Douglas Charles, associate professor of history at Penn State Greater Allegheny, was quoted recently in a MSN/Vox.com article about the FBI and presidential elections. Here’s an excerpt:
“’His actions were unprecedented, unethical, shocking, and have apparently led to chaos within the bureau, an unprecedented number of leaks, and chaos in our election cycle,’ said Douglas Charles, a history professor at Penn State.
“Charles, the author of a book about J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, said Comey has a long history with the Clintons that may have left him with a ‘personal grudge or underlying or subsumed political motive’ to try to derail Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
“He noted that Comey had helped probe the 1990s-era Whitewater real estate scandal, which focused heavily on Hillary Clinton’s financial dealings and willingness to fully cooperate with investigators, and oversaw the Marc Rich prosecution in the late 1980s. (Comey said he was ‘stunned’ by Bill Clinton’s decision to pardon the financier.)”
Exceptions prove the rule. Extremes reveal what is indispensable.
The phenomenon “Trump” is both an exception and an extreme: His brand of politics proves and reveals just how important democratic civility is to a vibrant democracy.
As a philosopher who looks at the the ways in which emotions impact political freedom, I am interested in how humans have established civility and how we sustain and strengthen it in order to bequeath it to future generations of citizens.
Modeling uncivil behavior
From the very beginning of his run for the White House in June 2015, Donald Trump has demeaned and insulted American Muslims, Mexican Americans, journalists, women, U.S. generals, President Obama, the Republican speaker of the house, beauty contestants and many more. In fact, just days before the election, The New York Times compiled a list of the 282 people, places and things Trump has insulted on Twitter.
Trump the candidate has, over the past 15 months, modeled and sanctioned the kind of uncivil discourse and behavior that has not been acceptable since the 19th century, in which candidates would call each other “atheists,” “murderers,” “pimps” and all kind of character assassination epitaphs. In the case of then Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, they went so far as to duel unto death.
Among the slogans coined by Trump’s supporters, one of the least offensive, because of its brevity, but most enlightening, is “Trump that Bitch.” This slogan reveals that his supporters understand something about their candidate: that Trump is a verb of maximal violence.
It is one thing, however, to insult an opponent. It is another to gratuitously demean innocent bystanders. What Trump has excelled at, and what makes him fall outside the mainstream of U.S. political discourse and culture, is his cruelty. As political theorist Judith Shklar famously claimed, in her book “Ordinary Vices,” cruelty is the summun malum, or “supreme evil,” of civil democracies, a moral and political failure that must be avoided at all costs.
That Shklar thought cruelty the worst thing that a democrat can do underlines one of the essential dimensions of democratic civility in which we acknowledge each other’s equality and liberty.
Civility: A history
“Civility” – the word and the concept – has a long and meandering history.
It begins in the 4th century B.C., in Greece, with Aristotle’s use of the expression “koinia politike” to refer to the type of human connection that happens in the polis (city) and the agora (gathering place) that is different from the type of relationship that we find in the private sphere, the space of the family.
Bruni’s translation unleashed a series of linguistic innovations but also ambiguities.
Civil society is linguistically related to city, civil, civilization and another term that is difficult to translated into English, the French word “civilité.” This term is sometimes translated as “having or related to good manners,” or etiquette.
It was the translation into French of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s 1530 book “De civilitate morum puerilium” (On Good Manners for Boys) that popularized the word civilité. In this book, and in similar texts aimed at the general civic education of Christians, Erasmus linked civil and moral virtues.
Good manners are a sign of moral excellence. For Erasmus civilité is not simply a mask, a way of comporting oneself in “polite” society, but a way of relating to oneself. How we treat others reveals how we treat ourselves morally in as much as we treat others as moral equals. To have good manners, then, is a sign of one’s membership in a community of mutual regard and mutual respect.
What sometimes gets lost in the translations, but which is nonetheless buried deep in the semantic layers of the word civitas, is that this virtue of mutual regard is directed at strangers.
In the polis, or city, strangers gather as equals. Civility, in other words, is an ethics of respect for strangers. It therefore follows that how you treat strangers is the measure of your moral excellence.
