vox--2020-09-23--RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy

For much of this fall , Americans have fretted about a legitimacy crisis surrounding the 2020 election .
But now , after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the hypocritical Republican rush to fill her seat in an election year , it ’ s clear that the crisis is here .
Liberal democracy only functions when major parties accept the right of their opponents to govern .
The purpose of the system is to take the antagonism that defines politics everywhere and channel it , creating rules and establishing norms that prevent one segment of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ participate in and shape the system .
The breakdown of these rules and norms is at the heart of our current crisis .
And the reason for this breakdown is that one of our two major parties has waged a decades-long campaign against them .
Simply put , Republicans for decades have been delegitimizing the very idea of Democratic Party rule .
Republicans shut down the government in the 1990s and impeached President Bill Clinton over far less than what Trump has done in office .
Under President Obama , they fanned the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economy hostage to force spending cuts , prevented Obama ’ s Supreme Court nominee from even getting a hearing , and elevated obstructionism to the level of governing principle .
At the state level , they have rewritten electoral rules to block Democrats from voting and seized power from Democratic governors after they have won elections .
On Wednesday morning , the Atlantic reported that the Trump campaign was preparing to ask Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states to override the results of the actual vote and send their own , Trump-supportive electors to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Mitch McConnell , the Republican agenda has devolved into one of minority rule : an abuse of the counter-majoritarian parts of the American political system in order to lock Democrats out of power , and a willingness to stop at nothing to pursue these goals .
For years , Democrats have refused to respond in kind , holding off on engaging in the same kind of procedural warfare that Republicans have made routine .
But a repeated gap between winning the most votes and winning power , thanks to the Electoral College @ @ @ @ @ @ @ toward a more aggressive stance .
They now believe , with good reason , that they represent the majority of the country — and that beating back Republican efforts to tilt the electoral playing field and seize control of the Court requires its own brand of procedural radicalism .
Once-unthinkable measures like court-packing and ending the filibuster are now in play , with the latest Supreme Court vacancy seemingly like a true tipping point .
“ Nobody ’ s word means anything in this place anymore .
All that matters is raw power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) tweeted on Monday morning , reacting to news that Senate Republicans would push through a Supreme Court nominee six weeks from an election — a complete reversal of the GOP ’ s stated principle in 2016 .
Given this backdrop , many on the losing side in the battles over the Supreme Court and the election will almost certainly believe the other side ’ s victory is illegitimate .
Depending on how things play out — and it ’ s important to be humble about our ability to predict the future — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be a flashpoint that turns the escalating fight over control of America ’ s institutions into a full-fledged constitutional crisis .
How Republicans corroded the legitimacy of American democracy To understand why we should be worried about what happens in the coming weeks and months , it ’ s worth dwelling a bit on the concept of political legitimacy in democracies .
“ In general , ” the political philosopher Samuel Freeman writes , “ the idea of legitimacy in law and politics relates to the proper enactment and application of laws and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all according to generally accepted and respected procedures.
” The key words there are “ proper ” and “ generally accepted.
” In the context of an election , what that means is whether it ’ s perceived as free and fair by the country ’ s citizens .
An election is legitimate in this sense when Americans generally accept that it was conducted properly .
The same goes for the business of a president appointing , and the Senate confirming , a Supreme Court justice .
But citizens ’ perceptions also should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
If real policies are actually making the United States ’ voting and Supreme Court appointment procedures less fair , then it ’ s understandable if that country ’ s citizens lose faith in elections and the judicial system — as many have in former democracies that have gone authoritarian , like Russia and Venezuela .
And when elections and judicial appointments are actually the product of fair procedures , you ’ d expect citizens to see them as legitimate .
In this respect , the fight surrounding American elections is somewhat strange @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dubious allegations of voter fraud to convince Republicans that elections they lose are illegitimate in ways that they actually are not .
These arguments have then served as justification for new policies that actually do make American elections less fair — think voter ID and mass purges from voter rolls that disproportionately hurt Democratic-leaning voters — thus leading Democrats to lose faith in electoral legitimacy .
Put differently : A partisan strategy of falsely claiming elections are unfair has perversely served as justification for policies that make them less fair , damaging legitimacy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This process , which has escalated significantly in recent years , has laid the groundwork for an election that could end in crisis dwarfing the 2000 Bush v. Gore mess .
It should not be controversial , at this point , to assert that Republicans have been making false and misleading claims about the threat from voter fraud for years .
Ben Ginsberg , a Republican attorney who has worked on the party ’ s election monitoring efforts since 1984 , admitted as much in a striking Washington Post op-ed .
“ Republicans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that four decades of dedicated investigation have produced only isolated incidents of election fraud , ” Ginsberg writes .
“ A study of results in three states where all voters are mailed actual ballots , a practice that has drawn the president ’ s outrage , found just 372 possible cases of illegal voting of 14.6 million cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections — 0.0025 percent.
” This Republican effort has had the effect of turning electoral legitimacy into a partisan issue , causing Republicans and Democrats to adopt fundamentally different @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
One study quantified this split using data from a survey of 10,000 voters ( 200 from each state ) conducted in 2014 .
The authors found that in states that had strict voter ID laws , Republicans were considerably more likely to say they were “ very confident ” in the state ’ s vote-counting process than Democrats were .
In states without those laws , things flipped — Democrats were the ones expressing higher confidence in the electoral system .
Trump , as is so often the case , took this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It started during the 2016 campaign , when he warned of an election “ rigged ” by “ millions ” of illegal votes cast on Hillary Clinton ’ s behalf .
This rhetoric mattered — one study found that Trump supporters were notably less likely to believe the election would be fair during the campaign — but was obviated by Trump ’ s victory and Clinton ’ s concession .
As the 2020 incumbent , Trump ’ s rhetoric means a lot more — and , if anything , he ’ s turned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ August that “ the only way we ’ re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.
” He has falsely claimed that Democrats are sending out “ 80 million ballots to everybody and there ’ s tremendous cheating going to go on.
” He openly claimed to be blocking emergency funding for the US Postal Service to prevent universal mail-in balloting .
These are not one-off comments .
The attacks on vote-by-mail and intimations that Biden could only win by cheating have become staples of the president ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s assault on the electoral system damages public faith in the elections on both sides of the aisle : Many Republicans actually believe what he ’ s saying , while many Democrats see his comments as evidence that he ’ s trying to use his powers of office to rig the game in his favor .
After the 2016 election , about three-quarters of Americans thought the results were legitimate .
By contrast , a mid-August 2020 NBC poll found that a majority of Americans had limited or no confidence in the fairness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats .
In a mid-September poll from Yahoo/YouGov , only 22 percent of Americans expressed confidence that the elections would be “ free and fair.
” And so we head into Election Day with large chunks of the population poised to doubt the legitimacy of whoever wins .
Republican hardball over the Supreme Court is eroding its legitimacy The Supreme Court vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’ s death has now linked the November election , already dubiously legitimate , with the broader problem of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves , thanks to past events like the Democratic rejection of Reagan ’ s appointee Robert Bork and the sexual misconduct allegations that dominated the hearings held for Clarence Thomas in 1991 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 , that Democrats don ’ t play fair when it comes to this most powerful of American institutions .
This sense of grievance has provided cover for a scorched-earth approach to judicial appointments , where anything and everything is justified in the name of ensuring conservative control .
Hence the Republican treatment of Merrick Garland , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ replace Antonin Scalia on the Court .
McConnell claimed it would be inappropriate to replace Scalia during an election year , and that justice died in February 2016 .
Now Republicans are vowing to install a Ginsburg replacement with about 40 days until an election , a blatant violation of the standard set for Garland .
It ’ s a transparent exercise in power politics that threatens the legitimacy of the Court .
“ If Trump and Republicans replace Ginsburg it will destroy the remaining public legitimacy of the Supreme Court .
Full @ @ @ @ @ @ @ V. Last writes in The Bulwark .
“ The Republican party ’ s willingness to invent , bend , cherry-pick , or break rules and norms as needed in the pursuit of power would be undeniable.
” Such an appointment would cement the Democratic perception that a defeat in 2020 would not just be a normal political loss : It would threaten to lock them out of power for a long , long time .
And , on this view , it would be because the Republicans bent or broke the norms and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ GOP capture of the Court are compounded by United States ’ profoundly dysfunctional electoral system .
It seems overwhelmingly likely that Trump will lose the popular vote — meaning that if he were to win , that win would , for the second time in a row , be handed to him by the Electoral College .
This is a weakly legitimate institution in the first place — a series of Gallup polls conducted between 1967 and 2011 all find majority support for its replacement with a national popular vote system — but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its abolition than Republicans .
