EDITOR’S NOTE: A few weeks ago, I was looking for caulk on one of the high shelves in my garage, when I found a stack of about a hundred loose pages, held in place by a brick. I had never seen these papers before, but that wasn’t surprising; I’ve only lived in this house three years, and I am still sometimes discovering odds and ends the previous owners left behind in a corner of the attic or the garage. I’ve no idea how long the papers were up there. The first page was covered in dust and dirt, but it’s a garage, so that could mean anything.
The
papers turned out to be a single lengthy document, written mostly on wide-ruled
looseleaf paper in blue and black ink, with page numbers in the upper-right
corners. There are only a handful of crossouts and insertions, so I have to
assume that this is the second or even third draft. The document relates a
series of events that putatively occurred in the United States of America.
There are several graphics, which are printed out on standard white printer
paper and, at appropriate places, pasted into what I have come to call The
Narrative. These images were all cut very, very close to the edges, as if the
author were either a layout perfectionist or trying to save paper by printing
lots of images on the same sheet. In any event, these print images, common at
the start of the narrative, become very uncommon later on, so that the second
half is just page after page of the author’s handwriting. I can only speculate
as to why. Perhaps it has something to do with the way the author seems to go
through pens faster as he gets closer to the end, as if he had a limited pen
supply and was now scraping the bottom of the barrel.
But
here’s what unnerves me about these papers:
It’s
my handwriting.
I
don’t remember writing any of this. For reasons which will become obvious, I
could not possibly have done so. But it’s unmistakeably written in my hand,
full of my weird obsessions—like the sidebar about conventions in the first
section—and distinctive turns of phrase.
The
Narrative is written on 79 sheets of single-spaced, double-sided, wide-ruled
looseleaf, plus a few toward the end where the pages have clearly been torn out
of notebooks. The sheets are identical to the still-sealed pack of
NavNeet-brand looseleaf I’ve owned for years; the notebook paper bears an eerie
resemblance to the unused pages of my college history notebook. I keep both the
looseleaf and the notebook in a cabinet over my desk. (I am looking at them as
I type this.) The handwriting is flawlessly me as well, right down to the
distinctively crappy way I write the § symbol. It’s so familiar, I can read the
author’s mood through the curve of his “j’s”. I do not like what I
find there.
This is all… unsettling… especially once you consider the content of the narrative.
So, of course, I decided to blog about it.
I’ve
transcribed (or scanned) the entire narrative. This appears to have been the author’s
intention; he did, in fact, include handwritten URLs in some places for me to
link to. (I have done so.) At other times, especially closer to the end of the
narrative, he wrote down an article title, or sometimes just a description of an
article—as though he could not find it, but expected me to be able to, for some
reason. I did my best, and I think I got most of them correct. I’ve also added a few links
of my own where appropriate, particularly to statutes. Because of the strange
nature of this document, I’ve left in all the typos and grammatical errors
present in the original. Hopefully I haven’t added any more of my own.
With that, I’ll get out of the way and let you read this for yourself.
Looking
back, the most surprising thing about it was how unsurprising each step along the road had been.
When
we started out, nobody expected it to go where it finally did. Many believed it
was actually impossible. Even afterward, we all understood, intellectually,
that it could have happened differently.
And
yet, looking back, it feels like, while history could have rewritten the
details, the story was already written, the actors were cast and waiting in the
wings, and the show was determined to go on, one way or another.
The
calamity could, perhaps, have been deferred—maybe if it had been Michigan
instead of Pennsylvania, Jocelyn Benson instead of Kathy Boockvar—we might have
limped on another 4, 8, 20 years before it came. But the tectonic forces of
politics—the Greek gods of our downfall—would not be denied their blood
sacrifice.
Maybe
we were lucky that it happened when it did. Maybe, with a few more years for
the wave to build, it would have been even worse when it broke.
Or
maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better. Maybe we
could have avoided it altogether. Maybe it happened because, deep down, we wanted it. Maybe we chose it. Maybe we’re the stupidest, most ungrateful human garbage
who ever lived.
Can
I walk you through it? Step by awful step, in exhausting detail?
It’s
not for you, it’s for me.
I
want you to tell me where, in all this, reality went off the rails. I want you
to point at something and say, “There! That‘s
the weird part that doesn’t make sense! There! That was outrageously unlikely!” I desperately want this not to make sense. I want to blame it
all on a fluke.
