism. If that sounds paranoid, let me repeat a question I've asked before: if nobody stopped him, how many Democratic voters would Donald Trump remove from the voting rolls? How many would Mitch McConnell remove? If Democrats had a 5% lead on Republicans, all across the country, and it meant Republicans would lose power in the House, Senate, and White House, would ANYONE in the Republican leadership balk at a package of voter ID laws, mail-in-ballot laws, and local and state interventions that cut 5% off the Democratic margin? Would this Supreme Court stop them? Try to picture anyone in the current Republican party standing up and saying, "This is un-American, and I refuse to participate in it." Who, specifically, are you imagining? Fun bonus question: if the person or persons you're imagining aren't running for president this year, what does it mean if you vote for the Republican who is running for president this year?
No two trains wreck in exactly the same way. But my fear, my really big, existential fear, about what happens if we lose next week is that it will upend our democracy — but let people keep going to work. It'll render the majority of voters powerless, but everyone will still be able to add to their retirement accounts, and order stuff on two-day delivery from Amazon Prime. My worry is that the actual working idea of representative democracy in America will die, and, mostly, it'll happen without people noticing.
Until they do.
Boy, it super sucks not to be able to say this anymore.
Fuck.
Double fuck.
Interesting question: is it better to have a broken system that allows a fascist to take control of the country with a minority of the voters, or a broken electorate that gives the fascist an electoral plurality? Fortunately, we don’t have to choose. We have both.