Electoral Victory Quotes

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the great Republic of America, to our Elector Primo, to our glorious states, to unity against the Colonies, to our impending victory!

It will be hard to dispel the myth that spending big money on advertising is the path to electoral victory, but we do know that if people organize, we can go up against big money and win.

Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way.

Trump had tapped into a vein in the electorate that Hillary couldn’t locate—and, just as important, that his much narrower focus within the Electoral College provided a viable path to victory.

And there are plays – and books and songs and poems and dances – that are perhaps upsetting or intricate or unusual, that leave you unsure, but which you think about perhaps the next day, and perhaps for a week, and perhaps for the rest of your life. Because they aren't clean, they aren't neat, but there's something in them that comes from the heart, and, so, goes to the heart. What comes from the head is perceived by the audience, the child, the electorate, as manipulative. And we may succumb to the manipulative for a moment because it makes us feel good to side with the powerful. But finally we understand we're being manipulated. And we resent it. Tragedy is a celebration not of our eventual triumph but of the truth – it is not a victory but a resignation. Much of its calmative power comes, again, from that operation described by Shakespeare: when remedy is exhausted, so is grief.

After months of listening to Bannon, I can say this with great certainty: While most of us who oppose his political project choose not to see him, he is watching us closely. The issues we are abandoning, the debates we aren’t having, the people we are insulting and discarding. He is watching all of it, and he is stitching together a political agenda out of it, a warped mirror agenda that he is convinced is the ticket to the next wave of electoral victories—it’s an agenda too few on our side of the glass have tried to comprehend.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or the government. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope. Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope sees in our enemy our own face. Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey. The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. I cannot promise you fine weather or an easy time. I cannot pretend that being handcuffed is pleasant. If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

In one respect, though, the Court received unfair criticism for Bush v. Gore—from those who said the justices in the majority "stole the election" for Bush. Rather, what the Court did was remove any uncertainty about the outcome. It is possible that if the Court had ruled fairly—or better yet, not taken the case at all—Gore would have won the election. A recount might have led to a Gore victory in Florida. It is also entirely possible that, had the Court acted properly and left the resolution of the election to the Florida courts, Bush would have won anyway. The recount of the 60,000 undervotes might have resulted in Bush's preserving his lead. The Florida legislature, which was controlled by Republicans, might have stepped in and awarded the state's electoral votes to Bush. And if the dispute had wound up in the House of Representatives, which has the constitutional duty to resolve controversies involving the Electoral College, Bush might have won there, too. The tragedy of the Court's performance in the election of 2000 was not that it led to Bush's victory but the inept and unsavory manner with which the justices exercised their power.

In theory, at least, the Union’s victory in the Civil War had reaffirmed the supremacy of the national government over the states. But of course the states of the former Confederacy had not come back willingly. They rejoined the union at gunpoint, and only after being forced to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and rewrite their state constitutions to ensure equal rights for newly freed blacks. Even then, it took the constant presence of federal troops, who fanned out across the South, to fight off attempts by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists to intimidate, terrorize, or murder black citizens who dared try to cast a ballot.

week before the election, the New Republic’s Morton Kondracke wrote that “it seems more likely by the day that Ronald Reagan is not going to execute a massive electoral sweep. In fact, the movement of the presidential campaign suggests a Carter victory.”14 David Broder had written: “There is no evidence of a dramatic upsurge in Republican strength or a massive turnover in Congress.” Though polls in the days leading up to the election showed Reagan ahead of Carter, most were near or within the margin of error, and everyone was predicting a late-night nail-biter. The New York Times poll three days out had Reagan ahead by a single point; veteran California pollster Mervin Field said, “At the moment there is a slight movement toward Carter.” George Gallup said, “This election could very well be a cliffhanger just like 1948.”15

