Yuval Levin, hailed by none other than Lyin’ Paulie Ryan as a serious conservative thinker, has a ponderous, and thoroughly repulsive “think piece” up at the New York Times, Democrats, Voting Rights Are Not the Problem, in which he tries to pretend that there are good arguments for election law reform “on both sides”! Because “greater care and transparency about postelection administration would serve us well regardless and could render such claims [Trump's fraudulent claims of fraud] easier to test and refute in ways that would build public confidence”. As through Trump's outrageous claims had not been “tested and refuted” a thousand times over to no effect! Levin's supposedly even-handed pose allows him to entirely sidestep the reason why we even need to be talking about “reform” in the first place: because the Republican Party, which has placed itself under complete intellectual and moral subservience to a consciousless sociopath in the form of Donald Trump, is actively trying to destroy the democratic process in these United States!
As Shikha Dalmia points out in a seriously excellent piece in her substack blog, “The UnPopulist”, Trump’s Big Lie Is Trashing a Major National Achievement, the 2020 election was spectacularly successful. Contrary to the hypocritical Mr. Levin, there is no chance in the world that “greater care and transparency about postelection administration would serve us well”. There isn’t the slightest need for “greater care and transparency” because the “care and transparency” displayed in 2020 were spectacular, undermined entirely by the disgusting greed for power displayed by Donald Trump! All the claims of fraud made by Trump and his supporters were brazen lies that were invented out of nothing other than Trump’s nakedly egoistic rage over losing an election, lies that were repeatedly rejected in state and federal courts all across the land, lies that could not be refuted and dispersed by all the honesty in the world, lies that Trump continues to assert and Trump’s supporters frenziedly continue to believe despite the fact that they are utter nonsense! And Yuval Levin knows it!
Levin is not alone in his hypocrisy. Ramesh Ponnuru, in an openly gloating piece, Republicans Are Winning the Debate on Voter ID, like Levin, completely ignores what’s really at stake—Republican efforts to give state officials the power to reject the will of the voters at their unrestricted discretion, as Trump so passionately tried to do in 2020. Ponnuru says he very much doesn’t want to see Trump get another four years in office, but he even more wishes not to offend the people who do want Trump to come back in. Because the people who want to see Trump come back in are the heart and soul of the Republican Party.
Yuval and Ramesh are joined in this hypocrisy by fellow chin-stroker/ass-licker Ross Douthat, who claimed, in a post extensively ridiculed by me in the past that “The Republican-backed bills that purport to fight voter fraud are obviously partially sops to conservative paranoia — but as such, they’re designed to head off cries of fraud, claims of ballots shipped in from China or conjured up in Italy.” If Ross believes that, then he’s very, very stupid. And I don’t believe Ross is very, very stupid. I believe he’s very, very hypocritical. And in that hypocrisy he’s far, far from alone.
Pre-Trump, Yuval, Ramesh, and Ross all called themselves “Reformicons”. Guys, the correct term is “Whore”.
Afterwords
Republicans have, of course, been trying to “fix” elections, because they can’t win them, for a long, long time.