This split has been intensified by the nature of the two parties ’ current coalitions , which structurally advantages Republicans , both in the Electoral College and in the Senate .
It ’ s generally understood that if Biden wins , Trump can be expected to cast doubt on the results and maybe even refuse to concede defeat .
But a Trump win , given Democrats ’ reasonably justified skepticism about the GOP ’ s commitment to playing fair and general sense that the system is rigged against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its own .
That ’ s especially if Trump wins via a Supreme Court decision against counting mail-in ballots or on some other flimsy legal challenge — a victory won with the votes of some or all of justices he picked to replace Scalia , Ginsburg , and Anthony Kennedy .
“ If one side sees the other side as consistently cheating , the very premise of democracy is undermined , ” writes Rick Hasen , an expert on election law at UC Irvine .
“ This year , the grounds for Democrats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ increased.
” What an American legitimacy crisis could look like Legitimacy might seem like a fuzzy concept , maybe even an irrelevant one .
Does it really matter whether people on the losing side think the election was fair ?
The answer from political scientists is an unequivocal yes .
“ This type of tension , in other countries , has led to civil war , ” UC Berkeley ’ s Susan Hyde tells me .
A 2009 paper by Kristine Höglund , a professor at Sweden ’ s Uppsala University , surveys @ @ @ @ @ @ @ violence — a diverse group ranging from Sri Lanka to Kenya to the Palestinian territories .
When elections are perceived as unfair by the losing side , they become more likely to turn to violence as a result .
Fighting becomes even more likely when elections have higher , group-based stakes — when they feel less like a competition between citizens and more like existential struggles between opposed ethnic or religious groups .
Other causes of violence include “ biased police , ” widespread “ access to arms , ” and “ political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of these comparisons , according to Hyde and others , is not that the United States is likely to experience a kind of new civil war ( though it ’ s telling that she needed to raise that as a possibility ) .
For a variety of reasons , including the professionalization of the military and the country ’ s long history of peaceful power transitions , that seems exceptionally unlikely .
Rather , the point is that American democracy is taking on features that are genuinely abnormal in wealthy , consolidated democracies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and politicization of ostensibly neutral government institutions like the Supreme Court that spell doom for public faith in electoral outcomes .
When that faith is lost , political factions that have lost elections look to other forms of political activity for satisfaction .
Tom Pepinsky , a political scientist at Cornell , tells me that “ we are in uncharted territory ” — that no advanced democracy has ever had an election with this kind and degree of problems .
The closest analogy he could think of , modern Thailand , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crisis surrounding the April 2006 election resulted in a military coup .
“ There are lots and lots of differences ” between the US and Thailand , Pepinsky notes .
“ But the important similarity is this idea that no side believes the election could be fairly held that they don ’ t win.
” There are a number of ways that 2020 ’ s loser could challenge the election ’ s outcome .
FiveThirtyEight ’ s Geoffrey Skelley sketches out one particularly troubling scenario , wherein Trump has a narrow lead in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ night that ends up flipping after all the absentee ballots are counted .
The state ’ s Democratic governor confirms a Biden victory and sends his electors to the Electoral College , while the state ’ s Republican-controlled legislature , following Trump rage-tweets , appoints a different slate .
According to Barton Gellman ’ s reporting in the Atlantic , the Trump campaign and its allies in Pennsylvania are actively considering this kind of push .
Direct appointment of electors “ is one of the options .
It is one of the available @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Lawrence Tabas , the Pennsylvania GOP ’ s chair , told Gellman .
The process of whose slate wins out in this kind of fight is , it turns out , shockingly indeterminate : This could easily end with Biden and Trump both claiming to be the real president on Inauguration Day .
Massive protests would likely ensue ; violence involving the police or armed militias , like the ones recently seen patrolling the streets of Kenosha , Wisconsin , are well in the realm of possibility in this or any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chooses to abuse his power as president , things could get even darker .
Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone , during a September appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones ’ s talk show , called on Trump to send federal marshals to seize allegedly corrupt absentee ballots , declare “ martial law , ” and arrest a list of political enemies that includes “ the Clintons ” and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid .
There just isn ’ t a good parallel for what we are currently living through in recent American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ democracy ; comparisons with developing and post-conflict states , like Thailand or the United States of 1876 , are closer but still not quite exact given the profound differences between these places and modern America .
This is terra incognita .
The fairness of our elections has come under fundamental question , as has the Court that ’ s supposed to provide legal redress in exactly this kind of dispute .
There is no road map for what may lie ahead , and getting out of it will require a genuine reckoning with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of our major parties has spent decades convincing itself that its rival wielding power is an unacceptable catastrophe .
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For much of this fall, Americans have fretted about a legitimacy crisis surrounding the 2020 election. But now, after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the hypocritical Republican rush to fill her seat in an election year, it’s clear that the crisis is here.
Liberal democracy only functions when major parties accept the right of their opponents to govern. The purpose of the system is to take the antagonism that defines politics everywhere and channel it, creating rules and establishing norms that prevent one segment of the population from crushing others’ ability to participate in and shape the system.
The breakdown of these rules and norms is at the heart of our current crisis. And the reason for this breakdown is that one of our two major parties has waged a decades-long campaign against them.
Simply put, Republicans for decades have been delegitimizing the very idea of Democratic Party rule. Republicans shut down the government in the 1990s and impeached President Bill Clinton over far less than what Trump has done in office. Under President Obama, they fanned the flames of birtherism, held the global economy hostage to force spending cuts, prevented Obama’s Supreme Court nominee from even getting a hearing, and elevated obstructionism to the level of governing principle.
At the state level, they have rewritten electoral rules to block Democrats from voting and seized power from Democratic governors after they have won elections. On Wednesday morning, the Atlantic reported that the Trump campaign was preparing to ask Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states to override the results of the actual vote and send their own, Trump-supportive electors to the Electoral College.
Under Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Republican agenda has devolved into one of minority rule: an abuse of the counter-majoritarian parts of the American political system in order to lock Democrats out of power, and a willingness to stop at nothing to pursue these goals.
For years, Democrats have refused to respond in kind, holding off on engaging in the same kind of procedural warfare that Republicans have made routine.
But a repeated gap between winning the most votes and winning power, thanks to the Electoral College and the Senate, has pushed Democrats toward a more aggressive stance. They now believe, with good reason, that they represent the majority of the country — and that beating back Republican efforts to tilt the electoral playing field and seize control of the Court requires its own brand of procedural radicalism. Once-unthinkable measures like court-packing and ending the filibuster are now in play, with the latest Supreme Court vacancy seemingly like a true tipping point.
“Nobody’s word means anything in this place anymore. All that matters is raw power,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) tweeted on Monday morning, reacting to news that Senate Republicans would push through a Supreme Court nominee six weeks from an election — a complete reversal of the GOP’s stated principle in 2016.
“Got it. New rules.”
Given this backdrop, many on the losing side in the battles over the Supreme Court and the election will almost certainly believe the other side’s victory is illegitimate. Depending on how things play out — and it’s important to be humble about our ability to predict the future — the November election has the potential to be a flashpoint that turns the escalating fight over control of America’s institutions into a full-fledged constitutional crisis.
How Republicans corroded the legitimacy of American democracy
To understand why we should be worried about what happens in the coming weeks and months, it’s worth dwelling a bit on the concept of political legitimacy in democracies.
“In general,” the political philosopher Samuel Freeman writes, “the idea of legitimacy in law and politics relates to the proper enactment and application of laws and bestowal of authority of upon officials, all according to generally accepted and respected procedures.”
The key words there are “proper” and “generally accepted.” In the context of an election, what that means is whether it’s perceived as free and fair by the country’s citizens. An election is legitimate in this sense when Americans generally accept that it was conducted properly. The same goes for the business of a president appointing, and the Senate confirming, a Supreme Court justice.
But citizens’ perceptions also should, in theory, correspond to reality. If real policies are actually making the United States’ voting and Supreme Court appointment procedures less fair, then it’s understandable if that country’s citizens lose faith in elections and the judicial system — as many have in former democracies that have gone authoritarian, like Russia and Venezuela. And when elections and judicial appointments are actually the product of fair procedures, you’d expect citizens to see them as legitimate.
In this respect, the fight surrounding American elections is somewhat strange.
Trump and the GOP have used dubious allegations of voter fraud to convince Republicans that elections they lose are illegitimate in ways that they actually are not. These arguments have then served as justification for new policies that actually do make American elections less fair — think voter ID and mass purges from voter rolls that disproportionately hurt Democratic-leaning voters — thus leading Democrats to lose faith in electoral legitimacy.
