Paul Matzko’s The Radio Right describes a short-lived period in the history of radio. From about 1957 to the end of the 1960s, a set of now-forgotten political/religious AM radio broadcasters attained a listening audience that approached 20 million, at a time when our population was about half of what it is today. I recommend listening to the Matzko interview with Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus.
Some ways in which this rhymes with the present:
1. This grass-roots right was much, much bigger than the intellectual right. National Review had less than 20 thousand subscribers around 1960. Then, as now, conservative intellectuals were leaders without a following.
2. The grass-roots right was strongly attached to conspiracy stories. Back then both Communism and racial integration were part of a conspiracy. Of course, the right has no monopoly on conspiracy-mongering–look at the left’s theory that Trump-Russia collusion defeated Hillary in 2016. I think that the grass-roots right will never let go of the theory that the Democrats stole the election for Biden. I predict that four years from now at least two-thirds of Republican voters will believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. Assuming Mr. Trump is not the nominee in 2024, my prediction is that the actual nominee will be unable to completely distance himself or herself from the stolen-election narrative.
3. The left treats censorship of the right as perfectly legitimate. Matzko’s main story is how President Kennedy undertook to use the IRS and the FCC to shut down the Radio Right, and by the end of the 1960s this effort had succeeded. I think it will be harder to stamp out the grass-roots right today, but the effort is surely being made. And of course, when someone is trying to shut you down, this serves to increase your openness to conspiracy theories, as Ross Douthat points out. (Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I had written most of this post before Sunday, when Tyler linked to the Douthat piece.)
Arnold, you say: “Then, as now, conservative intellectuals were leaders without a following.” None claiming to be an intellectual leader has a following, at best he/she has some young intellectual followers (as in Stackelberg’s theory) and some clients (those willing to pay a little for reading his views regularly) but that’s all. Exceptionally some intellectual leaders may become political leaders but the only one I could mention was Mario Vargas Llosa who run for the Presidency of Perú and failed miserably.
I looked quickly at RD’s column. He forgets how many threats the rotten and corrupt democrats made about manipulating the election by mail or by any other means, how much their press and social media canceled Trump’s campaign, and how much their radical leftists extorted black people and other minorities not to vote for Trump. And who may care about RD’s opinion writing in the NYT (has he ever criticized his bosses? why pay attention to TC whose links are 99% to the NYT, WP, and FT?
2. Is there any evidence for your contention that the election was conducted throughout the land in a technically competent manner? Day after day we see new stories about recounts producing different results and new batches of previously uncounted ballots discovered. Even election commissioners recognize that there were problems. Another story out today: https://www.localsyr.com/news/local-news/elections-commissioner-will-propose-law-changes-to-avoid-ballot-count-mistakes-made-by-ny22-counties/
Denying that there are serious problems with how elections are conducted in the USA and opposing legitimate non-partisan reforms seems as much a formula for onspiracy theories as it does a turn away from reality. It shouldn’t be that ideologically impossible to admit that voter registration rolls are a mess and that there were indeed glitches such as chain of custody breakdowns in several states that struggled with the move to mass mailings of ballots. It was frequently pointed out that a couple hundred thousand votes in the right states in the 2016 election would have given us President Hillary. A couple hundred thousand votes in a handful of cities with unusually high turnouts would also have given us a Trump second term. Dismissing as conspiracy demonstrably accurate complaints, such as not allowing poll watchers to do their jobs, is much akin to the mentality of anti-racism.
+1 NY-22 is about 20 votes difference. If you want to have that kind of difference mean anything you need to be very sure the votes are accurately counted.
>—“Is there any evidence for your contention that the election was conducted throughout the land in a technically competent manner?”
Yes there is. Glad you asked. The evidence is that every single one of the DOZENS of legal attempts to prove any significant level of voter fraud have failed. You can never prove the absence of something like fraud. You can only ever point to the utter lack of evidence for it.
In most of the cases in question the results were vouched for by Republican state level officials and the challenges thrown out by Republican judges often in the strongest possible language. Recall that the reason most often cited as to why we should be grateful for Trump is that his Presidency has resulted in Republican domination of the judiciary.
>—“Day after day we see new stories…”
Yes! Always “stories” and then more “stories.” Who can forget the “story” that Trump really won the popular vote back in 2016 only to be robbed of his proper glory by massive voter fraud, none of it proven of course.
Now we are to believe that despite all his supporters having been warned for years to be on their highest alert for more fraud in 2020, none of it is provable. Now we are to believe that Trump actually won in “a landslide” even though that would have taken many millions of fraudulent votes in multiple states without a single one of these conspiracies leaving enough evidence for even an indictment. Now we are to believe that the same Democrats who are incompetent in every way to run government suddenly become hyper competent criminal masterminds when running a massive multiple state voter fraud conspiracy.
