How Soon We Forget

blueapples on X

The Roman satirist Juvenal once maligned that bread and circuses are all that were needed to appease the masses into relinquishing their civic duties. Nearly two millennia later, the axiom he authored proved to be timeless as the 2020 presidential election cycle appeared to be the apex of political theater. While it seemed unfathomable at the time, the 2024 edition of that drama has somehow managed to surpass it. The spectacle that has unfolded has reinvigorated the demographic of the electorate that it had neutered just 4 short years before. Emboldened by that ascendancy, supporters of Donald Trump approach the forthcoming presidential election as if they are impervious to defeat. That hubris has clouded their judgment, leading them to forget the lessons they learned after 2020 and in doing so may doom to relive the same fate that befell them then once more.

It needn't take much effort to examine the parallels between 2020 and 2024. Much like outgoing president Joe Biden, Kamala Harris is the preferred candidate of the existing political establishment. As Seymour Hersh's recent reporting on the Obama-led soft coup shows, she too has been installed as the democratic nominee for president in direct contradiction to achieving the distinction through the electoral process she and her party have exalted as sacrosanct to distinguish them as morally superior to their opposition. The chronology of Harris' selection hearkens back to the process that saw her latch onto Biden to become Vice President to begin with. Although the same chain of events that culminated in the 2020 election being manipulated to deny Donald Trump his re-election emerging yet again, his supporters have become utterly oblivious and completely dismissive of the premise that the same outcome could be achieved in 2024, despite the same framework clearly being in place.

The facade of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 created an entirely unprecedented election process which catered to the scale of electoral fraud needed to have Biden installed as president. While the emergence of a new strain of avian flu has led some to believe a similar plandemic could be implemented for the same reasons, the political climate cultivated since Biden took the Oval Office negates that necessity. However, that does not mean an alternative is not in place. That alternative is fueled by one of the hallmarks of the Biden administrations term in office: its failure to secure the southern border.

It has often been said that one man's trash is another man's treasure and by the same token one man's failure is another man's triumph. While the border crisis that has escalate to catastrophic proportions became one of the central issues that instigated the cultural shift among the electorate provoking them to turn against Biden, that damage done by the influx of illegal immigrants may prove to be offset by an even more politically advantageous benefit: their votes. The newly imported 10 million or so illegal immigrants provide the Democratic Party with a new tool at their disposal. While the  same scale of expansive mail-in balloting does not pose the same impact it did in 2020, the number of undocumented identities that can be utilized to cast illegitimate votes for Kamala Harris shows that an even more potent mechanism for fraud.

This looming threat is not lost upon the Republican Party, as evidenced by the push to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility ("SAVE") Act. While non-citizen voting in federal elections is prohibited under federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 prevents states from confirming citizenship status at the ballot box. Only New Mexico, Tennessee, and Virginia even require applicants to provide a full social security number to register to vote. In the interest of mitigating that threat, the House Of Representatives passed the SAVE Act, which would have required voters to present proof of citizenship to cast their votes. However, that effort seems futile given the opposition the legislation faces in the Senate. Furthermore, it would inevitably be vetoed by President Biden even if it was able to be passed by both bodies on Congress with any feasible voting margins to get it on his desk to begin with too slim to overturn the veto.

Like Georgia's Election Integrity Act of 2021, Democratic opposition to the SAVE Act has been framed as if its measures are intended to violate voting rights instead of protecting them. In response to the threat the massive influx of illegal immigrants presents to the result of the 2024 Presidential Election, Democrats have repeatedly pointed out how proof of citizenship is required to be able to register to vote and as such the necessity of presenting proof of citizenship at the polls is a redundant complication that poses the potential to inhibit citizens from exercising their right to vote.

Although non-citizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections, the framework created by Democrats to address the ramifications of the influx of illegal immigrants into the country shows that those measures also facilitate bypassing federal law to get them registered as voters. By expanding the pool of resources available to illegal immigrants coming to the country such as making them eligible for things like welfare benefits and driver's licenses, those undocumented migrants have been able to receive voter registration forms without needing to present any proof of citizenship. The magnitude of this threat is exemplified by the fact that 46 states have provided voter registration forms to illegal immigrants applying for welfare, driver's licenses, and the like. Only North Dakota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming have implemented more stringent measures to prevent potential voter fraud.

While the threat of illegal immigrants fraudulently voting in the 2024 Presidential Election poses a distinctly different issue than the expanded mail-in voting that arose in 2020, the latter issue has not been entirely resolved. Although mail-in voting turnout will certainly be significantly less than it was during the last election, the issues it presents have re-emerged in two key battleground states: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Just like when Donald Trump lost both of those states in 2020, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were two states who took until days after the election to declare a winner. That problem persists into this year as neither state has instigated reforms to expedite the processing of counting mail-in voters such as absentee ballots.  The magnitude of that failure was conveyed by Rachel Orey, an elections expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, who stated that the country may not be able to declare a winner in November until days after the election if the electoral college comes down to those two crucial states.

Additionally the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a 2022 decision which banned unmanned ballot drop boxes that were central to claims about voter fraud in 2020. That decision allows unelected officials in the state authority on how to implement the drop boxes and how to count votes cast through them. The decision by Wisconsin's liberal state supreme court poses dire issues highlighted by conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley. In her dissent, Bradley wrote “The legitimacy of elections continues to be questioned, each side accusing the other of ‘election interference’ and ‘threatening democracy,'" Going on to state that the majority decision in the case will only "fuel the fires of suspicion." The concerns expressed by the justice demonstrates that conservative politicians and voters have done little to assuage the peril that persists despite the vociferous claims of malfeasance in the wake of the 2020 elections.

This naivety is perhaps best exemplified by the 2022 Midterm Elections. Heading into midterms that year, the incompetence of the Biden administration had already become utterly apparent. This fueled optimism of a "red wave" which would turn the tables against Biden by putting the House and Senate in the hands of Republicans. While Republicans won a slight majority that failed to meet expectations in the house, they failed to secure a majority in the Senate. While claims of fraud emerged again, little has been done since then to achieve a more secure election heading into November 2024.

Instead, the whole episode has seemingly been memory holed. More discerning judgment has been replaced with demagoguery as the political theater playing out during the election year from sweeping decisions that have defeated the Biden administrations lawfare against Donald Trump to the apotheosis of the assassination attempt against him have left his supporters a feeling that his re-election has seemingly been pre-ordained. This same sentiment existed in 2020 as the culture wars leading to riots in the streets across the country and the authoritarian pandemic response measures supported by the liberal portion of the electorate left Trump supporters confident that him defeating Biden was as close to a sure thing as possible.

That hubris has re-emerged in tandem with a chain of events that bears a stunning similarity to how the political establishment put a system in place to determine the outcome of the 2020 election. In spite of that, the people have been appeased by bread and circuses once again, so blissfully oblivious of reality that they can paradoxically believe that the solution to rigged elections can be achieved by voting in them. If history is destined to repeat in 2024 as it had in 2020 then the complacency of the electorate that enabled it should be blamed every bit as much as the corruption and malfeasance orchestrating the outcome of the election.