Still running
Plan B for democracy has been activated.
First of all, hello from Jakarta. This is my third extended stay to the second most populous metro on Earth, and as before I am graciously hosted by my in-laws. This trip was planned well before the election, and it’s about time as well for personal reasons I hope can come to light down the road.
How is an election?
As you may already know, the polls handed me a loss in the primary this past month. I have several videos in the pipeline discussing how and why this is, but instead of spoiling it for you I’m going to take it from the top and explain this election to you by illuminating the following:
How electoral candidates are supposed to be evaluated by the public
How the electoral candidates were, in fact, evaluated
How this difference between ethics and reality will be mended moving forward
Three categories of judgement
At the most basic level, an election held for a political office is a contest to win the moral judgement of the public. Moreover, the specific morals in question for that win are already well-known in advance: chiefly, a candidate’s reputation is what is morally in question. Reputation is then further decomposed pragmatically into components of the existing track record (ergo, look what I have already done), the incidence and circumstance of both goodwill and/or scandals, and lastly the personal character of the candidate to the extent that may illuminate their moral qualifications. It is also key to know that this is an ordered list in descending importance: track record is most important, personal character is least important, and goodwill/scandals float between as a sort of X factor.
Track record
In the Democratic primary for District 13, all three candidates earn a zero in the first category of existing track record for the simple reason that they have none. None of them have ever held popularly-elected public office before, period. So on this matter, the race was a wash.
Now, I understand that it is very common for hucksters to twist the meaning of ‘track record’ to be expanded beyond the applicability of their claims (e.g. being a farmhand makes Candidate X the better choice for leading Agriculture policy). Of the three candidates, Paul alone deployed this manipulation tactic, and in a particularly nasty way: by citing his 25 years of legal experience as a private attorney in the Beltway as a cause for credibility in being a Congressman, he not only conflated the charge of being a bona fide Representative with merely being near the House, but additionally trampled on the deep ethical separations that exist between attorneys and the outside world they represent. As an ethical matter, attorneys have to be neutral and unopinionated in their own rights in order to credibly do their jobs on behalf of their clients – they themselves cannot have a horse in the race. This neutrality of attorneys is foundational to their work and is completely orthogonal to the ethics of representation by election, where the foundation of a representative’s ethical credibility is the legitimacy and trust built in their relationship with their constituents. By taking his own side in the course of self-advocacy as an attorney running for office, Paul is throwing the entire ethics of legal representation in the garbage and denigrating the ethics of democratic representation at the same time. I can scarcely think of a more morally disgusting thing to say regarding one’s track record in seeking public office.
Infamy
Moving on to the second pillar—goodwill and/or scandals—both Paul and I get a zero for this as well. It’s worth remembering as well as those numbers may change in the future that they are only quantifiable in magnitude, not direction, meaning it is more honest to call this a sort of ‘infamy measurement’. Frank alone demonstrated sustained infamy in what appears to be a mostly positive direction, and this is resultant from his relentless canvassing efforts in both the previous election and this one. I think it is reasonable to credit this for the bulk of Frank’s showing in the polls, all things considered.
Before we move on to character, recall what I said before about relative importance and set it against the facts already laid out with Paul and I holding zero–zero. By this reasoning, Frank should have handily won the election and the following discussion about us two would be purely academic. But since that is not only not what happened but quite far from it even, we have to—at the very least—admit that this last avenue of evaluation actually took paramount importance for the voters in deciding this election, since even combining Frank’s votes with mine still nets a loss in the hypothetical contest between Paul and the Frank–Alexander Amalgamate.
