Mark Crispin Miller has a
long open letter to Salon that's interesting not so much for its review of the evidence that election fraud changed the 2004 Presidential election outcome, but for his analysis of why Manjoo, Kos and others have reacted so strongly against discussing the issue.
The key quote after the break.
Miller thinks there's two reasons why most Democrats have chosen to accept the result of 2004 as valid and react with disdain toward those who want to further explore the issue. The first is not so interesting: the fear of being labeled a "sore loser." Kerry is the primary example here.
The second is the one often heard at dKos. Here's what Miller has to say:
We also hear that Democrats have been reluctant to speak out about election fraud because they fear that doing so might cut down voter turnout on Election Day. By such logic, we should henceforth utter not a peep about election fraud, so that the Democratic turnout will break records. Then, when the Republicans win yet again, because they've rigged the system, how will all those Democratic voters feel? Maybe those who haven't killed themselves, or fled the country, will recover just enough to vote again. Would it then be prudent for the Democrats to talk about election fraud? Or would it still seem sensible to keep the subject under wraps?
The argument is idiotic, yet the people who have seriously made it -- Bernie Sanders, Markos Moulitsas, Hillary Clinton's and Chuck Schumer's people, among others -- are extremely bright. The argument, as foolish as it is, does not bespeak a low I.Q., but, I would suggest, a subtler kind of incapacity: a refusal and/or inability to face a deeply terrifying truth. The Democrats refuse to talk about election fraud because they cannot, will not, wrap their minds around the implications of what happened in 2004, and what is happening right now, and what will keep on happening until we, as a people, face the issue. In short, whatever clever-sounding rationales they may invoke (no doubt in all sincerity), the Democrats won't talk about election fraud because they're in denial, which is itself based on a lethal combination of inertia, self-interest and, above all -- or below all -- fear.
Fear of what?
Such fear is understandable. For the problem here is not simply mechanical or technological, legal or bureaucratic, requiring that we merely tweak the rules and/or build a better mousetrap. Any such expedient will naturally depend on a consensus of "both sides" -- and there's the rub, because in this great clash the "other side" detests American democracy itself. The movement now in power is not conservative but radical, intent on an apocalyptic program that is fundamentally opposed to the ideals of the Enlightenment, on which, lest we forget, this revolutionary secular republic was first founded.
Miller concludes with a lengthy description of what he sees as the primary threat to American democracy: theocrats. He gives some attention to the "neo-imperialists, corporate profiteers, careerist sociopaths and livid paranoids compelled by the intense self-hatred typical of such perennial types as Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover," but he's most worried about those who want to return to a pre-Enlightenment world.
What has been shown to date about election fraud (as opposed to voter suppression) may not have reached the level that would satisfy a preponderance of the evidence standard of proof, but I too have been puzzled by the intense desire to proscribe discussion of the issue. Does "fear" underlie this response? It would be extremely disheartening to think that all of one's effort was being expended in a rigged game. I'm interested in what the community thinks about Miller's post.