Conspiracy Much?

On February 4th, 2021 Time Magazine published Molly Ball’s article “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.” In many ideological camps, this article has sparked outrage and diatribes. More important than what the article says, though, is that which the article leaves unspoken, and that which the article should say.

To summarize the article, it recounts how a widespread coalition of Progressive strategists, activists and financiers worked under the radar to engineer the result of 2020’s presidential election. The article readily uses terms like “conspiracy,” “shadow effort” and “cabal,” perfect fodder for clickbait, yet mostly it is a long-winded gloat which surprises no one.

The article’s gist (spoiler alert!) is that this Progressive coalition and Big Business colluded to deliver the election to Joe Biden. The carrot which the Progressives offered to Big Business was forbearance from nationwide disruptive protests in the streets akin to what had been happening throughout 2020’s summer in response to George Floyd’s death. Stated differently, the coalition was saying, “Support our cause or we’ll burn cities down again!”

Though Ball credits the coalition with avoiding disruptive protests for the new president’s election, the coalition’s unspoken assumption proves that if anything they merely kicked the can down the road. All the coalition’s work was guided by the assumption that Trumpers could not be flipped.  Now to half the country which did not vote for the current president, Ball’s article boasts that he got in by clandestine gamesmanship. That can only worsen this country’s polarization and lead to future disruptive protests.

Imagine though what story this article could and should have recounted. What if the hundreds of millions of dollars which the coalition bundled had been used towards influencing Trumpers to Biden? Of course the coalition was no PAC in the technical sense, but surely operatives and donors as clever as Ball describes could have found ways to finance pro-Biden messaging. You never get everybody in a country this big, but instead of a 51-49 percent margin, we would be living in a safer, stabler country had the coalition used its vast resources to achieve something akin to 70-30.

If this proposal strikes you as too idealistic, then here’s one more grounded in realism. Presuming the coalition’s strategists correct that people can’t be swayed to change their values, then maybe the whole paradigm of half the country voting to force its will on the other half is the wrong way to go about things. Maybe the more realistic approach for the modern era is to allow people to make their own associations and allocations as they see fit, with government as nothing more than a repository of information about best practices and a final arbiter in guaranteeing citizens’ rights. Maybe it’s high time to live and let live, the Libertarian way.

Daniel Donnelly, Dutchess County Libertarian Party’s Vice-Chair

Published in the Mountain Eagle newspaper on February 25th, 2021.