It was in the suburbs, not the purportedly hopelessly corrupt cities where Biden actually exceeded expectations. Which just serves as evidence that the conspiracy is even deeper and more diabolical than originally suspected.
There is no limit to the gullibility of some people.
As far as I can tell, none of the following stories has been disproven:
“12 Votes Separated These Two Candidates, Then 55 Ballots Were Found” –
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/nyregion/house-election-tenney-brindisi.html
“12 more uncounted ballots found in ultra-tight House race in New York
Unofficial results show Republican candidate Claudia Tenney with a lead of just 12 votes in the race.”
By Thomas Barrabi | Fox News 12/8/2020
“Georgia recount unearths more than 2,600 uncounted ballots in Floyd County: Report”
-foxnews
“Nearly 400 Uncounted Ballots Found in Milwaukee Recount”
-AP, Updated: 5:15 PM CST Nov 24, 2020
“Puerto Rico finds uncounted ballots in vault week after election”
– DÁNICA COTO | ASSOCIATED PRESS | 5:20 pm EST November 11, 2020
“Recount finds thousands of Georgia votes missing from initial counts”
— Thursday, Nov 19, 2020 at 3:55 PM
By Mark Niesse – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Note: different ballots than the Floyd County story)
And that is just a quick trawl while I am watching Moscow play Stuttgart in a volleyball tournament. If that is your idea of everything is hunky-dory, then fine. Before the election I commented on this blog that the electoral process would be suspect no matter who won and I stand by that. Even Politico for crissakes recognizes there is a problem:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/02/one-big-flaw-in-how-americans-run-elections-433820
As with everything else one has to willfully ignore quite a lot to conclude the USA is anything other than mediocre at best in its electoral process.
This is the relevant claim in Arnold’s blog post:
>—” I think that the grass-roots right will never let go of the theory that the Democrats stole the election for Biden. I predict that four years from now at least two-thirds of Republican voters will believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.”
You claimed, in response, relevant problems “throughout the land” Edgar. It is always the case, even in the best run elections of this size, that recounts will show small variations, almost always inside of a predictably tiny percentage of the vote. This is inevitable when humans run elections. In Georgia after two recounts the vote count was found to be 99.964% accurate.
This is nowhere near enough to change the result even in the state with the closest vote for President in the country. Finding a tiny percentage of uncounted votes in a recount is utterly routine and no one has been even willing to even allege in court, where there are penalties for lying, that there was evidence this small percentage of missed votes was caused by fraud.
Trump is claiming that an election he “won in a landslide” was stolen from him through fraud and yet he hasn’t been able to show a single case of fraud in court. In Wisconsin, the recount he claimed would show fraud added a small number of votes to Biden’s margin…but, of course, subtracted nothing from his followers belief in the fraud conspiracy narrative.
I made no claim one way or the other on the Trump allegations: the President is elected by the Electoral College and we will learn the results of that soon enough when Biden is formally elected President. If it was up to me, the House of Representatives would elect the President.
What I object to is sweeping all the electoral integrity problems under the rug as if they don’t matter. You may have convinced yourself that you know the denominators and numerators of the fractions you assert, yet Harvard’s Electoral Integrity Project, using ratings by political science “experts” ranked the USA 57th in the world on electoral integrity in 2019: see figure 1 at https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com/the-year-in-elections-2017
That may be good enough for you but it is not for me.
I took a l0ok around at your link Edgar. Here is something I found within the first 60 seconds:
>—“These claims are puzzling since no credible evidence supports the administration’s claims of rigged elections or a vast conspiracy involving ‘millions’ of illegal ballots. Study after study investigating these issues has found no systematic evidence supporting the claim of large-scale voter fraud, defined as cases involving voters casting multiple ballots in an election, casting a ballot when disqualified to do so, or voter impersonation.
Thus a comprehensive 2014 study published in The Washington Post found 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast. Another review of voter fraud in the 2016 election found only four documented cases. The Brennan Center report concluded an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.” A thorough examination, by Lorraine Minnite, found that specific cases of deliberate voting fraud were extremely rare.”
As I suspected, your claiming that a study from the notoriously leftist Harvard supported your ideas didn’t begin to pass the smell test.
Yes they think there are problems with our elections. The OPPOSITE problems you think exist. THAT is why they give the U.S. a low rating. They are worried about things like voter suppression and having the loser of the popular vote win the election.
Your preferred “reforms” would LOWER our election integrity in their eyes. It’s one thing to simply disagree with them but invoking them as supporting your position is transparently dishonest.