Put differently: A partisan strategy of falsely claiming elections are unfair has perversely served as justification for policies that make them less fair, damaging legitimacy among voters from both major parties. This process, which has escalated significantly in recent years, has laid the groundwork for an election that could end in crisis dwarfing the 2000 Bush v. Gore mess.
It should not be controversial, at this point, to assert that Republicans have been making false and misleading claims about the threat from voter fraud for years. Ben Ginsberg, a Republican attorney who has worked on the party’s election monitoring efforts since 1984, admitted as much in a striking Washington Post op-ed.
“Republicans ... must deal with the basic truth that four decades of dedicated investigation have produced only isolated incidents of election fraud,” Ginsberg writes. “A study of results in three states where all voters are mailed actual ballots, a practice that has drawn the president’s outrage, found just 372 possible cases of illegal voting of 14.6 million cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections — 0.0025 percent.”
This Republican effort has had the effect of turning electoral legitimacy into a partisan issue, causing Republicans and Democrats to adopt fundamentally different views about what makes American elections fair.
One study quantified this split using data from a survey of 10,000 voters (200 from each state) conducted in 2014. The authors found that in states that had strict voter ID laws, Republicans were considerably more likely to say they were “very confident” in the state’s vote-counting process than Democrats were. In states without those laws, things flipped — Democrats were the ones expressing higher confidence in the electoral system.
Trump, as is so often the case, took this long-running problem and escalated it dramatically. It started during the 2016 campaign, when he warned of an election “rigged” by “millions” of illegal votes cast on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. This rhetoric mattered — one study found that Trump supporters were notably less likely to believe the election would be fair during the campaign — but was obviated by Trump’s victory and Clinton’s concession.
As the 2020 incumbent, Trump’s rhetoric means a lot more — and, if anything, he’s turned up the heat. He said in August that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” He has falsely claimed that Democrats are sending out “80 million ballots to everybody and there’s tremendous cheating going to go on.” He openly claimed to be blocking emergency funding for the US Postal Service to prevent universal mail-in balloting.
These are not one-off comments. The attacks on vote-by-mail and intimations that Biden could only win by cheating have become staples of the president’s rhetoric and right-wing media.
Trump’s assault on the electoral system damages public faith in the elections on both sides of the aisle: Many Republicans actually believe what he’s saying, while many Democrats see his comments as evidence that he’s trying to use his powers of office to rig the game in his favor.
After the 2016 election, about three-quarters of Americans thought the results were legitimate. By contrast, a mid-August 2020 NBC poll found that a majority of Americans had limited or no confidence in the fairness of the November elections, including 65 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats. In a mid-September poll from Yahoo/YouGov, only 22 percent of Americans expressed confidence that the elections would be “free and fair.”
And so we head into Election Day with large chunks of the population poised to doubt the legitimacy of whoever wins.
Republican hardball over the Supreme Court is eroding its legitimacy
The Supreme Court vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has now linked the November election, already dubiously legitimate, with the broader problem of Republican procedural radicalism.
Republicans have convinced themselves, thanks to past events like the Democratic rejection of Reagan’s appointee Robert Bork and the sexual misconduct allegations that dominated the hearings held for Clarence Thomas in 1991 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, that Democrats don’t play fair when it comes to this most powerful of American institutions. This sense of grievance has provided cover for a scorched-earth approach to judicial appointments, where anything and everything is justified in the name of ensuring conservative control.
Hence the Republican treatment of Merrick Garland, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Court. McConnell claimed it would be inappropriate to replace Scalia during an election year, and that justice died in February 2016. Now Republicans are vowing to install a Ginsburg replacement with about 40 days until an election, a blatant violation of the standard set for Garland. It’s a transparent exercise in power politics that threatens the legitimacy of the Court.
“If Trump and Republicans replace Ginsburg it will destroy the remaining public legitimacy of the Supreme Court. Full stop,” the conservative journalist Jonathan V. Last writes in The Bulwark. “The Republican party’s willingness to invent, bend, cherry-pick, or break rules and norms as needed in the pursuit of power would be undeniable.”
Such an appointment would cement the Democratic perception that a defeat in 2020 would not just be a normal political loss: It would threaten to lock them out of power for a long, long time. And, on this view, it would be because the Republicans bent or broke the norms and rules of American politics.
Fears about GOP capture of the Court are compounded by United States’ profoundly dysfunctional electoral system. It seems overwhelmingly likely that Trump will lose the popular vote — meaning that if he were to win, that win would, for the second time in a row, be handed to him by the Electoral College.
This is a weakly legitimate institution in the first place — a series of Gallup polls conducted between 1967 and 2011 all find majority support for its replacement with a national popular vote system — but Democrats have long been more supportive of its abolition than Republicans. This split has been intensified by the nature of the two parties’ current coalitions, which structurally advantages Republicans, both in the Electoral College and in the Senate.
It’s generally understood that if Biden wins, Trump can be expected to cast doubt on the results and maybe even refuse to concede defeat. But a Trump win, given Democrats’ reasonably justified skepticism about the GOP’s commitment to playing fair and general sense that the system is rigged against them, could create a crisis of its own. That’s especially if Trump wins via a Supreme Court decision against counting mail-in ballots or on some other flimsy legal challenge — a victory won with the votes of some or all of justices he picked to replace Scalia, Ginsburg, and Anthony Kennedy.
“If one side sees the other side as consistently cheating, the very premise of democracy is undermined,” writes Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at UC Irvine. “This year, the grounds for Democrats to fear an illegitimate election have only increased.”
What an American legitimacy crisis could look like
Legitimacy might seem like a fuzzy concept, maybe even an irrelevant one. Does it really matter whether people on the losing side think the election was fair?
The answer from political scientists is an unequivocal yes.
“This type of tension, in other countries, has led to civil war,” UC Berkeley’s Susan Hyde tells me.
A 2009 paper by Kristine Höglund, a professor at Sweden’s Uppsala University, surveys places that have been hurt by election-related violence — a diverse group ranging from Sri Lanka to Kenya to the Palestinian territories. When elections are perceived as unfair by the losing side, they become more likely to turn to violence as a result. Fighting becomes even more likely when elections have higher, group-based stakes — when they feel less like a competition between citizens and more like existential struggles between opposed ethnic or religious groups. Other causes of violence include “biased police,” widespread “access to arms,” and “political usage of electoral administration.”
The point of these comparisons, according to Hyde and others, is not that the United States is likely to experience a kind of new civil war (though it’s telling that she needed to raise that as a possibility). For a variety of reasons, including the professionalization of the military and the country’s long history of peaceful power transitions, that seems exceptionally unlikely.
Rather, the point is that American democracy is taking on features that are genuinely abnormal in wealthy, consolidated democracies — forms of polarization, social distrust, and politicization of ostensibly neutral government institutions like the Supreme Court that spell doom for public faith in electoral outcomes. When that faith is lost, political factions that have lost elections look to other forms of political activity for satisfaction.
Tom Pepinsky, a political scientist at Cornell, tells me that “we are in uncharted territory” — that no advanced democracy has ever had an election with this kind and degree of problems. The closest analogy he could think of, modern Thailand, was in no way reassuring: a political crisis surrounding the April 2006 election resulted in a military coup.
“There are lots and lots of differences” between the US and Thailand, Pepinsky notes. “But the important similarity is this idea that no side believes the election could be fairly held that they don’t win.”
There are a number of ways that 2020’s loser could challenge the election’s outcome. FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley sketches out one particularly troubling scenario, wherein Trump has a narrow lead in the decisive state of Pennsylvania on election night that ends up flipping after all the absentee ballots are counted. The state’s Democratic governor confirms a Biden victory and sends his electors to the Electoral College, while the state’s Republican-controlled legislature, following Trump rage-tweets, appoints a different slate.
According to Barton Gellman’s reporting in the Atlantic, the Trump campaign and its allies in Pennsylvania are actively considering this kind of push.
Direct appointment of electors “is one of the options. It is one of the available legal options set forth in the Constitution,” Lawrence Tabas, the Pennsylvania GOP’s chair, told Gellman.
The process of whose slate wins out in this kind of fight is, it turns out, shockingly indeterminate: This could easily end with Biden and Trump both claiming to be the real president on Inauguration Day. Massive protests would likely ensue; violence involving the police or armed militias, like the ones recently seen patrolling the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, are well in the realm of possibility in this or any other contested election scenario.
If Trump chooses to abuse his power as president, things could get even darker. Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, during a September appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s talk show, called on Trump to send federal marshals to seize allegedly corrupt absentee ballots, declare “martial law,” and arrest a list of political enemies that includes “the Clintons” and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
There just isn’t a good parallel for what we are currently living through in recent American history or that of any other wealthy democracy; comparisons with developing and post-conflict states, like Thailand or the United States of 1876, are closer but still not quite exact given the profound differences between these places and modern America.