Historically, it is traditional and habitual for us to be inadequately prepared. This is the combined result of a number factors, the character of which is only indicated: democracy, which tends to make everyone believe that he knows it all; the preponderance, inherent in democracy, of people whose real interest is in their own welfare as individuals; the glorification of our own victories in war and the corresponding ignorance of our defeats—and disgraces—and of their basic causes; the inability of the average individual to understand the cause and effect not only in foreign but domestic affairs, as well as his lack of interest in such matters. Added to these elements is the manner in which our representative form of government has developed as to put a premium on mediocrity and to emphasize the defects of the electorate already mentioned

Don’t be one of those so-called leaders who take the Black vote for granted,” a supporter told me. I was sensitive to the criticism, for it wasn’t entirely wrong. A lot of Democratic politicians did take Black voters for granted—at least since 1968, when Richard Nixon had determined that a politics of white racial resentment was the surest path to Republican victory, and thereby left Black voters with nowhere else to go. It was not only white Democrats who made this calculation. There wasn’t a Black elected official who relied on white votes to stay in office who wasn’t aware of what Axe, Plouffe, and Gibbs were at least implicitly warning against—that too much focus on civil rights, police misconduct, or other issues considered specific to Black people risked triggering suspicion, if not a backlash, from the broader electorate. You might decide to speak up anyway, as a matter of conscience, but you understood there’d be a price—that Blacks could practice the standard special-interest politics of farmers, gun enthusiasts, or other ethnic groups only at their own peril.

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

But Muslims now find themselves in a world shaped by western theories and western values. If we are to consider how Islamic communities conducted their affairs throughout the greater part of their history, it may be convenient to compare and contrast this way of life with the contemporary western model. Today the Muslims are urged to embrace democracy and are condemned for political corruption, while western scholars debate whether Islam can ever accommodate the democratic ideal. On the whole, they think not. Democracy, they believe, is a sign of political maturity and therefore of superiority. Western societies, since they are seen as democratic, exemplify this superiority. So there is one question that has to be pressed home: what, precisely, is meant by democracy? Let me put forward an imaginary Arab who knows nothing of western ways but would like to learn about them. He is aware that the literal meaning of the word democracy is "mob rule", but understands that this is not what westerners mean by it. He wonders how this meaning has, in practice, been modified and, since his questions are directed to an Englishman, he is not altogether surprised to be told that Britain is the exemplary democracy. He learns that the people—all except children, lunatics and peers of the realm—send their representatives to Parliament to speak for them. He is assured that these representatives never accept bribes to vote against their consciences or against the wishes of their constituents. He enquires further and is astonished to learn that the political parties employ what are known as Whips, who compel members to vote in accordance with the party line, even if this conflicts both with their consciences and with the views of the people who elected them. In this case it is not money but ambition for office that determines the way they vote. "But is this not corruption?" he asks naively. The Englishman is shocked. "But at least the party in power represents the vast majority of the electorate?" This time the Englishman is a little embarrassed. It is not quite like that. The governing party, which enjoys absolute power through its dominance in the House of Commons, represents only a minority of the electorate. "Are there no restraints on this power?" There used to be, he is told. In the past there was a balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the Commons, but that was seen as an undemocratic system so it was gradually eroded. The "sovereignty" of the Lower House is now untrammelled (except, quite recently, by unelected officials in Brussels). "So this is what democracy means?" Our imaginary Arab is baffled. He investigates further and is told that, in the 1997 General Election, the British people spoke with one voice, loud and clear. A landslide victory gave the Leader of the Labour Party virtually dictatorial powers. Then he learns that the turn-out of electors was the lowest since the war. Even so, the Party received only forty-three per cent of the votes cast. He wonders if this can be the system which others wish to impose on his own country. He is aware that various freedoms, including freedom of the press, are essential components of a democratic society, but no one can tell him how these are to be guaranteed if the Ruler, supported by a supine—"disciplined"—House of Commons enjoys untrammelled authority. He knows a bit about rulers and the way in which they deal with dissent, and he suspects that human nature is much the same everywhere. Barriers to oppression soon fall when a political system eliminates all "checks and balances" and, however amiable the current Ruler may be, there is no certainty that his successors, inheriting all the tools of power, will be equally benign. He turns now to an American and learns, with some relief since he himself has experienced the oppression of absolutism, that the American system restrains the power of the President by that of the Congress and the Supreme Court; moreover, the electe

