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> The American empire is a long way off collapse. The 2020 election dispute could have turned out a lot worse than it actually did. What if Mike Pence had lost

> The American empire is a long way off collapse. The 2020 election dispute could have turned out a lot worse than it actually did. What if Mike Pence had lost his cojones and decided to do Trump’s bidding, and then Congressional Republicans and the conservative SCOTUS majority decided to go along with it? What if blue state governors then turned around and said that the federal government has been taken over in a coup, and ordered their states to reject its authority? 2021 might have ended up rather resembling 1861. Thankfully, in our timeline, none of that happened. But, 2024, 2028, 2032, etc, all represent opportunities for “just like 2020 but worse”. Trump is going to look for a more pliant running mate this time around, and at the moment he’s ahead in the polls. Even though, if he does win in 2024, he won’t be able to run in 2028, his attitude may well be “the election is only fair if my guy wins” Rejecting election results risks becoming normalised, increasing the odds that future Republicans will emulate Trump in this way even long after Trump has shuffled off this mortal coil; and also that Democrats may eventually succumb to the temptation to copy this page of the Republican playbook.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Already in 2016, there were Democrats who claimed that the election wasn't fair (and therefore wasn't valid). To be fair, all they did was talk...
- desas 3y ago
  Wasn't that also a thing with the first Obama election? Before that, 2000 had Gore vs Bush and the Florida recount. Is it escalating?
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    > Is it escalating? I think so, yes. Obama's first election didn't have much - just some non-politician named Trump shooting off his mouth. 2016 had actual politicians saying that it was illegitimate. Then came 2020, and Jan 6, and it wasn't just talk anymore. So yes, it seems to be escalating. 2000 was different. The vote was close enough in one state that that there was legitimate doubt about what the actual result was. It wasn't "illegitimate because I don't like the results" the way more recent ones have been.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Obama's first election didn't have much - just some non-politician named Trump shooting off his mouth Trump wasn't even particularly notable among the Obama birthers, who were quite nunerous, except retrospectively; he also wasn't not-a-politician, having actively campaigned for the Reform Party nomination for President in 2000 (the Reform Party had qualified for federal matching funds, bringing out a lot of nontraditional contenders) before abandoning the effort in February 2000, shortly after Jesse Ventura, who had convinced him the Reform Party was the right vehicle for his political ambitions, left the party. At the time of the Obama election, Trump was a politician who hadn't succeeded looking for an in with a major party core constituency, and grabbing on to the widespread birther conspiracies as a means of achieving that.
      - skissane 3y ago
        > he also wasn't not-a-politician, having actively campaigned for the Reform Party nomination for President in 2000 (the Reform Party had qualified for federal matching funds, bringing out a lot of nontraditional contenders) In the US, if all you've (yet) done is run for a third party, failing to even win its Presidential nomination-you are really (at that point in time) more of a would-be politician than an actual politician.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      I went back and looked at the 2000 election (as a Gore supporter at the time) and I think it was a step on this path. Gore tried to lawyer his way to victory in an unseemly way: https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/01-17.pdf https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_pa... After losing two automatic recounts, he insisted on hand recounts—but only in precincts that had heavily favored him in the first place. The whole point is that hand recounts find more votes than machine counts (they can read votes the machine would reject). If you only seek hand recounts in precincts where each newly readable vote is twice as likely to be a Gore vote, then you can quickly close the gap Then the Florida Supreme Court completely lost its mind, doing stuff like allowing Gore to count vote gains so far in partial recounts in Gore-favoring states. See pp. 22-24 above the above. The Supreme Court agreed 7-2 that the Florida recount process violated the equal protection law. Democrats invoked that President against Trump after the 2020 election. Nonetheless, they waged a campaign to delegitimize Bush and delegitimize the Supreme Court, based on a mess that arose out of Gore’s own sneaky efforts to litigate his away around a loss in Florida.
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > Already in 2016, there were Democrats who claimed that the election wasn't fair (and therefore wasn't valid). Those Dems were very few and far between. Hillary Clinton conceded the morning after the polls closed, and pretty much all Dems at least paid lip service to wishing Trump well in his new office.
