Pirate's Cove

You can always count on the NY Times to provide a good Hot Take, and Excitable Michelle Goldberg has been on a roll lately. She even has to go back to George Bush 43

The Tyranny of the 63 Million
Impeachment didn’t undermine democracy. It vindicated it.

When George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 but became president anyway, he did so with almost 50.5 million votes. I didn’t know that number until I looked it up, because it would have been unimaginable for that president — even though he could be quite demagogic — to brandish it as proof that he represented some quasi-mystical conception of “the people,” in contrast to the nearly 51 million citizens who voted for his opponent.

Anyone who pays attention to politics, however, knows that Donald Trump got around 63 million votes in 2016. That number has taken on a totemic significance for him and his supporters; any attempts to restrain his power are seen as a sin against the 63 million. During the long impeachment debate in the House on Wednesday, Bill Johnson, a Republican from Ohio, called for a moment of silence to “remember the voices of the 63 million American voters” whose will Democrats would defy, as if seeing Trump held to constitutional standards was a sort of death.

On the surface it seems strange, this constant trumpeting of a vote total that is more than two million less than the total received by Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump didn’t just lose the popular vote — he lost it by a greater margin than any successful presidential candidate in American history. The right’s bombastic repetition of Trump’s 63 million could be just a propaganda trick meant to bully America’s anti-Trump majority into seeing itself as marginal, despite the more than 65 million votes Clinton received. But as I watched impeachment unfold, it seemed like something more than that — an assertion of whom Republicans think this country belongs to.

If you think she’s upset over the way the rules are laid out, you’d be correct, just like so many Democrats. If you understand the reasoning behind the Electoral College, there’s no need to explain it. If you hate it because Hillary lost (and, let’s face it, most were simply voting for the Democrat candidate because that’s who they always vote for or against Trump, just like a goodly chunk against Bush 43, not for John Kerry. Do you think people really liked Hillary?), then there’s not point wasting finger movement explaining the point.

In a sense, he’s right: We face the horror of Trump because the structure of American democracy gives disproportionate power to a declining demographic group passionately convinced of its right to rule. Trump, with his braying entitlement, his boastful ignorance, his sneering contempt for pluralism, is an avatar of a Republican Party desperate to return to the 1980s, or the 1950s, or maybe the 1910s. He can’t betray America if, to those who fetishize the 63 million, he embodies it.

It’s interesting that Michelle positions this as a “right to rule”, rather than as the President and Congress serving the people. It says quite a bit about the Modern Socialist/Progressive/Statist mindset.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the 63 million people who voted for Mr. Trump,” the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, said in his surprisingly moving speech on Wednesday. “Little talk about the 65 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton.” With the House’s impeachment vote, the America outside of Trump’s ruling faction finally mattered.

So, right there, we see that impeachment is about overturning the 2016 election. Case closed. She attempts to downplay it in the next paragraph, but, we know what she, and the rest of the Dems, mean with impeachment theater.

Read: NY Times: The 63 Million Are Tyrannical, And Impeachment Vindicated Democracy Or Something »