Sorry....I'd forgotten

Yesterday, on NPRs show, I head Alex Burns, a political reporter for the New York Times sum up the current status of the mid-term elections. He said the democrats have a fair chance of taking the House but will probably lose seats in the Senate. At the end of the show he reminded me of how our congress is constructed; an idea I had known but forgotten. We have two houses of government to protect the smaller, rural states from being run over politically by the larger cities and states. Giving them this edge gives them a reason to remain in our federation of states called the United States.

Several times in my blog I have used the phrase 'one person, one vote'. This is wrong in America and the reasons for it are probably good reasons. We don't want the majority to steam roll the minority. We want all sides of an issue to be represented in debate. We want to stay together even if we don't all agree like a family usually stays together in spite of political differences.

The Electoral College is biased in the same way, a bias that increased in the last couple decades, resulting in Clinton receiving more than 2,000,000 votes than Trump but losing the electoral college vote. The Electoral College has total votes adding up to the sum of the House members and Senate members plus some for Washington, DC for a total of 538. According to the Washington Post's article on voting in the 2016 election "While California has one electoral vote per 712,000 people, Wyoming — the least populous state in the country — has one electoral vote per 195,000 people." This type of discrepancy seems too large to be fair. 

In 2016 the Supreme Court decided that state representation in the House should be based on total population and not registered voters. Perhaps, if the gerrymandering in Republican states that was done over the for decade leading up to the 2010 census continues to be struck down by the Supreme Court, after the 2020 census, voters fairness may be shifted a little to the left, or toward more populous areas.

So, while I am apologizing for my error in saying our country stands for 'one person, one vote', I am not apologizing for fighting the consequences of this discrepancy. The Republican party and the president, who claims to be a Republican, are attempting to use this 'equalizer' to create a more fascist state.

The two best known students of fascism, Eco and Arendt, lived through it in Italy and Germany. Umberto Eco wrote a treatise on fascism in which he lays out 14 techniques that a fascist uses to gain and hold on to power. Trump is not Hitler nor Mussolini, but he is drawing from their playbooks. In 2016 Lorraine Berry wrote on literary hub:

It seems not only more intellectually honest, but also more accurate, to argue that Trump is tapping into the fourteen elements of Ur-Fascism, that Eco, who had lived through Italian fascism, and who understood that words, even the most banal, have meaning, laid out for us. So, the job of writers is to continue to ask of Trump’s followers, “Yes. He speaks his mind. But what does he mean when he says these things?"

The whole article may be found at: https://lithub.com/umberto-eco-on-donald-trump-14-ways-of-looking-at-a-fascist/.

The other writer who studied first hand the effects of fascism was Hannah Arendt. Her book The Origins of Totalitarianism explain her experiences of living in Germany under the rise and rule of Hitler. Many of the things Trump has done and said during his campaign and presidency are on both Eco's and Arendt's lists. Three of these are accusing the press of lying, accusing minorities of harming the native population (muslims and hispanics), and obsessing about plots being formed against him (Mueller and the 'deep state'). The list of similarities is long.

The question are two. Will the Republican party stand beside Trump while he rampages along in this way? Will they support him in his move toward a fascist regime? Even more importantly, will the military support him? (Please Mattis - don't resign) The second question is does Trump have any idea what he is doing or is his personality just naturally fascist. Probably, given his level of education and knowledge of the world, he doesn't know what fascism is nor has he heard of Eco or Arendt. He certainly hasn't read them as guide books. He does gravitate toward strong men such as Tsar Putin and Erdogan. So he probably gets is playbook by emulation and not by thought.

But he is still a risk. Take a look at this video by Jason Stanley the author of How Fascism Works:

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006154922/fascism-leaders-america-trump.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage.

So, while I am apologizing for forgetting that some of the things I have been complaining about in our electoral process were actually built into the structure of our government to protect the little guy, I did not forget that most fascist dictators were little guys - to begin with.