Character
Voters examined “the personal character of the candidate to the extent that may illuminate their moral qualifications.” Let us enumerate them then, starting with Paul:
Registered in the opposing political party for 25 years out-of-state and moved here specifically to run for office
Independently wealthy farmer who owns a textile company but chose instead to have a law career in Washington
Family heritage traces back to emigration from Germany in the early 1850s to Lee County before the Civil War
Married to an elite Jewish woman of unknown association, as documented in the New York Times
And for I:
Registered unaffiliated since age 18 in 2016, claimed to have voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary and swore off politics since then until deciding to run, his family having been generational Democrats
Itinerant tech industry worker with an ax to grind against the criminal syndicates in that industry
Family heritage immediately goes back to West Virginia and stays there all the way back to the 1700s
Gay married to an Indonesian green card holder
Right away the first items of each profile make the rest into afterthoughts: Paul was a registered Republican for a quarter of a century in Chevy Chase, MD, coterminous with his entire career as an attorney. Paul was evidently successful in this endeavour; an analogue in the tech industry would be someone who worked on anything trendy in the 1990s, did a tour as a baron of the various FAANG companies in the late 2000s and 2010s, and finally aped into crypto for an afternoon before championing some ill-fated AI startup. His party association, his vaguely unspecified ‘work on Obamacare’ that he describes as a glorified government IT help desk operation and otherwise never elaborates on, and his sudden entry into politics squarely marks him as an established architect against the public interest. Everything that has been personally working for him is congruent with the things that have been making life materially worse for Americans. It’s no wonder then that Frank’s campaign often took on a character of spite: he often appeared to be less running for himself and more running to sound the alarm about Paul. Not that it stopped him.
Well, my story is pretty much the exact opposite: my research never focussed on any of the latent obsessions with cryptocurrency or machine learning, I never made any serious money despite the industry being so explosively cash-laden that it has been subbing in for the nonexistent world economy in the last few years, and I stuck to my ethics about the decisions I made that led me down that path.
The reasonable outcome
So it should all be very straightforward, then: people think for five seconds about Paul, think for five more seconds about Alexander, and pick the person who is less full of shit: the kid who’s trying to stick it to the primary forces behind Trump’s second term. They tell the Republican to kick rocks, then Frank wins the election because he’s the only one to put hard work in ahead of time, and I’m not writing this for you to read right now. So why are we sitting here staring at a 60% win for the obvious plant—the literal Republican swamp monster waltzing into a Democratic primary? What were the voters thinking?
The reality: a tale of two groups
There are two answers for this electoral outcome depending on which voters you are examining. For the purpose of explaining I will simply call these groups of voters the ‘inner group’ and the ‘outer group’, and they are distinguished as follows.
Inner group
The inner group are people who tend to regard themselves as ‘insiders’ into the Democratic process. They tend to be older, whiter, wealthier, and treat politics as their personal hobby. They are disproportionately active on Facebook and serve as ‘hubs’ to the ‘spokes’ of organised Democratic outreach. And finally, they are completely unrepresentative of the public they spend their time reaching out to; this fact will prove key later.
Outer group
The outer group, on the other hand, are people who are civically involved for earnest—if often selfish—reasons. When you get out into the proper sticks of District 13, these people start comprising a supermajority of Democratic participants. They tend to be of a more widespread age distribution and are comprised of higher levels of minorities and working class people – all qualities that empirically overlap with constricted electoral participation. Finally, they are far more representative of the public they reach out to, for the simple reason that their formation is far more spontaneous and organic, mostly retreading existing social structures outside of politics.
The democratic chasm
The problem at hand is that neither of these groups are very numerous, and that reduction only gets compensated for in the case of the inner group, who have more time, more money and more meaningful connections that can all be pulled together to enhance their influence. The outer group, by and large, simply cannot afford to do this, ever. They are far more dependent on the highly constrained opportunities of candidate fora and meet-and-greets for which County parties have no ethical rubric of any consistency, making them very cheap to overrun with quid-pro-quos like what we saw between the Barringer campaign and the Granville County Democrats: a $750 donation and a few days later they jointly announce a meet-and-greet that no other candidate had all the while the Party never hosted a single candidate forum of any kind. This is one instance of a pattern of corruption that the inner group of voters stands squarely in the middle of, explaining Paul’s overwhelming win.
A familiar Orwellian story
The best explanation for the absurd outcome of this election is that Paul successfully convinced the pigs on the Animal Farm that were actually more equal than the others to back his campaign. He did this partly as I warned of before in Harnett County: weaponising Democratic financial anxiety by waving his $600,000 of campaign funds around—two thirds of which was his own money, mind you—in the hopes that people will lie to themselves that they need his money to beat Brad Knott. Never mind that Knott will always outraise any Democratic challenger by virtue of how easily defensible his position is, implying that beating him requires breaking the metagame.
