Harvey » Sun Nov 08, 2020 6:33 pm wrote:You may be entirely right. But before we get lost in nuance, let me ask: do you think the primaries were legit?
If not, how much does it matter who cheated whom afterward? The country was already cheated. A woman who has no mandate of any kind will be American president. The best narrative I can find here is that Democrats may have cheated less. After nearly losing to the man who some people have called 'the worst president in history.'
I do think that the Democratic primaries were flagrantly rigged against Bernie Sanders: by a combination of the standard media bias, fuckery with the vote count in Iowa and likely New Hampshire also, and a coordinated effort by the "moderate" wing of the party to consolidate behind Biden while Warren remained in to kneecap Bernie on Super Tuesday. And so in a certain sense, yes, the general was tainted from the beginning because the Democratic nominee already wasn't genuine to begin with. This was also the case in 2016 with the even more flagrant Dem primary fraud in favor of Hillary Clinton.
But election rigging does matter even in a context where the candidate on the receiving end of the fraud was themselves illegitimately nominated. Because the actual victim of such a fraud — one that succeeds, anyway, like 2016 where Trump was rigged into a victory — is the people who either thought they were making a legitimate choice (not knowing any better) or knew what went on but decided to strategically make the best of a shitty situation with their vote, and had their voices disenfranchised. The deck is often stacked before the voting even happens, but that doesn't make the elections and manipulation of them meaningless. There wouldn't be so many efforts to rig them if that were the case.
A lot of why election fraud matters also has less to do with any individual candidate's impact and more to do with the propaganda narrative that results. When Bush was the beneficiary of massive fraud in 2004 to ensure his reelection, it certainly wasn't because John Kerry was some kind of threat to the deep state who had to be taken out. I posit that it was mainly to silence the growing anti-Bush sentiment, and convince those who wanted to speak out against the creeping fascist policies of his administration that they were a minority in the nation with no one around them to turn to. And the systemic pattern of red shifts we have seen over the past 20 years reinforces the idea that we are a deeply right-wing nation, with Republicans easily holding onto power that they would not possess in ordinary circumstances. That also gives major fuel to the duopoly, with Democrats continually claiming that it is necessary to run "moderates" given how right-skewed the electorate appears to be, and also using their relative lack of political power as cover for never passing any of the progressive policies they purportedly stand for.
