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The democrats got the ball rolling in 2016 with accusations of “election interference.” But what wouldn’t be “election interference”?
Anyone who talks about an election is “interfering” with it. Even if we reduce it to “foreign” interference, it remains ubiquitous and it’s not clear what can be excluded.
Anyone who has any commercial, familial, or intellectual connection with anyone in any other country and says anything about the election could be considered to be facilitating “foreign interference.”
There’s also no way of drawing a line between activities pertinent to the election and those that aren’t. No one can know what might influence another’s vote.
The more the specter of “election interference” haunts us, the more the government must be empowered to interfere with the interference. But what exempts officials of the government from charges of election interference?
Election interference only makes sense if we imagine a kind of pure electoral space, a vacuum free of outside influences through which untainted decisions of autonomous citizens move to the candidate they have with adequate information chosen.
But Filmer had it right 400 years ago, as our increasingly microscopic view of the election process reveals—every choice made in running elections is questionable—who can vote, how often we vote, where we vote, who is eligible to be a candidate,
what the threshold for victory in an election should be, winner take all or proportionate voting, the voting process itself, supervision of that process, checks on that supervision…
The electoral process is “always already” interfered with. This further collapses the entire public/private distinction, but also the distinction between “partisan” and “non-partisan”—
we already know that the surest way to advance partisan interests is to seize and operate those institutions deemed non-partisan, but how can that now not become explicit? Everything we do must be taken to be an attempt to interfere with elections.
Rather than everyone competing collegially over a common space, then, we will have to realize that the democratic process brings into being incommensurable social orders, a kind of return to the actual warfare that voting replaces by simulating.
A new kind of warfare—6G? Participation in elections might go up, but so will participation in all the forms of “election interference”—“poll watching” will become a highly professionalized and weaponized activity, for example.
We can expect to see an already existing argument mainstreamed in the US—since the rest of the world has such a huge stake in the outcome of American elections, isn’t it understandable that they would want to interfere?
And shouldn’t some recognized way of allowing them to do so be established? Of course, the side that will benefit from this proposal will advance it first,
but if it makes headway the other side will counter by encouraging countries and foreign constituencies sympathetic to it to “participate” as well.
American elections will become a global spectacle, with those at home abroad playing along. But it will become less game show and more professional wrestling, as the fix will always be in
—those arranging the spectacle will come to cooperate over and beyond their competition because everyone will know that it’s all manufactured from the ground up—unless there really is a complete breakdown or civil war both sides will find a way to blink at some point
because they will have become even more inextricably connected and mimetically engaged than before.
(This would be kind of like the move from postmodernism to metamodernism—from realizing that everything we thought was “natural” is really constructed to realizing that, nevertheless, some “constructions” are better than others, even if we can only provisionally say why.)
But wouldn’t the “election” then gradually become more of a “coronation” of someone “groomed” by the system to ascend to the highest position
(of course this would be a more concentrated version of what already takes place, but removing even the minimal competition now permitted would make a qualitative difference, as it would allow for the long term interests of the system to be represented)?
In that case, the question will be whether the process of succession will involve one figurehead or entertainer following another as the real action continues behind the scenes,
or the central figure is one who gets hold of the “threads” and gains command over the entire process and leaves his mark on the selection of his successor.
And then the question is whether doing one thing or another now would make any difference to this outcome.