For
myself and for my nation, I want absolution.
The end began the same way it did in 1860: with an election.
On
November 3rd, 2020,
American voters went to the polls and cast ballots for the office of President
of the United States.
This
was never supposed to happen. The Founding Fathers established the electoral
college specifically to prevent
popular elections for President of the United States, because they knew such
elections would be dominated by demagogues, money, and the “convuls[ion]
of the community with extraordinary and violent movements” (Federalist
68). The electors were supposed to be appointed through something resembling
the convention system the Founders adored,* or at least through the state
legislatures. The electoral college would thus avoid the destructive, partisan
hellscape of direct popular elections for the most powerful man in the country.
With indirect elections for both President and U.S. Senate, direct popular elections
under the Constitution were supposed to be confined to the House of
Representatives.**
The
electoral college was the Founders’ first and greatest failure. State
legislatures immediately started transferring the constitutional authority to
appoint electors from themselves to The People. Within fifty years, every state
but one (South Carolina) held a statewide, popular election for President,
usually without even listing the names of electors on the ballot. Electors
themselves became loyal, bound partisans devoted to their candidates, not the
deliberative, flexible citizens the Founders had planned on. The
small-r-republican electoral college, designed specifically to escape the
corruption inherent in mass democracy, had been subverted into a tool of mass
democracy.
Except
not quite. Even though it usually functioned like a direct popular election,
the electoral college system would—very occasionally, very quirkily—vomit up an
electoral college winner who did not win a plurality of the votes. It is
impossible to say whether the Founders “intended” for this to happen from time
to time, since the whole system where individual citizens cast ballots for
President is so divorced from what the Founders envisioned that the question
has no meaning. But it is no surprise that, when one side wins a national
popular election (that was never intended to exist), and the other side loses
the national popular election but happens to win in a few specific territories
that let them win the electoral college… this makes people on the losing side
feel like they’ve been cheated.
This
semi-direct election of the President was, by 2020, a well-established part of
America’s unwritten Constitution. Unfortunately, by a bizarre and unlikely coincidence, the popular vote
winner had lost the electoral college twice in the same generation… and, both
times, the fluke benefited a Republican. Democrats came to feel that the entire
system was rigged against democratic outcomes. (They were, of course, correct,
but it was not rigged against democracy even a tenth as much as the Founders
had hoped.)
*SIDEBAR:
While the “convention system the Founders adored” no longer exists,
its nearest modern equivalent in 2020 was the model the North Dakota Republican
Party used to select its delegates in the presidential primary. The Wyoming GOP
also got close. Democratic Party rules specifically forbade a convention
system, even in the primary. Outside North Dakota and Wyoming, very nearly
everything, even at the primary stage, was decided by direct, partisan, popular
vote. And we wondered why our political system was seized up by demagogues,
money, and violent convulsions! END SIDEBAR.
**SIDEBAR
2: Direct elections were not just supposed to be contained to the House of
Representatives; popular voting was supposed to happen, specifically, in small
Congressional districts, with a population of no more than 50,000 people
apiece. Local issues and neighborly friendship were supposed to prevent the
electoral hellscape from becoming too
unbearable. A constitutional amendment ratifying this limit came within a
hair’s breadth of passing back in the late 1700s. Instead, by 2020, a
Congressional district had more than 700,000 residents, nearly fifteen times
larger than what the Founders considered a maximum. Predictably, our
Congressmen were remote, distant powers most of us rarely (if ever) met, and
they were slaves to campaign cash much more than they were slaves to voters,
because they had to have cash just to advertise to all 700,000 of their
constituents every cycle! END SIDEBAR 2.
Thus,
on the first Tuesday of November 2020,
scores of millions of Americans did what they mistakenly considered their
“civic duty” and marked ballots for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden to serve
as the next President of the United States.
The
whole thing played out eerily close to the way it had four years before. Maybe
that’s the least believable part of all this: that, after the madness of spring
and summer 2020, politics would revert to the mean in a matter of months, even
with the pandemic drum continuing to beat steadily into the fall. But the
long-term memory of politics is chronically defective, and deep polarization
arguably makes reversion to the mean faster and stronger than it is in normal
times.
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