You
know him from TV or film, if not from high school. He was skinny or too fat. He
wore his pants too high, and his shirt buttoned almost to his chin. He wrote
for the school paper, joined the electronics club.
He
didn’t run for class office, or try out for debate.
His
impressionable years were highly politicized. Shocking assassinations in the
recent past. Marches, clashes with police. The Vietnam war dragged on.
He
noticed, however, that beneath all the chaos, all the noise, lay a framework of
laws and rules most people accepted. Even the protesters used it to give their
arguments ground to push against. Or ideals to invoke.
So
he majored in political science. Studied what others found boring. The
mechanics of democracy. Party structure, party rules. How people got elected
and rose to power.
Computers
made everything visible, voting patterns, party affiliations. Easy to correlate
with a host of demographic details, age, sex, employment figures in the
relevant districts, etc. The tools of marketing transferred well to the job of
electing candidates. Easy to isolate your target audience, and then provide the
ideas they would respond to.
That
way, you’d control the candidate, too—supplying his words, telling him where to
say them. You’d have real power without needing to be popular.
Power
to change the rules, themselves. Change district boundaries so the opposition
loses representatives. So their supporters’ votes no longer count.
Power
to restrict voting hours and locations. Limit the numbers of machines in
opposition precincts. Require picture ID’s that work a hardship on the elderly,
poor people, some minorities and on married women who change their names.
The
data showed that fewer voters helped his party win.
Intimidation
had its place, too. The threat that voting somehow would make your political
views public, thus harming your business, affecting your job. Despite recent
changes to the primary election rules, we still don’t declare party preference
to register in Texas. But we do declare it, in public, to get a primary ballot.
That small distinction can be enough to induce hesitation. Shrink turnout.
After
that, what’s left? One more set of
rules, the logical next step for the policy wonks and political operatives:
Change the U.S. Constitution itself. The ultimate Framework. The ground we
stand on.
Thirty-four
states need to request an Article V convention. And Governor Abbott has made approving
the request an emergency priority this year. (See his State of the State
address.)
Wait
a minute.
Did
you or I vote for that? Did we ever tell Abbott we wanted that? Where’d he get the
idea?
From
the Texas GOP platform, that’s where, playground of far right true believers
and activists. (Have you even read it?) This arcane arena of party rules and
pronouncements is where our Nerd is most at home.
When
someone can’t win an honest battle of
ideas—when he’s given up on appeals to informed reason—all that’s left are these
structural tricks. Deflating the football, juicing the bat, dog or horse. Gaming
the system. Because our political Nerd of the high pants, drunk on the game of power,
will try to win by any means.
We
tell our kids not to cheat, but all around them are the spoils of cheating
adults.
For
every political operative who emerges from the back room—as Stephen Miller and
Karl Rove have—there are a thousand others whose names we will never know.
But
our children will eat the tainted fruit of their labor.
