The Cult of the Count
If you’ve been online at all today you’ve probably seem something like this, accompanied by an outpouring of mockery and incomprehension by Biden supporting liberals.
Now on the one hand all of this is just incredibly funny, I mean it’s a literal Veep sketch come to life and just LOOK at these shitheads bumbling around like a herd of drunk sheep. And the contradictions there are objectively hilarious. LOOK! They can’t even keep their lines straight! But there’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye. At its core, this entire confrontation and the liberal reaction to it is a demonstration of a clash of competing conceptions of politics that hinges on fundamentally different understandings of bureaucracy, a clash with incredibly dangerous consequences.
Anyone who’s ever been in a political fight inside of an organization knows that political battles often take the form of disputes over the minutiae of procedure. To take a specific example that’s been replicated with small variations all across Latin America, the Conga Project, a gold and copper mine in Peru, saw massive resistance from Indigenous groups, farmers, and environmentalists who rightly feared the contamination and massive ecological damage the mine would bring. The conflict, which lasted almost two decades and saw the Peruvian government suspend habeas corpus and all but impose martial law, eventually became an incredibly arcane legal dispute over the minutia of an environmental impact statement and later Peruvian property law. Now obviously the real political dispute here is about Indigenous sovereignty, the environment, and capitalism (to list but a few aspects of the conflict), but the battle was essentially reduced to a bureaucratic procedure turning on the precise applications of the law. The mechanism of the legal case thus serve to conceal the actual dynamics of the conflict, which in the end was resolved not by the court but by a pullout by the mining company over the financial consequences of the battle they’d incurred at the hand of anti-mine protesters. The legal technocratic apparatus of the courts was in the end just a proxy for the real political conflict, which resolved itself according it its own, extra-legal political dynamics.
These extra-legal political dynamics, however, preset a dangerous problem for liberals. Liberals are, after all, people for whom the highest political principle is following the rules, which makes it difficult for them to conceive of procedural arguments as something other than just procedural arguments. If following procedure is the basis of your politics it’s hard for you to imagine a separate realm of politics that uses disputes over procedure as a proxy for some kind of abstract “real” politics, because for liberals the two are one and the same. Now this version of politics is fairly powerful inside of a bureaucracy, where clear, defined rules are the source of order and violating them draws the wrath of the authorities. But in the real world, where power is constantly shifting and being re-negotiated, where the rules are inherently unstable and often implicit, and there’s no manager to call to back you up when someone steps over the line, such a view is dangerously limiting.
All of this brings us back to the count. For Trump supporters, the count is essentially incidental. They don’t give a shit whether or not the bureaucracy correctly tallies the actual number of votes each candidate got, what they care about is keeping hold of the presidency. The dispute over the count is a purely political matter, there’s no contradiction between demands to stop the count in one state and count every vote in another because the only thing that matters is winning. It doesn’t even really matter whether stopping the vote or continuing to count would actually give them a win. All of the numbers they throw out are bullshit, none of the specifics matter at all. What matters is the count’s ability to mobilize Trump’s base and the legitimacy that appearing to win the election would give him with the military and the police. All of this leaves liberals befuddled. Legitimacy in their eyes rests in whoever actually gets the most votes, or failing that as was the case in 2000, whoever the legal system decides got the most votes. In their perfect bureaucratic world, when the count is over and the final vote totals are in, the person with the most electoral votes becomes the president. If Trump refuses to step down the managers, in this case the military and the intelligence services, will step in and remove him from the premises. And maybe we do live in that world and I’ve been talking out of my ass this whole time, maybe Trump concedes to the news of the real vote totals or after a defeat in the courts. But there’s a real chance that winning the most electoral votes isn’t going to decide the election, that it will be decided by extra-legal political dynamics. Now many of those dynamics are out of our control entirely. But one of those extra-legal political dynamics, dear reader, is you. If the bureaucracy of the American state begins to collapse and winner of this nightmare conflict is decided in the streets, history, for a brief moment, will be in the hands of the masses, to reshape and reorder as it wishes. But the masses are not an abstract concept. The masses is you, your friends, your coworkers, your loved ones, your neighbors, your family. You are the seeds of the new world waiting to be born. And what you do in that moment will decide what that new world will bring.