  - skissane 3y ago
    > Those Dems were very few and far between. Hillary Clinton conceded the morning after the polls closed, and pretty much all Dems at least paid lip service to wishing Trump well in his new office. According to [0]: > Trump’s mendacity is arguably the Second Big Lie. Four years earlier, the Hillary Clinton campaign and leading Democrats refused to acknowledge the outcome of the 2016 election, by claiming Donald Trump was not a legitimate president. These actions, while certainly not as dramatic or as immediately damaging as the events leading to Jan. 6 (and today), helped bring us to our current situation. > “He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” ex-President Jimmy Carter said in 2019, continuing to deny Trump’s victory three years after the election. > “He knows he’s an illegitimate president,” said Clinton, also three years later. She repeated this sentiment in 2020, telling The Atlantic the election “was not on the level,” and again when she called Trump’s win illegitimate. She piled on to this by saying, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” clearly referring to how she saw her 2016 campaign. That's an opinion piece, but it isn't making up these quotes from Carter and Clinton (and it goes on to reference remarks in similar spirit by Jerry Lewis, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, among others.) [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-denial-second-big-lie-ask-hillary-clinton-rcna55764 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-denial-second-b...
    - dctoedt 3y ago
      That was years later, after more details of Russian interference had become public. The salient point is that Hillary conceded the election within hours after the polls closed — and Obama (the then-incumbent) didn't try to sabotage the Electoral College's vote to keep Trump from taking office.
- rainworld 3y ago
  The events of 2020 were more than talk. Tears in the rain.
oh_sigh 3y ago
You would also need to turn pretty much all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, military men with a 30+ year track record of loyalty to the nation(and not an individual). Otherwise, feel free to occupy a few buildings in DC for a couple of days, but don't cry when you're forcibly evicted by the Army and hanged for treason.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > You would also need to turn pretty much all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, military men with a 30+ year track record of loyalty to the nation(and not an individual). And had Pence gone along with the electoral vote plan — or been caught in the insurrection and his replacement been amenable to that plan, what do you think the Joint Chiefs would have done about it? A military coup overthrowing the regime installed by an autocoup? Or just supporting the autocoup because the Constitutional issues of the autocoup are outside of military competency?
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    What was their oath? It was to the Constitution, not to avoid rocking the boat. Would an autocoup be against the Constitution? Absolutely. So yes, I would expect the Joint Chiefs to support the actual election winner, by force if necessary.
    - skissane 3y ago
      > Would an autocoup be against the Constitution? Absolutely. In normal circumstances, the military doesn't make up its own mind about what is against the constitution - they defer to SCOTUS to do that. Suppose Pence went along with Trump's plan, and refused to count the electoral votes of certain states, and declared Trump the winner. Biden surely would have challenged Pence's act in the Supreme Court. What if the conservative majority upheld Pence and declared Trump the legitimate winner? Does the military oppose an autocoup if the Supreme Court declares it constitutional? > So yes, I would expect the Joint Chiefs to support the actual election winner, by force if necessary. In practice, I think it would really depend on how the other side responded. If the SCOTUS majority had endorsed a Trump-Pence autocoup as constitutional, Biden might have announced that even though he believed the majority decision was gravely wrong, he was going to submit to it for the sake of national peace-in that scenario, the military would almost surely accept the autocoup too. Conversely, suppose Biden had announced that he rejects the SCOTUS decision as illegitimate. This is where things get a lot messier. Would the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) refuse an order by President Trump to enforce the SCOTUS decision? Well, operational command authority doesn't go through the JCS, it goes from the President through SECDEF directly to the commanders of the Unified Combatant Commands - USNORTHCOM has responsibility for the domestic US, so maybe the real question is whether the commander of USNORTHCOM would obey the President. What if, come January 20th, there are two parallel Presidential inaugurations - one of Trump (endorsed by Congressional Republicans and the SCOTUS majority) and one of Biden (endorsed by Congressional Democrats and the SCOTUS minority) - to which President would the US military owe its allegiance? I don't think it is guaranteed that the JCS would be of one mind about that question. And even if they were - what if lower-level commanders and their units disagree? One could foresee a scenario in which some units swear allegiance to one President, others to the other, yet others refuse to swear allegiance to either and insist on remaining neutral regarding the matter. Likely in such a scenario, some state governments would recognise one President and others the other. If military units in a state recognised the opposite President to the state government, that could create a significant risk of federal-state violence - which might give military units an incentive to adopt the position of the state in which they are based. In a scenario in which the US military has internal disagreements over who the commander-in-chief is, US military effectiveness could collapse overnight. It could be a prime opportunity for America's enemies to attack.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

Already in 2016, there were Democrats who claimed that the election wasn't fair (and therefore wasn't valid). To be fair, all they did was talk...