This is terra incognita. The fairness of our elections has come under fundamental question, as has the Court that’s supposed to provide legal redress in exactly this kind of dispute. There is no road map for what may lie ahead, and getting out of it will require a genuine reckoning with what got us here — that one of our major parties has spent decades convincing itself that its rival wielding power is an unacceptable catastrophe.


vox--2020-09-23--Troubled Blood sees J.K. Rowling at the mercy of all her worst impulses

J.K. Rowling ’ s latest novel made headlines for generating controversy well before its US release date of September 29 .
That ’ s because Troubled Blood , the newest installment of the detective series Rowling publishes under the pen name Robert Galbraith , features a serial killer who lures his victims into a false sense of security by dressing as a woman .
Fears of a bad man in a dress are one of the main justifications for anti-trans legislation across the globe .
In the US and the UK over the past few years , that ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ controversies : Trans people want to be able to use public restrooms and changing rooms that correspond to their gender identity .
But opponents argue that if trans people were allowed to use the public bathrooms that corresponded to their gender identity , women and children will undoubtedly be menaced by sexual predators using this legal loophole to ogle women in their most vulnerable state .
In practice , however , US states that have allowed trans people to use the facilities corresponding to their gender have seen no increase in sexual harassment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , however , has stated that it is “ the simple truth ” that allowing trans women to use women ’ s bathrooms will lead to violent men using those loopholes to attack “ natal girls and women.
” She began outlining her views on gender in a series of tweets last fall , then elaborated on them in a long essay published this June .
There , Rowling perpetuated a series of outdated myths about trans people while repeatedly stating that she ’ s not transphobic , because she knows and likes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that trans women aren ’ t real women , that they ’ re taking advantage of resources meant for “ biological women , ” and that they are enabling predatory men to commit violence against those “ biological women.
” To be clear , regardless of Rowling ’ s personal feelings toward trans people , all of the ideas she expressed in her essay are transphobic .
They actively seek to take rights away from trans people , and they treat trans identity as something that is up for debate , rather than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deserve to be treated with dignity .
But Rowling has threatened to sue publications who describe her and her views as transphobic , forcing at least one children ’ s site to issue a public apology .
So to some critics , Troubled Blood is just the latest sign of J.K. Rowling ’ s increasingly outspoken and retrograde ideas about gender .
Others have countered that the book contains no trans characters , that detractors were judging the book without reading it , and that dismissing Troubled Blood before its publication over worries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its worst .
What it would mean to cancel J.K. Rowling , a billionaire with theme park attractions built around her intellectual property , remains unclear .
But in any case , Troubled Blood debuted at No .
1 in the UK .
I ’ ve read all of Troubled Blood ’ s many pages , and I can say that this book is transphobic .
But it ’ s also just not very good .
What Troubled Blood is , above all else , is an example of Rowling at the mercy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Blood is the fifth volume in Rowling ’ s Cormoran Strike books , a series of noir-inflected murder mysteries .
The name of the series comes from their protagonist , a grizzled army police officer-turned-private detective named Cormoran Strike , who solves crimes with his partner/obvious eventual love interest , Robin .
The Cormoran Strike books have never been perfect , but they ’ re usually fun .
The part of writing that Rowling is best at is constructing a mystery , so her whodunnits are always absorbing and twisty .
And writing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seems to grant Rowling freedom to be playful and flippant in a way she hasn ’ t been since the very first Harry Potter novels .
( Rowling published the first volume in the Strike series , 2015 ’ s The Cuckoo ’ s Calling , in genuine anonymity .
She was unmasked a few months after the book came out , but she ’ s continued to use her Robert Galbraith pen name for all the books in the series that have followed . )
But Troubled Blood is not fun , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It feels bloated and resentful , turgid with an ethos of grim duty .
It ’ s the writing of someone who feels she has no choice but to bring some home truths to you , the reader , and damn the consequences .
Troubled Blood also reads like nothing so much as a stylistic sequel to Rowling ’ s incredibly boring 2012 novel Casual Vacancy .
Casual Vacancy was a dour class satire that seemed to be animated most strongly by Rowling ’ s desire to be taken seriously as an author @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Blood seems to be animated most strongly by Rowling ’ s desire to share her political opinions on feminism and other gender issues with the world .
It features Strike and Robin setting out together to solve the disappearance of one Margot Bamborough , a feminist doctor who vanished from the world in 1974 .
The police strongly suspected that Margot was abducted by the serial killer Dennis Creed ( the one who wears women ’ s clothes ) , but they were never able to solve the case .
And now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ daughter Anna — a lesbian , Rowling notes with an air of triumph , as if to say , see , she ’ s not homophobic — has hired Strike and Robin to try to bring her closure on the mystery once and for all .
Over the course of the year-long investigation that ensues , Strike and Robin manage to establish the following : Fourth-wave feminism , with its Slut Walks and pro-porn stance , is nothing but a bunch of idiotic children having airy , academic discussions about words , while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the sex trafficking of children .
In contrast , Margot ’ s brand of ’ 70s second-wave feminism was correct and righteous , except for its lamentable pro-choice stance .
( All sympathetic characters in Troubled Blood , except for poor misguided Margot , are pro-contraception but anti-abortion . )
Moreover , women are all bound together by their biological destiny , which leaves them in danger of being victimized by predatory men .
And the most dangerous predator of all is the predator who cloaks themselves in femininity .
This final category @ @ @ @ @ @ @ killer , who is obsessed with women ’ s clothing .
Creed wears a wig and a women ’ s coat and lipstick to abduct his victims , because his disguise makes the drunk women he targets perceive him first as another woman and then as a harmless drag queen .
But his interest in cross-dressing isn ’ t purely utilitarian .
He also steals trophy garments from his victims and masturbates into them .
“ I felt I stole something of their essence from them , ” says Creed of his penchant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ taking that which they thought private and hidden.
” ( Per Rowling ’ s Galbraith website , Creed is loosely based on two real serial killers .
Per the Guardian , both of them stole women ’ s clothes from their victims , and one of the two may have worn them , although the evidence there seems to be fuzzy . )
But there are other predators besides Creed in this most dangerous category of deceptive femininity , and one of them manages to fool Strike .
“ Like the women @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Creed ’ s van , ” Strike muses of this villain at the end of Troubled Blood , “ he ’ d been hoodwinked by a careful performance of femininity.
” This particular predator who manages to best Strike is cis .
But within the world of Troubled Blood , it ’ s this predator ’ s cold-blooded and inauthentic performance of femininity that makes them monstrous .
And in her nonfiction writing , Rowling has strongly suggested that she believes trans women are cold-bloodedly performing a gender identity that does not truly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the process , they are stealing away resources that exist to help what Rowling calls “ biological women ” cope with the world ’ s misogyny .
In Troubled Blood , the overt performance of gender is done with an eye to deceive , to misdirect , to harm .
Cis women may experiment with their femininity — there ’ s a recurring motif that sees Robin test driving different perfumes as she decides what kind of woman she wants to be in the wake of her divorce — but men who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even by open-minded Robin as “ camp.
” Meanwhile , the good gay man who Robin lives with is clean-cut enough to get an acting job playing a straight army vet .
Anna the good lesbian is non-threateningly feminine , by which Rowling usually means pretty .
( When Rowling writes a woman in touch with her masculine side , the result tends to look like Harry Potter ’ s wicked Aunt Marge . )
And anyone in this book who wields their gender across boundaries with deliberate intent is a monster .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Troubled Blood is , broadly speaking , “ about.
” They are where the narrative tension lies , where the juice of the book is .
But Troubled Blood is also ostensibly a murder mystery , and the murder plot provides the skeleton from which the political ideas are hung .
So is it a good murder mystery ?
Not really .
It is way , way , way too fucking long .
Rowling ’ s always had a tendency to go long and sprawling whenever the pressure is on .
The Harry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Fire , right at the time they ’ d become such a phenomenon that the midnight release parties were starting .
And Troubled Blood , which comes just as Rowling is beginning to speak more and more publicly about her views on gender , is even longer — it clocks in at a hefty 927 pages , with a plot stretching out across a full year .
Within that year , Strike and Robin sift their way through innumerable red herrings .
Ordinarily , this is a part of plotting at which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ good at flashy authorial sleight of hand , directing the reader ’ s attention this way while she seeds the information that will turn out to be vital just where you ’ re not looking .
But in this case , the red herrings pile on so heavily and for so long that they begin to feel meaningless .
There ’ s no pleasure to be had in trying to figure out what ’ s worth paying attention to and what can be discarded , because there ’ s just more information than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I began to feel unpleasantly reminded of that part of Deathly Hallows that turns into a long , sad , pointless camping trip where nothing happens : Are we really just checking every random tree in this forest for clues ?
