Can the US follow Sri Lanka’s new example?

I have written in the past about Sri Lanka’s deteriorating democracy, with corrupt, nepotistic family dynasties that enriched themselves while pursuing chauvinistic policies that discriminated against minorities and brutally suppressed both an insurgency and a separatist movement. Those governments also systemically undermined the institutions that underpin democracies such as an independent judiciary, police force, the media, and other non-governmental institutions, and using thugs and other means to intimidate opponents and critics. I have written that I observed the US heading in that same direction, and Trump more than anyone represented that trend towards creating a government that merely paid lip-service to democratic governance while in reality making it into a corrupt personal fiefdom.

The situation has now reversed itself.

In September, the Sri Lankan presidential elections saw Anura Kumara Dissanayake (known as AKD) get elected, defeating two candidates who belonged to the past nepotistic dynasties while AKD came from very humble origins. AKD had been a member of parliament but his party held only three seats. After his election, he dissolved parliament and in the new elections held yesterday, his party won 159 seats in the 225-seat parliament, with 62% of the vote.
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Trump sends in the clowns

Trump has started nominating people to fill his administration and so far they are startling, even considering the low expectation that I had. He seems to have decided to populate senior posts with people who have little or no experience in the areas they are supposed to be dealing with or with the kind of administration skills required to run large organizations.

The most startling is the nomination of Florida congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Gaetz was federally investigated on sex-trafficking charges for pursuing underage women and while the justice department finally declined to press charges, the congressional ethics committee is still investigating him. I suspect that Trump appointed him knowing that this would disgust many of the senior professionals in the justice department and they would resign, sparing him the trouble of firing them. He can now fill those positions with loyal hacks who will carry out whatever Trump wants them to do, and especially go after anyone who opposes him on anything. He promised revenge on his ‘enemies’ and there is no reason to think that he will not do just that, with an ‘enemy’ being defined as anyone who opposes or criticizes him.
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Reclaiming slurs

Kevin Drum stirred up a hornet’s nest in his comments in a post asking what exactly the term ‘queer’ meant these days when applied to issues of gender and sexuality. He thought that it had become an umbrella term for anyone who is not cisgender and heterosexual. It is simpler than listing all the categories like LGBTQIA+. Using queer as an umbrella term for those categories risks circularity since Q in the list stands for queer or questioning. But that can be dismissed as a quibble that will only worry language pedants and also by reserving Q only for ‘questioning’.

That seems to be a common understanding of the term. Unfortunately, Drum phrased it in a way that, while attempting to be amusing, was seized upon by some of his commenters to take offense and the conversation veered off in an acrimonious direction. We know that when it comes to comments on the internet, that is inevitable so we should not be surprised that it happened.
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Which bathrooms will Sarah McBride use?

In the previous post, I wrote about how Sarah McBride has been elected as the first transgender person in the US House of Representatives, a piece of good news in an otherwise dismal election.

But something occurred to me later and that is there is going to be an issue when she starts her tenure on January 3rd. Trump and the GOP have made much of the bathroom issue as a way to wage the culture war by attacking the transgender community, saying that people should only be allowed use bathrooms that correspond to the gender assigned to them at birth.

So will they demand that she use the men’s bathroom in every building that makes up the US Congress? What about when she visits the White House? What about the places she goes to as part of her official duties? Which members of Congress will support her right to use the women’s bathroom everywhere?

While using divisive and incendiary rhetoric is easy when you do not have to personally deal with the consequences, this is one issue that is going be very close to home.

A small piece of good news

The results of the election were overwhelmingly bad but in the debris there was one piece of good news and that was the election of the first transgender person to the House of Representatives.

Sarah McBride, a Delaware state senator, has made history as the first out transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives.
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McBride, 34, won Delaware’s at-large House seat in Tuesday’s general election against the Republican candidate John Whalen III, a former Delaware state police officer and businessman. The House seat, Delaware’s only one, has been Democratic since 2010, the New York Times reported.
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In 2011, at the age of 21, McBride came out as a trans woman in her university’s student paper and in a viral Facebook post.

Since then, McBride has worked on LGBTQ+ issues within and beyond her state. She worked on anti-discrimination legislation in Delaware that provided protection to trans people. She later served as the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group. McBride also taught public policy at the University of Delaware and wrote a 2018 memoir entitled Tomorrow Will Be Different, as her state senate biography notes.

The LGBTQ community, especially the transgender part of it, is going to face a difficult future given the overt hostility that has been expressed against them in this ugly campaign by those who will now have much more power than they did before. Now more than ever, we need to rally round and support them.

The role of gender in the election

There are going to be plenty of postmortems of the last election, trying to understand how Trump managed to win. These analyses will look at exit poll data to see what they can learn about who people voted for and why, and break it down by demographic categories. There will of course be analyses of many factors such as campaign messages, strategy, and tactics.

I looked at data on the number of votes going back to the 2008 election and have made the chart below. Each vote total is in millions, as is the US population at that time. We see that the percentage of the US population that voted this year was roughly the same as past election years, except for the sharp increase in 2020.

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America reveals itself. And it is not pretty

The people have spoken and what they say is that they want a corrupt, amoral, hateful narcissist as their president.

Donald Trump has always been this way. One might find excuses for how he won his first term in 2016 by saying that he was largely unknown then, a novelty act that a large part of the country was willing to take a chance on. But in the period since then, he has revealed himself very clearly, and surrounded himself with awful people who espouse the same misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, anti-LGBTQ views. And people said, “Yeah, I’m fine with that”.

There will be innumerable postmortems as to how and why this came about. It seems to me that Kamala Harris was a good candidate and ran a good campaign. One can disagree with this or that policy (For example, I strongly disagreed with the way she and Joe Biden addressed the war in Gaza and the Israel-Palestine issue generally) but I doubt that any one of those was a decisive factor in her loss. The voters wanted Trump.

He has also been given control of the Senate and (likely) the House of Representatives and the chance to appoint more right wing US Supreme Court justices and federal judges. Basically, he now has a much freer hand than he had in his first term to wreak havoc and leave lasting damage.

It is said that a country gets the leaders it deserves. It is hard to imagine that any country deserves leadership like this.

But here we are.

We are at the meaningless ‘vox pop’ state of election reporting

Today is election day and until the polls close and vote totals start coming in, there is really nothing to report. So the media is filling time and space with responses from voters as they exit the polling stations, asking them whom they voted for and why.

While well-designed and organized exit polls can use this information to obtain trends and do important post-election analyses, these ad-hoc interviews are useless.

Getting quotes from random people about something or other is a standard reporting trope but such quotes are usually selected to support the narrative that the reporter has already decided upon and hence are cherry picked.

But we get them anyway.