desas 3y ago
Wasn't that also a thing with the first Obama election? Before that, 2000 had Gore vs Bush and the Florida recount. Is it escalating?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  > Is it escalating? I think so, yes. Obama's first election didn't have much - just some non-politician named Trump shooting off his mouth. 2016 had actual politicians saying that it was illegitimate. Then came 2020, and Jan 6, and it wasn't just talk anymore. So yes, it seems to be escalating. 2000 was different. The vote was close enough in one state that that there was legitimate doubt about what the actual result was. It wasn't "illegitimate because I don't like the results" the way more recent ones have been.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Obama's first election didn't have much - just some non-politician named Trump shooting off his mouth Trump wasn't even particularly notable among the Obama birthers, who were quite nunerous, except retrospectively; he also wasn't not-a-politician, having actively campaigned for the Reform Party nomination for President in 2000 (the Reform Party had qualified for federal matching funds, bringing out a lot of nontraditional contenders) before abandoning the effort in February 2000, shortly after Jesse Ventura, who had convinced him the Reform Party was the right vehicle for his political ambitions, left the party. At the time of the Obama election, Trump was a politician who hadn't succeeded looking for an in with a major party core constituency, and grabbing on to the widespread birther conspiracies as a means of achieving that.
    - skissane 3y ago
      > he also wasn't not-a-politician, having actively campaigned for the Reform Party nomination for President in 2000 (the Reform Party had qualified for federal matching funds, bringing out a lot of nontraditional contenders) In the US, if all you've (yet) done is run for a third party, failing to even win its Presidential nomination-you are really (at that point in time) more of a would-be politician than an actual politician.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    I went back and looked at the 2000 election (as a Gore supporter at the time) and I think it was a step on this path. Gore tried to lawyer his way to victory in an unseemly way: https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/01-17.pdf https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_pa... After losing two automatic recounts, he insisted on hand recounts—but only in precincts that had heavily favored him in the first place. The whole point is that hand recounts find more votes than machine counts (they can read votes the machine would reject). If you only seek hand recounts in precincts where each newly readable vote is twice as likely to be a Gore vote, then you can quickly close the gap Then the Florida Supreme Court completely lost its mind, doing stuff like allowing Gore to count vote gains so far in partial recounts in Gore-favoring states. See pp. 22-24 above the above. The Supreme Court agreed 7-2 that the Florida recount process violated the equal protection law. Democrats invoked that President against Trump after the 2020 election. Nonetheless, they waged a campaign to delegitimize Bush and delegitimize the Supreme Court, based on a mess that arose out of Gore’s own sneaky efforts to litigate his away around a loss in Florida.
dctoedt 3y ago
> Already in 2016, there were Democrats who claimed that the election wasn't fair (and therefore wasn't valid). Those Dems were very few and far between. Hillary Clinton conceded the morning after the polls closed, and pretty much all Dems at least paid lip service to wishing Trump well in his new office.