The process of civilizing
In his seminal book, “The Civilizing Process,” sociologist Norbert Elias argues that there is a genealogy that links the evolution of “manners” with the development of “state formation” or the rule of law. Governing, or what we call “administration,” presupposes a modus vivendi that is enacted through rules of political etiquette.
Where did these manners come from? They are the descendants of Christian virtues such as charity and gratitude. They are adaptations of the customs or courtesies practiced at royal courts. Courtesy may have, over time, acquired negative connotations associated with deception and a hollow respectability. But what civility retains from the notion of courtesy is the idea of nobility. Democratic civility can therefore be seen as the nobility of a citizenry that treats itself with moral and political regard.
Elias’ genealogy confirms the association that Erasmus made centuries earlier. Civility is, on the one hand, manners or behavior in public, and, on the other, an ethical relationship with oneself.
The point to underline here is that both Erasmus and Elias make us aware that democratic civility is not a natural state but demands work: It is one of the accomplishments of civilization.
Democratic hope
Political philosopher Richard Boyd has referred to civility as a restraint on political discourse. I would argue that this restraint is also a form of democratic care and solicitude. With both restraint and solicitude, civility enables democratic hope and human solidarity.
The arc of the moral universe that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of so many times is bent toward justice by the discourse of equals who revel in their difference.
Trumpism may have vulgarized and debased our electoral politics, but he has also unwittingly illuminated brilliantly one of our proudest and greatest accomplishments: a civil democracy that elevates and does not denigrate, that inspires hope and not cynicism and that models moral and political excellence.
November 3, 2016 / Comments Off on A ‘rigged’ vote? Four US presidential elections with contested results / Posted in: 2016 Presidential Election, U.S. Politics
The Florida butterfly ballot confused a number of voters, who ended up voting for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan thinking they had voted for Democratic candidate Al Gore. Wikimedia Commons
In recent weeks, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that this year’s election is rigged and has predicted rampant voter fraud.
While it’s unprecedented to call an election “rigged” before voting has even taken place, there is a history of candidates and the media crying foul after suspicious results.
Robert Speel
The most recent presidential election that had rumblings of rigging was 2004. Two years later, Robert Kennedy Jr. published an article in Rolling Stone claiming that Ohio election officials had made decisions that stole the election from Democratic candidate John Kerry. (If Kerry had won Ohio’s electoral votes, he would have defeated Republican president George W. Bush that year.) But while some Democrats parroted Kennedy’s allegations, Bush’s margin of victory in Ohio – over 100,000 votes – led many to dismiss them.
However, the most plausible claims of a rigged presidential election were made in 1876, 1888, 1960 and 2000. In each case, the losing candidate and party dealt with the disputed results differently.
If there’s a close or contested vote this year, perhaps the candidates could take a cue from the past.
1876: A compromise that came at a price
By 1876 – 11 years after the end of the Civil War – all the Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and Reconstruction was in full swing. The Republicans were strongest in the pro-Union areas of the North and African-American regions of the South, while Democratic support coalesced around southern whites and northern areas that had been less supportive of the Civil War. That year, Republicans nominated Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, and Democrats chose New York Governor Samuel Tilden.
But on Election Day, there was widespread voter intimidation against African-American Republican voters throughout the South. Three of those Southern states – Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina – had Republican-dominated election boards. In those three states, some initial results seemed to indicate Tilden victories. But due to widespread allegations of intimidation and fraud, the election boards invalidated enough votes to give the states – and their electoral votes – to Hayes. With the electoral votes from all three states, Hayes would win a 185-184 majority in the Electoral College.
A certificate of Louisiana’s electoral vote for Rutherford B. Hayes. Wikimedia Commons
Competing sets of election returns and electoral votes were sent to Congress to be counted in January 1877, so Congress voted to create a bipartisan commission of 15 members of Congress and Supreme Court justices to determine how to allocate the electors from the three disputed states. Seven commissioners were to be Republican, seven were to be Democrats, and there would be one independent, Justice David Davis of Illinois.
But in a political scheme that backfired, Davis was chosen by Democrats in the Illinois state legislature to serve in the U.S. Senate (senators weren’t chosen by voters until 1913). They’d hoped to win his support on the electoral commission. Instead, Davis resigned from the commission and was replaced by Republican Justice Joseph Bradley, who proceeded to join an 8-7 Republican majority that awarded all the disputed electoral votes to Hayes.