New York is a peculiarly incompetent state (and city), including in its handling of year’s election (they sent lots of voter the wrong ballots, they designated some ballots as needing review with post-it notes, but then the post-it notes fell off and they forgot why the ballots were sequestered, etc., quite a debacle), but it wouldn’t have made any difference in the presidential election, nor would any of the issues in other states or territories.
I think there are some worthwhile reforms suggested by recent events, as a precautionary matter, like either automatically excluding ballots that were misplaced then rediscovered later, and/or charging election officials who are responsible for misplacing them with felonies, just to remove any incentive to remove ballots from the process then later reintroduce them if one’s favored candidate is losing at the last minute. I doubt it’s often intentional when this happens, but it’s still unsettling even that an election might be decided by whether a janitor finds a few boxes of ballots accidentally left in a closet.
That said, errors by election officials, unless sufficient to decide the election, don’t really vindicate either candidate. You can’t just say, ‘our elections are a mess’ and act as though this somehow vindicates Trump specifically, anymore than someone saying that in 2016 would specifically vindicate Clinton. It’s also a fact of life that there’s a nonzero margin of error, and if an election is close enough, which candidate the final count favors is basically a coin toss; GW Bush won that coin toss in 2000. It may be as likely as not that more people actually voted for Gore, but there’s not really a better alternative to letting the final tally decide the election.
Interestingly, most of the other examples I can come up with of this sort of “soft” or “indirect” censorship are from right-wing authoritarian governments, e.g. Singapore suppressing political dissent with libel lawsuits or the Orban regime in Hungary squeezing anti-regime media economically and legally.
No mention of how many Dems still believe that there was Russian Collusion with Trump’s campaign. Was there a single witness with credible evidence of collusion?
The collusion belief is without basis in fact according to evidence thoroughly looked at by Trump-hating Mueller investigators. Many of whose gov’t phones were illegally (accidently? ha!) reset to factory settings to erase all messages before being turned in.
” I think that the grass-roots right will never let go of the theory that the Democrats stole the election for Biden. “
That’s for sure – because of evidence.
Looking at the sworn affidavits of individuals who were involved, THEY see wrong and often illegal actions by gov’t election officials.
https://youtu.be/zG2RkKBHX0M Some court testimony (wish there was a faster transcript.)
The evidence shows that many US cities did NOT conduct a Free, Fair election, in accordance with US standards, and International standards.
Once a batch of ballots, fraudulent or not, gets mixed in with legal ballots, there is no way to unmix them.
Here’s the security video in GA about how, after telling poll watchers to go home and that vote counting would stop, some 4 counters continued with questionable ballots.
https://youtu.be/pP7VSAEuyzc
The Republican Sec. State Brad Raffensperger is claiming it’s not really irregular, and the poll watchers left on their own, after misunderstanding what was happening.
[I believe Brad will be a target of some Primary and fail to get re-elected at the next opportunity.]
Neither Republicans nor Democrats knew, before counting, that Sports Arena security cameras were on and recording.
*** Having security cameras in all counting locations is a good idea.
If the secret hidden suitcases of ballots had no chains of custody, they are in violation of GA rules. With witnesses and videos like this, there’s plenty of hard evidence of fraud for those who want to believe there was fraud to justify their belief – other places as bad as this, just without an unknown camera recording.
There’s also much more questionable evidence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2f3aw9rk30
There is likely plenty of testimony that is judged as not providing evidence of fraud.
#3 Censorship of Republicans & conservatives & Christians has long been OK on college campus. See treatment of Murray, and other Reps, under Obama. The censorship follows from the demonization, which itself followed from accepted discrimination.
There needs to be some affirmative action to get more Reps as college professors. I’d prefer large anti-discrimination lawsuits against the colleges, which would be won by Reps. I recall some Law School lawsuit from Iowa, where the Rep who was denyed tenure sued, and lost. Such lawsuits should be won. We need to enforce laws fairly, but that’s not being done.
Sort of like how the FBI is so thoroughly investigating: Clinton’s illegal email server; IRS illegal targeting of conservatives; Obama officials illegally unmasking Trump associates; Comey & company illegal FISA applications, Mueller investigators erasing phones … er, NOT. Not investigating. (Durham, show me I’m wrong. Kevin Clinesmith’s illegal and dishonest written memo on Carter Page required almost NO investigation.)
Long ago I remember Rush Limbaugh saying something to the effect of, “To the left, silencing right-wing radio was necessary thus not really ‘censorship’, while merely failing to subsidize left-wing radio was intolerable and thus definitely censorship.”