And after Mitterrand’s victory she wrote: ‘Le miracle est là: c’est en inventant une gauche complètement libérée de la gauche fasciste issue du stalinisme que l’électorat français a porté le coup le plus décisif au stalinisme’ (‘The miracle is plain to see: by inventing a party of the left completely free of the Fascist left that came out of Stalinism the French electorate has landed the most decisive blow yet against Stalinism’).42

This is the core claim of populism: only some of the people are really the people. Think of Nigel Farage celebrating the Brexit vote by claiming that it had been a “victory for real people” (thus making the 48 percent of the British electorate who had opposed taking the UK out of the European Union somehow less than real—or, put more directly, questioning their status as proper members of the political community).

for heaven’s sakes,” they would say, by way of example. The fact is, though, this was a development that the majority of the dominant caste was not truly in a position to claim. The majority of white voters did not support him in either of his presidential bids. He had star power and a way with babies and pensioners, but no matter how refined and inspirational, well-spoken and conciliatory he was, Obama’s victory did not occur because most voters in the dominant caste had become more open-minded and enamored of him. As with other recent Democrats running for president, he won despite the bulk of the white electorate.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” declared FDR in his 1937 inaugural address, reminding the Court and the United States: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”92 Emboldened by the scale of his electoral victory, the President then opened the second administration by announcing a one-third cut in relief spending and his promise to balance the budget.

than one hundred black Louisianans exercising political liberty. The duty of protecting citizens’ equal rights, the Court said, “rests alone with the States.” Such judicial conservatism and embrace of states’ rights doctrine, practiced by the justices, all of whom had been appointed by Republican presidents Lincoln and Grant, left a resounding imprint on what remained of Reconstruction.55 In the disputed election of 1876, Tilden in all likelihood won the popular vote by more than two hundred thousand votes and 3 percent, but did not become president. When election returns poured in, it appeared that Hayes had failed, but the three “unredeemed” Southern states of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina were fiercely and violently contested. With 185 electoral votes needed for victory, without the three disputed states Tilden had 184 and Hayes 166. Both sides claimed they had won and accused their opponents of fraud in the disputed states, although most of the bloodshed and intimidation committed in those states had been against black Republican voters. To resolve this unprecedented situation, Congress established a fifteen-member electoral commission, balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Because Republicans held a majority in the overall Congress, they prevailed 8–7 on repeated attempts to “count” the confused returns. As the midwinter crisis dragged on in Washington, it appeared Hayes would become president. Democrats controlled the House and launched a filibuster to block action on the count.56

The writers and thinkers on the margins of the GOP—the Claremont gang, paleoconservatives, social traditionalists, and antiestablishment national populists—felt that Trump’s victory favored their side. Such vindication may have been a mirage. Trump failed to win a popular vote majority—he captured a smaller percentage of the vote than Mitt Romney had in 2012. His Electoral College win rested on seventy-seven thousand voters spread across three states. And for all his personal excesses and haphazard policymaking, Trump stuck rather closely to the Republican agenda of tax cuts, defense spending, and conservative judicial appointments. He rarely broke faith with either the New Right interest groups he had wooed during the campaign or with his core supporters, who would continue to defend him,

To be a populist conservative is to be a fatalist; to believe in a world where your side will never win; indeed, where your side almost by definition cannot win. Where even the most shattering electoral victories turn out to be hollow, and the liberal stranglehold on life can never be broken.12

But having won an election by attracting voters to these themes, he has given free rein to the most retrograde elements in Indian society, who are busy rewriting textbooks, extolling the virtues of ancient science over modern technology, advocating protectionism and self-reliance against free trade and foreign investment, and asserting that India’s identity must be purely Hindu. Mr Modi cannot be oblivious to this fundamental contradiction, but he can only resolve it by jettisoning the very forces that have helped ensure his electoral victory.