That ’ s how we ’ re going to solve this one ?
In a way , the plotting in Troubled Blood is even less satisfying .
While the second half of the Harry Potter series is bloated , there ’ s still pleasure to be had in those books from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When the mystery fails , the fun of the magic and the friendships and the boarding school coziness can take over .
Maybe you don ’ t particularly care about where Voldemort ’ s Horcruxes are , but there ’ s still magical camping and teen angst and wizarding revolutionary radios to be had , right ?
Maybe you ’ re getting distracted by the frankly wild ethics of the house-elves and their slavery , but boy , that Marauder ’ s Map sure is a blast , right ?
In Troubled Blood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aren ’ t taken by the political ideas animating it , what ’ s left for you to care about is the long slow-burn romance between Robin and Strike .
And I do more or less want Robin and Strike to be together , in the same way I sort of vaguely wanted Ron and Hermione to be together but never bothered over it much .
I definitely don ’ t care about Robin and Strike one-thousand-pages-of-refusing-to-talk-about-feelings much .
At this point , with both of them single and both of them gazing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even keeping them apart anymore ?
It ’ s exhausting just to contemplate .
There ’ s a plotline in the Cormoran Strike books that I ’ ve been thinking about ever since Rowling first began to talk about trans issues in public .
Other critics have already discussed the way she treated trans women in the second volume of the series , The Silk Worm .
In that book , the two trans women Strike meets in the course of his investigation are ostensibly sympathetic characters , but Strike treats them as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t forthcoming with the information he wants , he casually threatens her with prison rape .
But what ’ s haunting me is a subplot from the series ’ s third volume , Career of Evil .
In Career of Evil , Strike ’ s investigation leads him to a subculture built around people who want to become physically disabled .
On hidden forums , they discuss the operations they plan to get in order to manifest the disabilities they believe they already spiritually possess , and they complain bitterly that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ understand their plight .
Does anyone think they would choose to live like this , with such inaccessible and easily mocked desires ?
Don ’ t people understand that they were born with these wishes , that these desires are an intrinsic part of their identity ?
Strike , who lost a leg in the war , takes this group ’ s obsession personally .
He is incensed and offended by them .
How dare they try to playact at an identity which became his so painfully , at such great cost ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ own personal , private pain ?
He has lunch with two people from the forum , and they rudely force him to pay while ordering the most expensive options on the menu .
One of them is in a wheelchair .
Strike at last loses his patience and pushes her out of the chair , only to find that she can walk just fine without it .
I don ’ t know what ’ s going on in J.K. Rowling ’ s mind or how she sees the world .
But she writes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about this particular subculture : as people appropriating a disability — and Rowling does write about womanhood , and its attendant dangers , as if it were a disability — that is rightfully hers .
And that idea is becoming more and more central to every book she writes .
I don ’ t know what to do with J.K. Rowling anymore .
I don ’ t know what anyone should do with her and her books .
I don ’ t believe that it ’ s sustainable or valuable or even really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to enact some sort of ideologically pure , progressive worldview in every book they write .
Most readers , I think , would agree with me on that .
That ’ s part of why so many readers stuck with Rowling despite the politics embedded in the subtext of the Harry Potter novels , which have always been centrist at best , and through the increasing crankiness of the Cormoran Strike series .
I don ’ t think that you have to throw away the Harry Potter series to prove you ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t know if it ’ s even possible to avoid those books : They ’ re so embedded into the grid of pop culture by this point that they feel like a utility , like an electric company .
How do you avoid electricity every single day without becoming a hermit ?
How do you choose to throw out a series you grew up on , that you built beloved childhood memories around ?
Every reader has to have their own dividing line between what they are willing to work with and what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to choose the way they will approach a text , and what they ’ re going to take out of it and what they ’ ll leave behind .
And that ’ s a choice you have to make for yourself .
I ’ ve written positively about the Cormoran Strike books before , despite what happened to the trans women in book two and that bizarre trans-disability subplot in book three , and despite that ongoing thing where Rowling always treats fat people as inherently grotesque and probably evil .
I thought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ found it easy to ignore the politics .
That was a choice I was used to making after growing up on Harry Potter , and because I am a thin cis non-disabled woman , it was easy for me to make that choice without thinking too hard about it .
But I can ’ t ignore the politics of Troubled Blood , and I don ’ t think that ’ s just because of all of the essays and tweets Rowling ’ s written over the past year .
I think that ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of Troubled Blood she really cares about , and that shows in the writing .
So here is what I do know .
Troubled Blood is a book in which aesthetics have been rendered subordinate to politics .
There is no “ there ” there besides Rowling ’ s political ideas .
And those ideas are reactionary and hateful .
I don ’ t see anything left in this book worth sticking around for .
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J.K. Rowling’s latest novel made headlines for generating controversy well before its US release date of September 29. That’s because Troubled Blood, the newest installment of the detective series Rowling publishes under the pen name Robert Galbraith, features a serial killer who lures his victims into a false sense of security by dressing as a woman.
Fears of a bad man in a dress are one of the main justifications for anti-trans legislation across the globe. In the US and the UK over the past few years, that’s taken the form of the bathroom bill controversies: Trans people want to be able to use public restrooms and changing rooms that correspond to their gender identity.
But opponents argue that if trans people were allowed to use the public bathrooms that corresponded to their gender identity, women and children will undoubtedly be menaced by sexual predators using this legal loophole to ogle women in their most vulnerable state. In practice, however, US states that have allowed trans people to use the facilities corresponding to their gender have seen no increase in sexual harassment or assault in public restrooms.
Rowling, however, has stated that it is “the simple truth” that allowing trans women to use women’s bathrooms will lead to violent men using those loopholes to attack “natal girls and women.” She began outlining her views on gender in a series of tweets last fall, then elaborated on them in a long essay published this June. There, Rowling perpetuated a series of outdated myths about trans people while repeatedly stating that she’s not transphobic, because she knows and likes trans people. She just also thinks that trans women aren’t real women, that they’re taking advantage of resources meant for “biological women,” and that they are enabling predatory men to commit violence against those “biological women.”
To be clear, regardless of Rowling’s personal feelings toward trans people, all of the ideas she expressed in her essay are transphobic. They actively seek to take rights away from trans people, and they treat trans identity as something that is up for debate, rather than an intrinsic part of human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity. But Rowling has threatened to sue publications who describe her and her views as transphobic, forcing at least one children’s site to issue a public apology.
So to some critics, Troubled Blood is just the latest sign of J.K. Rowling’s increasingly outspoken and retrograde ideas about gender. Others have countered that the book contains no trans characters, that detractors were judging the book without reading it, and that dismissing Troubled Blood before its publication over worries about a trope is cancel culture at its worst. What it would mean to cancel J.K. Rowling, a billionaire with theme park attractions built around her intellectual property, remains unclear. But in any case, Troubled Blood debuted at No. 1 in the UK.
I’ve read all of Troubled Blood’s many pages, and I can say that this book is transphobic. But it’s also just not very good.
What Troubled Blood is, above all else, is an example of Rowling at the mercy of all her worst impulses.
Troubled Blood is the fifth volume in Rowling’s Cormoran Strike books, a series of noir-inflected murder mysteries. The name of the series comes from their protagonist, a grizzled army police officer-turned-private detective named Cormoran Strike, who solves crimes with his partner/obvious eventual love interest, Robin.
The Cormoran Strike books have never been perfect, but they’re usually fun. The part of writing that Rowling is best at is constructing a mystery, so her whodunnits are always absorbing and twisty. And writing under a (masculine) pen name seems to grant Rowling freedom to be playful and flippant in a way she hasn’t been since the very first Harry Potter novels. (Rowling published the first volume in the Strike series, 2015’s The Cuckoo’s Calling, in genuine anonymity. She was unmasked a few months after the book came out, but she’s continued to use her Robert Galbraith pen name for all the books in the series that have followed.)
But Troubled Blood is not fun, and it’s not playful. It feels bloated and resentful, turgid with an ethos of grim duty. It’s the writing of someone who feels she has no choice but to bring some home truths to you, the reader, and damn the consequences.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
Troubled Blood also reads like nothing so much as a stylistic sequel to Rowling’s incredibly boring 2012 novel Casual Vacancy.
Casual Vacancy was a dour class satire that seemed to be animated most strongly by Rowling’s desire to be taken seriously as an author of literary fiction for adults. Troubled Blood seems to be animated most strongly by Rowling’s desire to share her political opinions on feminism and other gender issues with the world.