Picking a ‘winner’
But Paul also activated a uniquely American delusion that is most prevalent among yuppies and the various kinds of old people chiefly responsible for today’s social decay: he convinced them that their vote in this primary is a matter of ‘picking a winner’. Despite the phrase’s appearances, his is not the straightforward notion of voting for whomever has the best odds to win in the general election; rather, this is the idea of ‘choosing’ the person that most strongly exudes the aesthetics of someone who already won, because it’s fashionable, low-risk, and enhances one’s social status after the likely outcome comes to pass. Exploiting the same psychological vulnerabilities as the tech mob does with cryptocurrency and the following FOMOs surrounding AI, Paul goaded them again into discarding the fundamental diseases afflicting his pitch to the voters in favour of a more contrived idea that he should win because he should win. This obviously circular logic is even more insane than the first rationale about fundraising, but it’s par for the course when dealing with millionaires who took for granted everyone who helped them when they were young and are ditching everyone else on the side of the road today. Cue the TED talk from morons like Mark Cuban and Patrick O’Leary who think spending money is a skill – same disease, different khakis. Some people are too rich and happy to understand the world is not an extended universe for the idiot box.
The reason that this clinches the election is painfully simple: this inner group controls all of the levers for accessing an obtuse and downright medieval voter outreach system. Even the Wake County Democratic Party is still sending out these ‘voter guides’ to people, really just to sanctify their ritual petitioning of candidates for answers to an arcane set of elementary questions under the false pretense that there is no way for them to know about candidates otherwise. It’s not the 1970s anymore; I made a point to disregard this circus just to show you that the only outcome from it was having my name kicked off of their fake ballot. And what other purpose does this ‘voter guide’ serve? Its sole demonstrated purpose is to disinform the voters by selectively removing names according to outmoded and arbitrary rules. Doesn’t the party owe it to the people to tell them everything they can reasonably figure out and copy regarding all of the Democratic candidates they have the choice of voting for? I mean shucks, isn’t that their whole reason for being? Well, what do we call it when an organisation betrays their own core ethics? Corruption.
(An aside: There is an impulse among those who are predisposed to Paul or otherwise feel too ‘seen’ by this analysis to dismiss this writing without even reading it as being a product of some kind of ‘sour grapes’. Not only is this dishonest and immature, its strongest possible pretense—the notion that at the end of the day Paul is popular, so what you think went wrong isn’t true—is false. Don’t run with the percentages: at the end of the day, Paul obtained less than 30,000 votes. I obtained less than 6,000. It’s more honest to say that none of us are popular, and therefore it remains to be seen whether either of us will ever demonstrate a genuine resonance with the voting public.)
What is to be done
So, for all of these reasons, the inner group picked their ‘winner’, and the resultant outcome is the result of two forces colliding: the negative force of the wider public fatigue and (understandable) contempt for conventional electoral processes, and the positive force of monopolising an archaic and corrupted information highway and deputising it for a specific candidate ahead of the primary. This leads me to what I’m going to be doing to move forward once I return to the United States: bridging that information gap. This will come in two forms:
constructive outreach addressing the negative force of apathy and disengagement, and
destructive outreach addressing the positive force of petty corruption in the Democratic apparatus
American politics has a perennial credibility problem that several successive movements under names like Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang have, so far, failed to mend. Crotchety goblins like Paul are no different from dinosaurs like Joe Crowley or Jeb Bush – nobody likes them, they have no redeeming ethics to compensate for their repulsiveness, and their political careers depend on the wider public being too disgusted with the mere sight of them to bother kicking them out of the fray.
Paul has tried in vain to preempt the reality of why people like him are not welcome in Congress – chiefly the problem of affordability – by hijacking it as a narrative talking point, but at the end of the day, he has less than zero credibility to be claiming to help anyone besides the culprits of it. People know this already but they need a reason to believe that there is a realistic and effective opening to get rid of his ilk. Giving them that reason is now my job.
I’ll leave you with one more thing regarding my personal place in all of this. I’ve learned a very valuable lesson from this election: positivity does not sell in the current American political economy. The places where I talked up Asian food regulations and made callbacks to the Progressive Era were the places where I did the worst electorally. In contrast, the places where I did the best were either defined by podium-mediated negativity towards the candidate plant, or were based on direct voter contact where people picked me simply for my earnestness and Democratic credentials. I know what it’s going to take to win these follow-up contests, and it’s something that I’m actually far more talented at than being all naïve and positive. I didn’t spend my twenties fighting the mob for my livelihood just to be sitting on my hands when the same problem crops up in the Democratic weeds. Hold on to your hats, because this is about to get nasty.