Each of them got caught, and he hasn’t been caught yet. Simple as that. For some of them, the president’s electoral victory was their victory. A vindication, a quiet affirmation of their life choices.

Those same troops were nowhere in sight months later when an overwhelmingly white mob, composed of white nationalists and Trump supporters, stormed the United States Capitol, smashing windows and ransacking offices while lawmakers were in the process of certifying president-elect Joseph Biden’s electoral victory.

The facial stills that Mario lap-dissolves between are of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, founding standard-bearer of the seminal new ‘Clean U.S. Party,’ the strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone, -Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers, a surreal union of both Rush L.– and Hillary R.C.–disillusioned fringes that drew mainstream-media guffaws at their first Convention (held in sterile venue), the seemingly LaRoucheishly marginal party whose first platform’s plank had been Let’s Shoot Our Wastes Into Space, 150 C.U.S.P. a kind of post-Perot national joke for three years, until—white-gloved finger on the pulse of an increasingly asthmatic and sunscreen-slathered and pissed-off American electorate—the C.U.S.P. suddenly swept to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm that made the U.W.S.A. and LaRouchers and Libertarians chew their hands in envy as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.

In 2014, a disturbing study was released by political scientists at Old Dominion University. Their work showed that a significant percentage of foreign nationals residing in the United States, whether lawfully or unlawfully present, were registered to vote in US elections—and that a significant number of them actually have voted in recent years—6.4 percent in 2008 and 2.2 percent in 2010. That is enough to have swayed election outcomes in some states: “there is reason to believe non-citizen voting changed one state’s Electoral College votes in 2008, delivering North Carolina to Obama, and that non-citizen votes have also led to Democratic victories in congressional races including a critical 2008 Senate race [in Minnesota] that delivered for Democrats a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.” It is, of course, illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal and state elections. But this study suggests that hundreds of thousands of illegal votes may have been cast in the United States in every federal election.11 If this study’s results are accurate, the implications are startling. We have Obamacare because of election fraud. We have the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act because of election fraud. We have Solyndra—the alternative energy company that collapsed leaving taxpayers liable for $535 million in federal loan guarantees—because of election fraud. Without the election fraud that helped put Obama and his allies in office, there’d be no lawless amnesty for illegal aliens, no Operation Fast and Furious, no Obama IRS assault on Americans. This shows that no American can take his or her vote for granted. There is a real chance that your vote can be cancelled out by an illegal vote cast by legal or illegal aliens.

However, the British leaders failed to listen to their scientists, expressing disbelief that the technology would be of any use now that the Allies had secured victory. A further blow to the English scientists' plans came when Winston Churchill, an avid technophile in his own eccentric fashion, suffered a startling electoral defeat, resulting in his replacement by Clement Atlee.

Especially in the Deep South, where Democratic victory was impossible without the neutralization of part of the black electorate, it also implied a revival of political violence. And, a noticeable shift away from support for state-sponsored modernization (the economic corollary of the discredited New Departure) accompanied the reemergence of white supremacist rhetoric. The depression heightened the attractiveness of retrenchment and tax reduction to white voters who associated expensive government with new state programs that primarily benefited corporations and blacks, and who feared that high taxes threatened both planters and yeomen with the loss of their land. And with Republicans proposing as an economic program little more than a milder version of “reform,” they had little to offer white voters to counteract Democrats’ racist appeals.64

Yet, it was infuriating that for the second time in five elections, a Democrat would win more votes but be robbed by this archaic fluke of our constitutional system. I’d been saying since 2000 that the Electoral College gave disproportionate power to less populated states and therefore was profoundly undemocratic. It made a mockery of the principle of “One person, one vote.” In a cruel twist of fate, the Founders had also created it as a bulwark against foreign interference in our democracy—Alexander Hamilton cited protecting against foreign influence as a justification for the Electoral College in Federalist Paper No. 68—and now it was handing victory to Vladimir Putin’s preferred candidate.