It features Strike and Robin setting out together to solve the disappearance of one Margot Bamborough, a feminist doctor who vanished from the world in 1974. The police strongly suspected that Margot was abducted by the serial killer Dennis Creed (the one who wears women’s clothes), but they were never able to solve the case. And now, 40 years later, Margot’s daughter Anna — a lesbian, Rowling notes with an air of triumph, as if to say, see, she’s not homophobic — has hired Strike and Robin to try to bring her closure on the mystery once and for all.
Over the course of the year-long investigation that ensues, Strike and Robin manage to establish the following: Fourth-wave feminism, with its Slut Walks and pro-porn stance, is nothing but a bunch of idiotic children having airy, academic discussions about words, while enabling the sexual assault of women and the sex trafficking of children.
In contrast, Margot’s brand of ’70s second-wave feminism was correct and righteous, except for its lamentable pro-choice stance. (All sympathetic characters in Troubled Blood, except for poor misguided Margot, are pro-contraception but anti-abortion.) Moreover, women are all bound together by their biological destiny, which leaves them in danger of being victimized by predatory men. And the most dangerous predator of all is the predator who cloaks themselves in femininity.
This final category of dangerous predators includes Creed the serial killer, who is obsessed with women’s clothing. Creed wears a wig and a women’s coat and lipstick to abduct his victims, because his disguise makes the drunk women he targets perceive him first as another woman and then as a harmless drag queen. But his interest in cross-dressing isn’t purely utilitarian. He also steals trophy garments from his victims and masturbates into them.
“I felt I stole something of their essence from them,” says Creed of his penchant for taking women’s underwear, “taking that which they thought private and hidden.” (Per Rowling’s Galbraith website, Creed is loosely based on two real serial killers. Per the Guardian, both of them stole women’s clothes from their victims, and one of the two may have worn them, although the evidence there seems to be fuzzy.)
But there are other predators besides Creed in this most dangerous category of deceptive femininity, and one of them manages to fool Strike. “Like the women who’d climbed willingly into Dennis Creed’s van,” Strike muses of this villain at the end of Troubled Blood, “he’d been hoodwinked by a careful performance of femininity.”
This particular predator who manages to best Strike is cis. But within the world of Troubled Blood, it’s this predator’s cold-blooded and inauthentic performance of femininity that makes them monstrous. And in her nonfiction writing, Rowling has strongly suggested that she believes trans women are cold-bloodedly performing a gender identity that does not truly belong to them, and that, in the process, they are stealing away resources that exist to help what Rowling calls “biological women” cope with the world’s misogyny.
In Troubled Blood, the overt performance of gender is done with an eye to deceive, to misdirect, to harm. Cis women may experiment with their femininity — there’s a recurring motif that sees Robin test driving different perfumes as she decides what kind of woman she wants to be in the wake of her divorce — but men who take an interest in femininity are dismissed even by open-minded Robin as “camp.” Meanwhile, the good gay man who Robin lives with is clean-cut enough to get an acting job playing a straight army vet. Anna the good lesbian is non-threateningly feminine, by which Rowling usually means pretty. (When Rowling writes a woman in touch with her masculine side, the result tends to look like Harry Potter’s wicked Aunt Marge.)
And anyone in this book who wields their gender across boundaries with deliberate intent is a monster.
All of these political ideas are what Troubled Blood is, broadly speaking, “about.” They are where the narrative tension lies, where the juice of the book is. But Troubled Blood is also ostensibly a murder mystery, and the murder plot provides the skeleton from which the political ideas are hung.
So is it a good murder mystery? Not really. It is way, way, way too fucking long.
Rowling’s always had a tendency to go long and sprawling whenever the pressure is on. The Harry Potter books turned into doorstoppers with Goblet of Fire, right at the time they’d become such a phenomenon that the midnight release parties were starting. And Troubled Blood, which comes just as Rowling is beginning to speak more and more publicly about her views on gender, is even longer — it clocks in at a hefty 927 pages, with a plot stretching out across a full year.
Within that year, Strike and Robin sift their way through innumerable red herrings. Ordinarily, this is a part of plotting at which Rowling excels; she’s very good at flashy authorial sleight of hand, directing the reader’s attention this way while she seeds the information that will turn out to be vital just where you’re not looking. But in this case, the red herrings pile on so heavily and for so long that they begin to feel meaningless. There’s no pleasure to be had in trying to figure out what’s worth paying attention to and what can be discarded, because there’s just more information than any reader could possibly hold on to.
I began to feel unpleasantly reminded of that part of Deathly Hallows that turns into a long, sad, pointless camping trip where nothing happens: Are we really just checking every random tree in this forest for clues? That’s how we’re going to solve this one?
In a way, the plotting in Troubled Blood is even less satisfying. While the second half of the Harry Potter series is bloated, there’s still pleasure to be had in those books from all the genre-blending Rowling is doing. When the mystery fails, the fun of the magic and the friendships and the boarding school coziness can take over. Maybe you don’t particularly care about where Voldemort’s Horcruxes are, but there’s still magical camping and teen angst and wizarding revolutionary radios to be had, right? Maybe you’re getting distracted by the frankly wild ethics of the house-elves and their slavery, but boy, that Marauder’s Map sure is a blast, right?
In Troubled Blood, when the mystery falters and you aren’t taken by the political ideas animating it, what’s left for you to care about is the long slow-burn romance between Robin and Strike. And I do more or less want Robin and Strike to be together, in the same way I sort of vaguely wanted Ron and Hermione to be together but never bothered over it much. I definitely don’t care about Robin and Strike one-thousand-pages-of-refusing-to-talk-about-feelings much. At this point, with both of them single and both of them gazing endlessly at each other, what is even keeping them apart anymore? It’s exhausting just to contemplate.
There’s a plotline in the Cormoran Strike books that I’ve been thinking about ever since Rowling first began to talk about trans issues in public.
Other critics have already discussed the way she treated trans women in the second volume of the series, The Silk Worm. In that book, the two trans women Strike meets in the course of his investigation are ostensibly sympathetic characters, but Strike treats them as mockable. When one of them isn’t forthcoming with the information he wants, he casually threatens her with prison rape.
But what’s haunting me is a subplot from the series’s third volume, Career of Evil.
In Career of Evil, Strike’s investigation leads him to a subculture built around people who want to become physically disabled. On hidden forums, they discuss the operations they plan to get in order to manifest the disabilities they believe they already spiritually possess, and they complain bitterly that the rest of the world doesn’t understand their plight. Does anyone think they would choose to live like this, with such inaccessible and easily mocked desires? Don’t people understand that they were born with these wishes, that these desires are an intrinsic part of their identity?
Strike, who lost a leg in the war, takes this group’s obsession personally. He is incensed and offended by them. How dare they try to playact at an identity which became his so painfully, at such great cost? How dare they try to appropriate his own personal, private pain?
He has lunch with two people from the forum, and they rudely force him to pay while ordering the most expensive options on the menu. One of them is in a wheelchair. Strike at last loses his patience and pushes her out of the chair, only to find that she can walk just fine without it.
I don’t know what’s going on in J.K. Rowling’s mind or how she sees the world. But she writes about trans people the way Strike thinks about this particular subculture: as people appropriating a disability — and Rowling does write about womanhood, and its attendant dangers, as if it were a disability — that is rightfully hers. And that idea is becoming more and more central to every book she writes.
I don’t know what to do with J.K. Rowling anymore. I don’t know what anyone should do with her and her books.
I don’t believe that it’s sustainable or valuable or even really possible to ask every author you follow to enact some sort of ideologically pure, progressive worldview in every book they write. Most readers, I think, would agree with me on that. That’s part of why so many readers stuck with Rowling despite the politics embedded in the subtext of the Harry Potter novels, which have always been centrist at best, and through the increasing crankiness of the Cormoran Strike series.
I don’t think that you have to throw away the Harry Potter series to prove you’re a good person. I don’t know if it’s even possible to avoid those books: They’re so embedded into the grid of pop culture by this point that they feel like a utility, like an electric company. How do you avoid electricity every single day without becoming a hermit? How do you choose to throw out a series you grew up on, that you built beloved childhood memories around?
Every reader has to have their own dividing line between what they are willing to work with and what they are not. Every reader has to choose the way they will approach a text, and what they’re going to take out of it and what they’ll leave behind. And that’s a choice you have to make for yourself.
I’ve written positively about the Cormoran Strike books before, despite what happened to the trans women in book two and that bizarre trans-disability subplot in book three, and despite that ongoing thing where Rowling always treats fat people as inherently grotesque and probably evil. I thought the mysteries were fun, and I found it easy to ignore the politics. That was a choice I was used to making after growing up on Harry Potter, and because I am a thin cis non-disabled woman, it was easy for me to make that choice without thinking too hard about it.