- skissane 3y ago
  > Those Dems were very few and far between. Hillary Clinton conceded the morning after the polls closed, and pretty much all Dems at least paid lip service to wishing Trump well in his new office. According to [0]: > Trump’s mendacity is arguably the Second Big Lie. Four years earlier, the Hillary Clinton campaign and leading Democrats refused to acknowledge the outcome of the 2016 election, by claiming Donald Trump was not a legitimate president. These actions, while certainly not as dramatic or as immediately damaging as the events leading to Jan. 6 (and today), helped bring us to our current situation. > “He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” ex-President Jimmy Carter said in 2019, continuing to deny Trump’s victory three years after the election. > “He knows he’s an illegitimate president,” said Clinton, also three years later. She repeated this sentiment in 2020, telling The Atlantic the election “was not on the level,” and again when she called Trump’s win illegitimate. She piled on to this by saying, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” clearly referring to how she saw her 2016 campaign. That's an opinion piece, but it isn't making up these quotes from Carter and Clinton (and it goes on to reference remarks in similar spirit by Jerry Lewis, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, among others.) [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-denial-second-big-lie-ask-hillary-clinton-rcna55764 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-denial-second-b...
  - dctoedt 3y ago
    That was years later, after more details of Russian interference had become public. The salient point is that Hillary conceded the election within hours after the polls closed — and Obama (the then-incumbent) didn't try to sabotage the Electoral College's vote to keep Trump from taking office.
rainworld 3y ago
The events of 2020 were more than talk. Tears in the rain.

oh_sigh 3y ago

You would also need to turn pretty much all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, military men with a 30+ year track record of loyalty to the nation(and not an individual). Otherwise, feel free to occupy a few buildings in DC for a couple of days, but don't cry when you're forcibly evicted by the Army and hanged for treason.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> You would also need to turn pretty much all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, military men with a 30+ year track record of loyalty to the nation(and not an individual). And had Pence gone along with the electoral vote plan — or been caught in the insurrection and his replacement been amenable to that plan, what do you think the Joint Chiefs would have done about it? A military coup overthrowing the regime installed by an autocoup? Or just supporting the autocoup because the Constitutional issues of the autocoup are outside of military competency?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  What was their oath? It was to the Constitution, not to avoid rocking the boat. Would an autocoup be against the Constitution? Absolutely. So yes, I would expect the Joint Chiefs to support the actual election winner, by force if necessary.
  - skissane 3y ago
    > Would an autocoup be against the Constitution? Absolutely. In normal circumstances, the military doesn't make up its own mind about what is against the constitution - they defer to SCOTUS to do that. Suppose Pence went along with Trump's plan, and refused to count the electoral votes of certain states, and declared Trump the winner. Biden surely would have challenged Pence's act in the Supreme Court. What if the conservative majority upheld Pence and declared Trump the legitimate winner? Does the military oppose an autocoup if the Supreme Court declares it constitutional? > So yes, I would expect the Joint Chiefs to support the actual election winner, by force if necessary. In practice, I think it would really depend on how the other side responded. If the SCOTUS majority had endorsed a Trump-Pence autocoup as constitutional, Biden might have announced that even though he believed the majority decision was gravely wrong, he was going to submit to it for the sake of national peace-in that scenario, the military would almost surely accept the autocoup too. Conversely, suppose Biden had announced that he rejects the SCOTUS decision as illegitimate. This is where things get a lot messier. Would the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) refuse an order by President Trump to enforce the SCOTUS decision? Well, operational command authority doesn't go through the JCS, it goes from the President through SECDEF directly to the commanders of the Unified Combatant Commands - USNORTHCOM has responsibility for the domestic US, so maybe the real question is whether the commander of USNORTHCOM would obey the President. What if, come January 20th, there are two parallel Presidential inaugurations - one of Trump (endorsed by Congressional Republicans and the SCOTUS majority) and one of Biden (endorsed by Congressional Democrats and the SCOTUS minority) - to which President would the US military owe its allegiance? I don't think it is guaranteed that the JCS would be of one mind about that question. And even if they were - what if lower-level commanders and their units disagree? One could foresee a scenario in which some units swear allegiance to one President, others to the other, yet others refuse to swear allegiance to either and insist on remaining neutral regarding the matter. Likely in such a scenario, some state governments would recognise one President and others the other. If military units in a state recognised the opposite President to the state government, that could create a significant risk of federal-state violence - which might give military units an incentive to adopt the position of the state in which they are based. In a scenario in which the US military has internal disagreements over who the commander-in-chief is, US military effectiveness could collapse overnight. It could be a prime opportunity for America's enemies to attack.