How we react to the presidency of Donald Trump will be the first test of our preparedness. His administration in its infancy is already wracked with scandals. But the real scandal is that he is president at all. Yes, a few extra votes in key states might have changed the electoral college outcome. But a Democratic victory would not have masked the fact that it was a third force that surged from below to fill a vacuum and defeat both parties. There proved to be an untapped yearning to hear someone address America’s new challenges in a different key, someone willing to champion change and say without equivocation that America can be great. Trump offered an authoritarian snarl and an ever-changing string of bizarre spontaneous “positions,” not a political vision. But his demagogic skills were sufficient to move millions to applaud his race baiting, his misogyny, his hardly veiled threats of violence, his contempt for the press, and his contempt for the law.

FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, people from every corner of the planet have flocked to New York City for the reason Frank Sinatra immortalized: to prove they could “make it.” The allure, the prestige, the struggle to survive, breeds a brand, an image of the city that ripples out to the rest of the world. Sinatra sang about proving himself to himself. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” New York was the yardstick. New York has indeed become a global yardstick—for artists, businesspeople, and dreamers of all stripes. He was a lawyer in New York? He must be good. Doesn’t matter if he was the worst lawyer in the city. If you can make it in New York, people assume that you can make it anywhere. The yardstick the public uses when judging a presidential candidate, it turns out, is not how much time the candidate has in politics. “It’s leadership qualities,” explains the presidential historian Doug Wead, a former adviser to George H. W. Bush and the author of 30 books on the presidents. Indeed, polls indicate that being “a strong and decisive leader” is the number one characteristic a presidential candidate can have. The fastest-climbing presidents, it turns out, used the Sinatra Principle to convey their leadership cred. What shows leadership like commanding an army (Washington), running a university (Wilson), governing a state for a few years—even if you started out as an actor (Reagan)—or building a new political party and having the humility to put aside your own interests for the good of the whole (Lincoln)? Dwight D. Eisenhower led the United States and its allies to victory against Hitler. He had never held an elected office. He won by a landslide with five times the electoral votes of his rival. “If he can make it there, he can make it anywhere,” US voters decided.

In light of the widespread violence and terror suffered by Black people in the South, Frederick Douglass’ insistence that Black people’s need for electoral power was more urgent than that of middle-class white women was logical and compelling. The former slave population was still locked in a struggle to defend their lives—and in Douglass’ eyes, only the ballot could ensure their victory. By contrast, the white middle-class women, whose interests were represented by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, could not claim that their lives were in physical jeopardy. They were not, like Black men and women in the South, engaged in an actual war for liberation.

Despite the fluke that was his electoral advantage and a “victory” that was at best suspect and at worst illegitimate, he never had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist; his bluster and shamelessness just happened to resonate with certain segments of the population.

Fear is why the president still has a map of his electoral college victory hanging outside the door to the Oval Office. Fear is why the president makes every person who goes into his office pass by a display meant to assert his right to sit behind the Resolute desk. Fear is why he asks people to pledge personal loyalty

Equally important, downsizing is mimicked by a politics that consistently sacrifices the needs of the poorer and often the more vulnerable classes—the counterparts to civilian casualties. Reduction of social benefits, lax enforcement of workplace standards, preserving a scandalously low minimum wage, all these are part of strategies devised to achieve an electoral victory and demonstrate the political superfluousness of the working classes.