But I can’t ignore the politics of Troubled Blood, and I don’t think that’s just because of all of the essays and tweets Rowling’s written over the past year. I think that’s because the politics are the only part of Troubled Blood she really cares about, and that shows in the writing.
So here is what I do know.
Troubled Blood is a book in which aesthetics have been rendered subordinate to politics. There is no “there” there besides Rowling’s political ideas. And those ideas are reactionary and hateful.
I don’t see anything left in this book worth sticking around for.


vox--2020-09-24--Postal workers say they are ready for the mail-in voting surge

Over the last few months , Lori Cash has watched US Postal Service management remove mail sorting machines , curb after-hours pickups and deliveries , and limit overtime work in the Upstate New York region where she has worked for more than 20 years .
These kinds of operational changes in the USPS , which rolled out across the country , have caused significant mail delays — and legitimate concern that they could interfere with an expected surge in mail-in voting for this November ’ s general election .
Many have speculated that the postal service slowdowns were intended to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these controversial cost-cutting measures were initiated after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy , a top Trump donor , took over in June .
And President Trump stoked these concerns when he admitted in August that he was blocking new funding for the postal service in part to sabotage universal mail-in voting .
So how worried should we be — if you vote by mail this election , will your vote get counted ?
Cash told Recode that despite the hurdles and delays these changes have caused , she has little doubt that she and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the expected mail-in voting rush ahead of the historic presidential election .
“ Where we stand right now , I feel confident that we can handle the amount of ballots , ” Cash , a postal worker and local union leader with the American Postal Workers Union ( APWU ) , told Recode in early September .
“ We can definitely handle the volume even with the machines that have been removed.
” Yet Cash ’ s confidence comes with one big caveat : She fears that DeJoy , who paused the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of congressional pressure and a media firestorm , may still institute more disruptive changes between now and November 3 .
If that happens , she believes all bets are off .
About a half-dozen other rank-and-file postal employees in New York , Florida , Montana , and New England echoed Cash ’ s perspective in conversations that took place after DeJoy committed to pause the disruptive measures in August : They are adamant that they and their colleagues are prepared to handle the barrage of ballots — so long as DeJoy stays out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concerns are people not mailing ballots in early enough .
If there are delays in some areas , and if DeJoy makes any more significant changes out in the field , that would definitely disrupt the [ mail-in voting ] operation , ” Cash said .
“ My advice to people is to make sure you know what your due date is and get that ballot in the mail two weeks early .
I want people to still be proactive and mail their ballots in early — because just because [ DeJoy ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t mean that at the last minute he won ’ t make any drastic changes.
” But the biggest challenge mail-in voting faces is one of trust , perhaps more than anything else .
Even if DeJoy keeps his word on pausing the cost-saving changes until after the election and the USPS handles tens of millions of ballots without a major disruption , will the general public trust the results ?
Sowing that doubt appears to be a goal for Trump , who has for months been pushing baseless , misleading claims about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And it seems to have worked : Conspiracy theories about the process abound .
As a result , for government officials in states where voters will rely heavily on voting by mail , educating the public about how and when to vote by mail is more crucial than ever .
With the Covid-19 pandemic making in-person voting a potentially risky activity , as many as 80 million people could end up voting via mail-in or drop-off ballots ahead of the election , according to a New York Times analysis .
Such a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than a 100 percent increase from mail ballot totals in 2016 .
That kind of spike would apply massive pressure to the USPS and its 500,000 employees even in normal times .
And these times are anything but normal at the United States Postal Service .
DeJoy , a top Republican donor and former logistics company CEO , took over as the USPS chief in June and has since overseen a series of cost-cutting measures that worried postal employees , union leaders and some politicians , who feared that the accompanying deterioration in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a mail-in voting fiasco .
The delays have also disrupted the lives of Americans who rely on timely postal service deliveries for prescription drugs , social security checks , and other important goods .
Still , America ’ s postal workers are committed to getting the job done .
“ I think and hope [ DeJoy ] is hiding and going to let us do our thing and get all election mail delivered like before , ” a veteran postmaster in New England , who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ We get daily emails [ from management ] to make sure all election mail , incoming or outgoing , is clear everyday.
” Joanne Borell , a 25-year veteran of the USPS who is a postal clerk in Billings , Montana , says she has no reason to believe the postal service won ’ t handle mail-in voting on time , even with increased demand .
More than half of all voters in Montana voted by mail in 2016 , and Borell said she has never witnessed or heard of significant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deal with passports , live animals , and other things people really care about , ” Borell said in an interview .
“ We are always watching for things that we have to take special care of.
” What does concern Borell is how some mail delays and misleading claims about vote-by-mail fraud has caused many Americans to lose confidence in the postal service .
Recently , a family member of Borell told her they were worried postal employees with a political bias would discard or tamper with ballots to try to give @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Such conspiracies are not surprising at a time in which Trump has routinely publicly attacked mail-in voting .
But Borell was offended by the suggestion .
“ Never in my entire career have I seen anybody do something like that , ” she said of tossing ballots in the trash .
Another postal clerk , who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to reporters , said a deluge of Amazon packages is what is currently overwhelming the post offices where the employee works .
But the USPS has actually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mail like bills and letters during the pandemic , which presumably would allow the postal service to more easily process a surge of mail-in ballots , which are also typically treated as first-class .
“ From what I can see , we are perfectly capable of handling [ a surge of mail-in ballots ] , ” the worker said .
“ But we ’ re getting destroyed with packages .
It ’ s like Christmas never ended.
” Nate Castro , a mail processor in Tampa , Florida , and a local APWU @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get labeled with a red tag to denote their importance , will get processed quickly and accurately — barring unforeseen changes by DeJoy or other top management to existing USPS processes .
“ You want to vote in-person ?
So be it ; that ’ s your voting right , ” Castro told Recode .
“ But it should also be the right for every person to vote by mail.
” Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network .
All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ all ?
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes .
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That is our mission at Vox .
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Over the last few months, Lori Cash has watched US Postal Service management remove mail-sorting machines, curb after-hours pickups and deliveries, and limit overtime work in the Upstate New York region where she has worked for more than 20 years. These kinds of operational changes in the USPS, which rolled out across the country, have caused significant mail delays — and legitimate concern that they could interfere with an expected surge in mail-in voting for this November’s general election.
Many have speculated that the Postal Service slowdowns were intended to interfere with the election because some of these controversial cost-cutting measures were initiated after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a top Trump donor, took over in June. And President Trump stoked these concerns when he admitted in August that he was blocking new funding for the Postal Service in part to sabotage universal mail-in voting.
So how worried should people be? If you vote by mail this election, will your vote get counted?
Cash told Recode that despite the hurdles and delays these changes have caused, she has little doubt that she and her colleagues around the country are ready for the expected mail-in voting rush ahead of the presidential election.
“Where we stand right now, I feel confident that we can handle the amount of ballots,” Cash, a postal worker and local union leader with the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), told Recode in early September. “We can definitely handle the volume even with the machines that have been removed.”
Yet Cash’s confidence comes with one big caveat: She fears that DeJoy, who paused the controversial initiatives last month in the wake of congressional pressure and a media firestorm, may still institute more disruptive changes between now and November 3. If that happens, she believes all bets are off.
About a half-dozen other rank-and-file postal employees in New York, Florida, Montana, and New England echoed Cash’s perspective in conversations that took place after DeJoy committed to pause the disruptive measures in August: They are adamant that they and their colleagues are prepared to handle the barrage of ballots — so long as DeJoy stays out of the way.
“My biggest concerns are people not mailing ballots in early enough. If there are delays in some areas, and if DeJoy makes any more significant changes out in the field, that would definitely disrupt the [mail-in voting] operation,” Cash said. “My advice to people is to make sure you know what your due date is and get that ballot in the mail two weeks early. I want people to still be proactive and mail their ballots in early — because just because [DeJoy] is quiet right now, doesn’t mean that at the last minute he won’t make any drastic changes.”
But the biggest challenge mail-in voting faces is one of trust, perhaps more than anything else. Even if DeJoy keeps his word on pausing the cost-saving changes until after the election and the USPS handles tens of millions of ballots without a major disruption, will the general public trust the results? Sowing that doubt appears to be a goal for Trump, who has for months been pushing baseless, misleading claims about how susceptible mail-in ballots are to fraud. And it seems to have worked: Conspiracy theories about the process abound. As a result, for government officials in states where voters will rely heavily on voting by mail, educating the public about how and when to vote by mail is more crucial than ever.