Democrats decided not to argue with that final result due to the “Compromise of 1877,” in which Republicans, in return for getting Hayes in the White House, agreed to an end to Reconstruction and military occupation of the South.
Hayes had an ineffective, one-term presidency, while the compromise ended up destroying any semblance of African-American political clout in the South. For the next century, southern legislatures, free from northern supervision, would implement laws discriminating against blacks and restricting their ability to vote.
1888: Bribing blocks of five
In 1888, Democratic President Grover Cleveland of New York ran for reelection against former Indiana U.S. Senator Benjamin Harrison.
Back then, election ballots in most states were printed, distributed by political parties and cast publicly. Certain voters, known as “floaters,” were known to sell their votes to willing buyers.
Harrison had appointed an Indiana lawyer, William Wade Dudley, as treasurer of the Republican National Committee. Shortly before the election, Dudley sent a letter to Republican local leaders in Indiana with promised funds and instructions for how to divide receptive voters into “blocks of five” to receive bribes in exchange for voting the Republican ticket. The instructions outlined how each Republican activist would be responsible for five of these “floaters.”
Democrats got a copy of the letter and publicized it widely in the days leading up to the election. Harrison ended up winning Indiana by only about 2,000 votes but still would have won in the Electoral College without the state.
Cleveland actually won the national popular vote by almost 100,000 votes. But he lost his home state, New York, by about 1 percent of the vote, putting Harrison over the top in the Electoral College. Cleveland’s loss in New York may have also been related to vote-buying schemes.
Cleveland did not contest the Electoral College outcome and won a rematch against Harrison four years later, becoming the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms of office. Meanwhile, the blocks-of-five scandal led to the nationwide adoption of secret ballots for voting.
1960: Did the Daley machine deliver?
The 1960 election pitted Republican Vice President Richard Nixon against Democratic U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy.
The popular vote was the closest of the 20th century, with Kennedy defeating Nixon by only about 100,000 votes – a less than 0.2 percent difference.
Because of that national spread – and because Kennedy officially defeated Nixon by less than 1 percent in five states (Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico) and less than 2 percent in Texas – many Republicans cried foul. They fixated on two places in particular – southern Texas and Chicago, where a political machine led by Mayor Richard Daley allegedly churned out just enough votes to give Kennedy the state of Illinois. If Nixon had won Texas and Illinois, he would have had an Electoral College majority.
While Republican-leaning newspapers proceeded to investigate and conclude that voter fraud had occurred in both states, Nixon did not contest the results. Following the example of Cleveland in 1892, Nixon ran for president again in 1968 and won.
2000: The hanging chads
In 2000, many states were still using the punch card ballot, a voting system created in the 1960s. Even though these ballots had a long history of machine malfunctions and missed votes, no one seemed to know or care – until all Americans suddenly realized that the outdated technology had created a problem in Florida.
Then, on Election Day, the national media discovered that a “butterfly ballot,” a punch card ballot with a design that violated Florida state law, had confused thousands of voters in Palm Beach County.
Many who had thought they were voting for Gore unknowingly voted for another candidate or voted for two candidates. (For example, Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan received about 3,000 votes from voters who had probably intended to vote for Gore.) Gore ended up losing the state to Bush by 537 votes – and, in losing Florida, lost the election.
But ultimately, the month-long process to determine the winner of the presidential election came down to an issue of “hanging chads.”
Over 60,000 ballots in Florida, most of them on punch cards, had registered no vote for president on the punch card readers. But on many of the punch cards, the little pieces of paper that get punched out when someone votes – known as chads – were still hanging by one, two or three corners and had gone uncounted. Gore went to court to have those ballots counted by hand to try to determine voter intent, as allowed by state law. Bush fought Gore’s request in court. While Gore won in the Florida State Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled at 10 p.m. on Dec. 12 that Congress had set a deadline of that date for states to choose electors, so there was no more time to count votes.
The national drama and trauma that followed Election Day in 2000 (and in 1876) probably won’t be repeated this year. Of course, a lot will depend on the margins and how the candidates react.
Most eyes will be on Trump, who hasn’t said whether or not he’ll accept the result if he loses.