Then came the unthinkable: the ignorant demagogue Trump was elected to the most powerful office in the world. Trump’s victory that November only happened thanks to the Electoral College, an anti-populist instrument from long ago, but that irony quickly receded into the background. Instead, the Democracy Scare developed into a kind of hysteria. Across the world there were panels and convenings and academic projects dedicated to analyzing and theorizing and worrying about this thing called populism.

Mook, always attentive to cash flow, knew that it was much more costly to try to persuade undecided voters to back Hillary than it was to register her supporters or to make sure they went to the polls. The analytics team could also conduct less expensive surveys than the pollsters to get a snapshot of the horse race in a given state. Separate from the three scores, the analytics experts would do quick surveys with a small universe of voters and then extrapolate how many other voters with similar demographic profiles were likely to vote and for whom they would cast their ballots. The same methods had been used in the primaries, when adjustments could be made based on the outcome of a string of contests. The general election was different, in part, because there was only one Election Day. The analytics were also thought to be more precise at predicting general-election outcomes in each state than primary outcomes because the exact shape of the electorate could be harder to project in lower-turnout contests. But in both cases, Mook relied heavily on the data to figure out where the campaign could get the most bang for its buck. Like a baseball executive in the Moneyball era, Mook looked at the data as the means for taking the least costly route to victory.

The modern left proves how prescient the Framers were. The left’s class warfare strategies mean that election campaigns are actually conducted against the Constitution’s safeguards of freedom. Supporters of the Constitution’s federalist framework of limited central government and its protection of liberty and property rights are demagogued as enemies of social justice. Statist candidates construe electoral victories as a mandate to undo constitutional constraints that impede their authority to do “the right thing,” as Obama puts it. Winning office becomes a license for lawlessness.

On October 18, before the numbers had been re-weighted, the campaign’s internal election simulator, dubbed the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” gave Trump a 7.8 percent chance of winning the 270 electoral votes he needed. His long odds were mainly due to the fact that he trailed (albeit narrowly) in most of the states that looked like they would decide the election, including the all-important state of Florida. Re-weighting the model to reflect an older, whiter electorate changed the polls by only a couple of percentage points in most of the major battleground states. But it shifted the odds of victory substantially in Trump’s direction because it either put him ahead or made him

The electoral victories of Thatcher (1979) and Reagan (1980) are often viewed as a distinctive rupture in the politics of the postwar period. I understand them more as consolidations of what was already under way throughout much of the 1970s. The crisis of 1973-5 was in part born out of a confrontation with the accumulated rigidities of government policies and practices built up during the Fordist-Keynesian period. Keynesian policies had appeared inflationary as entitlements grew and fiscal capacities stagnated. Since it had always been part of the Fordist political consensus that redistributions should be funded out of growth, slackening growth inevitably meant trouble for the welfare state and the social wage.

IT WASN’T OVER QUITE YET. BUT WITH TRUMP NOW AT 264 ELECTORAL votes, any one of the outstanding competitive races—Michigan, Wisconsin, or Arizona—would put him over the top. He won all three. When the final numbers were tabulated, Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton in one of the strangest results in presidential history.2 Trump won the Electoral College with 306 votes to Clinton’s 232 (officially 304 to 227, after seven pledged electors went rogue). The margin of the GOP victory was found in three states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—which Trump won by a total of 77,744 votes, less than the capacity of some Big Ten football stadiums. Meanwhile, Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million.

But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty. Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion. But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann. 'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.

The result was a Roosevelt victory, closer than it looked in the electoral college, and a new set of standards for radio. Never again would such a program be allowed. A line had been crossed: radio was the most powerful communications medium yet devised, and turning over the entire broadcast facilities of the nation for a partisan cause to an artist-playwright who was constitutionally unable to write anything in less than his strongest voice was, at best, less than prudent. Roosevelt was simply grateful, amazed that Corwin could pack so much into an hour.

Trump carried around maps outlining his electoral victory, which he would pull out at odd times in discussions meant to focus on preparing him to take office.