With the Covid-19 pandemic making in-person voting a potentially risky activity, as many as 80 million people could end up voting via mail-in or drop-off ballots ahead of the election, according to a New York Times analysis. Such a surge in mail-in voting would mark more than a 100 percent increase from mail ballot totals in 2016. That kind of spike would apply massive pressure to the USPS and its 500,000 employees even in normal times.
And these times are anything but normal at the United States Postal Service. DeJoy, a top Republican donor and former logistics company CEO, took over as the USPS chief in June and has since overseen a series of cost-cutting measures that worried postal employees, union leaders, and some politicians, who feared that the accompanying deterioration in mail and package delivery times would cause a mail-in voting fiasco. The delays have also disrupted the lives of Americans who rely on timely Postal Service deliveries for prescription drugs, Social Security checks, and other important goods.
Still, America’s postal workers are committed to getting the job done.
“I think and hope [DeJoy] is hiding and going to let us do our thing and get all election mail delivered like before,” a veteran postmaster in New England, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, told Recode. “We get daily emails [from management] to make sure all election mail, incoming or outgoing, is clear every day.”
Joanne Borell, a 25-year veteran of the USPS who is a postal clerk in Billings, Montana, says she has no reason to believe the Postal Service won’t handle mail-in voting on time, even with increased demand. More than half of all voters in Montana voted by mail in 2016, and Borell said she has never witnessed or heard of significant issues with handling ballots.
“We deal with passports, live animals, and other things people really care about,” Borell said in an interview. “We are always watching for things that we have to take special care of.”
What does concern Borell is how some mail delays and misleading claims about vote-by-mail fraud has caused many Americans to lose confidence in the Postal Service. Recently, a family member of Borell told her they were worried postal employees with a political bias would discard or tamper with ballots to try to give their chosen candidate and party a boost. Such conspiracies are not surprising at a time in which Trump has routinely publicly attacked mail-in voting.
But Borell was offended by the suggestion.
“Never in my entire career have I seen anybody do something like that,” she said of tossing ballots in the trash.
Another postal clerk, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to reporters, said a deluge of Amazon packages is what is currently overwhelming the post offices where the employee works. But the USPS has actually seen a decline of customers sending first-class mail like bills and letters during the pandemic, which presumably would allow the Postal Service to more easily process a surge of mail-in ballots, which are also typically treated as first-class.
“From what I can see, we are perfectly capable of handling [a surge of mail-in ballots],” the worker said. “But we’re getting destroyed with packages. It’s like Christmas never ended.”
Nate Castro, a mail processor in Tampa, Florida, and a local APWU leader, said election ballots, which get labeled with a red tag to denote their importance, will get processed quickly and accurately — barring unforeseen changes by DeJoy or other top management to existing USPS processes.
“You want to vote in-person? So be it; that’s your voting right,” Castro told Recode. “But it should also be the right for every person to vote by mail.”
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.


vox--2020-09-24--The first big test of Facebook’s oversight board will be the US election

Facebook ’ s much-anticipated independent oversight board — a group that will be able to overrule Facebook ’ s leaders , even CEO Mark Zuckerberg , about whether controversial posts should stay up or be removed — announced its plans to start making decisions on contested content by mid to late October .
That means the board may be called on to make decisions about important Facebook posts related to the US presidential election .
In recent months , some have criticized the long-awaited board for not moving quickly enough to deal with issues around misinformation , hate speech , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doubted whether it would be functional before the November election .
But as long as internal testing of its technical systems goes well , the board says it will start accepting contested content cases around mid to late October .
That means that if President Trump or any other candidate declares a premature victory on Facebook on election night , the board could potentially take on that case and decide whether that post should stay up or come down .
While the board is still determining the specific criteria for how it will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on “ difficult , significant and globally relevant ” cases “ that can inform future policy , ” according to its website .
“ The go-live date is not connected to any specific case that the board is seeking or not seeking to take , ” Facebook oversight board ’ s director of administration Thomas Hughes told Recode .
“ That said , the type of case you just described [ in which a politician declares a premature election victory ] , would be in scope , and could be referred to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time , referred to by a user.
” Here ’ s how the board will work once it goes live : It will take cases both from users and Facebook itself .
Facebook the company can refer any kind of contentious post to the board it wants an outside opinion on , and the board will have 90 days ( or 30 days if the case is expedited ) to rule on the decision .
For Facebook users , they can only go to the board if something they personally posted was taken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In later months , the board plans to expand its purview and allow users to request for other people ’ s content to be taken down if they believe it violates Facebook ’ s policies against things like hate speech or harmful misinformation .
At a time when Facebook is being attacked by both Republicans and Democrats for how it ’ s been handling politically contentious speech in the US , the board is meant to add oversight to the company ’ s decision-making .
But it won ’ t solve the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s problems around how to deal with hate speech and misinformation .
For one thing , the board will only take a small number of cases a year , likely “ tens or hundreds ” according to Hughes , out of the tens of thousands of annual cases that are expected to come its way .
And it won ’ t be all about the US , either .
Facebook ’ s oversight board is made up of 20 lawyers , academics , journalists , and policy experts from all over the world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ different languages and have lived in 29 different countries .
“ Obviously , the US election has an enormous impact on the world , ” said Hughes , “ But there will be a quite a broad range of things that the board I think would be very keen to get stuck into early on.
” Facebook first floated the idea of an independent oversight board back in 2018 , as it was facing scrutiny for its handling of Russian interference on the platform during the 2016 US election .
Almost two years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its governing rules , and in May announced its members .
Ruling on specific controversial posts is one thing , but actually getting Facebook to rethink its policies is another challenge .
Some social media researchers have questioned the power of the board to dictate Facebook ’ s policy , and how much the company will listen to its recommendations .
Now , the election could turn out to be the first big test of how impactful this oversight board will truly be in practice .
In fact , whether or not the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election content is a test in and of itself .
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Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
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Facebook’s much-anticipated independent oversight board — a group that will be able to overrule Facebook’s leaders, even CEO Mark Zuckerberg, about whether controversial posts should stay up or be removed — announced its plans to start making decisions on contested content by mid to late October. That means the board may be called on to make decisions about important Facebook posts related to the US presidential election.
In recent months, some have criticized the long-awaited board for not moving quickly enough to deal with issues around misinformation, hate speech, and extremism on the platform, and doubted whether it would be functional before the November election.
But as long as internal testing of its technical systems goes well, the board says it will start accepting contested content cases around mid to late October. That means that if President Trump or any other candidate declares a premature victory on Facebook on election night, the board could potentially take on that case and decide whether that post should stay up or come down. While the board is still determining the specific criteria for how it will prioritize cases, it generally will take on “difficult, significant and globally relevant” cases “that can inform future policy,” according to its website.
“The go-live date is not connected to any specific case that the board is seeking or not seeking to take,” Facebook oversight board’s director of administration Thomas Hughes told Recode. “That said, the type of case you just described [in which a politician declares a premature election victory], would be in scope, and could be referred to the board by Facebook, or potentially in time, referred by a user.”
Here’s how the board will work once it goes live: It will take on cases from users and from Facebook itself. Facebook the company can refer to the board any kind of contentious post it wants an outside opinion on, and the board will have 90 days (or 30 days if the case is expedited) to rule on the decision. For Facebook users, they can only go to the board if something they personally posted was taken down and they want to dispute it. In later months, the board plans to expand its purview and allow users to request for other people’s content to be taken down if they believe it violates Facebook’s policies against things like hate speech or harmful misinformation.
At a time when Facebook is being attacked by both Republicans and Democrats for how it’s been handling politically contentious speech in the US, the board is meant to add oversight to the company’s decision-making. But it won’t solve the lion’s share of Facebook’s problems around how to deal with hate speech and misinformation. For one thing, the board will only take a small number of cases a year, likely “tens or hundreds” according to Hughes, out of the tens of thousands of annual cases that are expected to come its way.
And it won’t be all about the US, either.
Facebook’s oversight board is made up of 20 lawyers, academics, journalists, and policy experts from all over the world — collectively, its members speak 27 different languages and have lived in 29 different countries.
“Obviously, the US election has an enormous impact on the world,” said Hughes, “But there will be quite a broad range of things that the board I think would be very keen to get stuck into early on.”
Facebook first floated the idea of an independent oversight board back in 2018, as it was facing scrutiny for its handling of Russian interference on the platform during the 2016 US election. Almost two years later, the board in January announced its governing rules, and in May announced its members.
Ruling on specific controversial posts is one thing, but actually getting Facebook to rethink its policies is another challenge. Some social media researchers have questioned the power of the board to dictate Facebook’s policy, and how much the company will listen to its recommendations.
Now, the election could turn out to be the first big test of how impactful this oversight board will truly be in practice. In fact, whether or not the board accepts a case related to controversial election content is a test in and of itself.