Black Swan: Part 4

November 2020 presented America with an election result nobody accepts.

If Biden did earn more votes than any candidate in history nobody believes it. If Biden didn’t earn more votes than any candidate in history, it was the biggest election cheat in history.

One of those things happened. Either one is unexpected… at least at the scale that happened. When an unusual thing happens, handling it with normal ways of thinking won’t work.

A black swan event sets the stage for another black swan event.

Here’s what we’re supposed (ordered?) to accept; nothing interesting happened. We’re ordered to pretend the election was normal and boring. America is trying. She’s going through the motions of normal governance. Biden is wandering around the White House. Trump is in exile bitching about Twitter. For better or worse, the “results” were applied; even if “applied” included chain link fences, military troops, and a third attempt at post-election impeachment.

It’s a done deal… suck it up buttercup.

That would be the normal way one party can cheat over another. Like a mayoral election in Chicago or whatnot… people are used to that. At the national scale and with record breaking vote counts it’s not working. America is deeply uneasy. The unusual situation isn’t resolving because “suck it up buttercup” wasn’t built for this scale.

Folks who honestly disagree with me may cynically think “suck it up buttercup” will indeed get traction and hold. As Hillary Clinton famously said “What difference at this point does it make?”

Thanks Hillary, I’m glad you asked that question!

The reason it matters is because the resolution to an unexpected thing is often another unexpected thing.

Lets take a break from Orange Man Bad and Potato In Chief to enjoy some old timey history. A lot less frazzled nerves when I talk about remote events.

There have been several sketchy elections in America. I’ll mention three and in my next post mention their unusual resolutions.

Exhibit 1: Sketchy math in Chicago: In 1960 Democrat John F. Kennedy defeated Republican incumbent Vice President Nixon. It was the closest election in the twentieth century. It was shockingly amazingly unnervingly close. It got ugly, as these things do. As happens in so many sketchy elections (like 2020) it hinged on that paragon of clean transparent fair elections; Chicago. Kennedy was sworn in as y’all know. What you might not know is that historians still aren’t sure it was an honest election. One quote that captured my fancy: “Those problems have also fueled continuing scholarly interest in the 1960 presidential election because of the difficulty in determining whether Kennedy really won through honest means or corrupt ones.” Historians are awesome! They use the cutest phrases: “difficulty in determining whether though honest means or corrupt ones“. I love it! Whether hinky shit went down in 1960 or only appears to have gone down it was a messy time and they employed the “suck it up buttercup” resolution. Later I’ll show how the ensuing situation got weird and resolved in an unexpected way.

Exhibit 2: War: In 1860, Abraham Lincoln, Republican opponent of slavery, won a bitterly disputed election. War erupted within months. Pressure had been building for a century so conflict wasn’t unexpected. What was unexpected was the brutality of the war. It got out of hand. Many Americans on both sides didn’t expect things to get so bloody. I wasn’t there, but I get the idea that people of the time deeply regretted not finding some other way to resolve their differences. This election too, played out in unexpected ways.

Exhibit 3: Congress has the balls to fix it: In 1876 Democratic Samuel Tilden theoretically won over his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes. The election stunk to high heaven. It was almost comically crooked and things could have gotten nasty. However, the country had recently gone to war with itself; nobody wanted another pile of dead bodies! In what sounds like a different universe, Congress rationally and pragmatically addressed the situation. They established a commission of Senators, Congressmen and Supreme Court justices to sort it out. Which it did. Was this approach written in the constitution? Nope. It was Congress growing a pair and doing its job. It worked! They resolved the situation to the people’s satisfaction. Congress, apparently stocked with adults in 1876, concocted an unusual resolution that kept an unusual problem from going nuclear. Good for them! I think it was the timing. People who’d been through a horrific war were not willing to burn everything down a second time.

I’ll wrap this up in the next post.