Politics in Namibia (really!)

We are currently travelling around the deserts and savannas of Namibia, and it so happens that there will be a general election while we are here.

Now, you'd be forgiven for knowing nothing about Namibian politics. It's a small country of 3 million people (well, actually a BIG country of 3 million people), and there's not much that happens here that impacts the larger world. In fact, for an African country, it has been remarkably stable and democratic since it gained independence from South Africa in 1990, and rarely makes news for anything.

The country has been ruled by SWAPO, the political party of the South West Africa People's Organization that led Namibia to independence back in the late 1980s. And, much like the ANC in South Africa, it is starting to get a bit stale and corrupt. 

When outgoing President Hage Geingob died of cancer in February of this year, his vice-president Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah became SWAPO's presidential candidate. She is very much an old-school establishment candidate (she was a member of the SWAPO Central Committee back in the 1970s and 1980s), and she is still considered the front runner in the upcoming election.

But change is in the air. A relatively new party, going under the rather awkward moniker Independent Patriots for Change (IPC), is making inroads into SWAPO's traditional fiefdom. They made a good showing in the 2020 local elections, and party founder Panduleni Itula (ex-dentist and lawyer) finished in second place in the 2019 presidential elections. He is expected to do even better this year, and, judging by the posters we are seeing on the streets, that looks more than likely.

UPDATE

Well, so much for that. SWAPO candidate Ms. Nandi-Ndaitwah won handily, despite a palpable groundswell of public opinion in favour of change. 

Apparently, SWAPO (which also won a majority in the National Assembly) retained its strength in rural areas and among older voters who remember SWAPO's role in the independence struggle. 

In the end it wasn't even close, with SWAPO polling 57% in the presidential race and the second place IPC just 26%, although Itula and IPC are vowing that they will not accept the result because of rhe "deeply flawed" electoral process, marred by technical difficulties, ballot paper shortages, and delayed and extended voting in some areas. Don't hold your breath, though. 

Taliban continues to erase Afghan women

The Taliban in Afghanistan are starting to jump the shark with a series of new proclamations that are pretty hard to take seriously (unless of course you are Afghan, particularly an Afghan woman).

Already banned from showing flesh of any kind, looking at men they are not related to, and singing, reciting and reading aloud in public, a new Taliban edict has now come down disallowing women from being heard at all, even by other women. So, they cannot sing or play music, they cannot hold down a job of any kind, they cannot hold conversations with one another, they cannot even pray or recite Quranic verses:."Even when an adult female prays and another female passes by, she must not pray loudly enough for them to hear". 

Because? Well, female voices are potential instruments oftemptation and vice, don't you know? 

At the risk of incurring punishments that include beatings, detentions, torture, rape and even death, Aghan women are gradually being completely erased.

For what it's worth, men are now obliged to cover their bodies from their navel to their knees when they are outside their home, so no more of that naked shopping, guys! The Taliban's laws are becoming increasingly restrictive and bizarre, some of them worthy of a Monty Python sketch were they not so distressing and sad.

Buyers' remorse in Dearborn, Michigan

Arab-Americans, such as those in the  Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan, made quite a song and dance about how they where going to "punish" Kamal Harris amd the Democrats for not being loud enough in their support for the beleaguered Arabs of the Middle East. I have already commented on how silly and short-sighted this was.

After the election, there is probably a lot of buyers' remorse in Dearborn (not that their votes either way would actually have swung the result, of course). The city voted 42% for Trump, 36% for Harris and 18% for Green Party candidate Jill Stein (which, as a vote against Harris, effectively counts as a vote for Trump). American Muslim voters in general voted 53% for Stein, 21% for Trump and 20% for Harris.

Well, I hope they are pleased with themselves. They have helped elect a Muslim-hating, ultra-pro-Israel President and Congress. Some of them will get deported. As one Muslim commentator put it, having seen some of Trump's pro-Israel cabinet nominations, "it does looked like our community has been played". You don't say! But the important thing is that they really showed those Democrats, eh?

What we need to do for the next four years

The deep thinkers of the Globe and Mail (and every other media outlet) have been doing their analysis of how America managed to elect an idiot like Trump, and how the world has to pivot to deal with a second Trump term.

Regarding the latter, I was particularly struck by Doug Saunders article on how to replace a US-sized hole in the free world, most of which make good sense to me.

Given that Trump has served notice that he is not interested in the USA doing the right thing in the wider world, and that he is much more concerned with making his own little fiefdom cozy and secure, Saunders suggests three steps that the remaining free and democratic countries must take to take up the slack.

Firstly, they need to get their own houses in order. Canada, Europe and the rest of the free world will need legitimate, stable democracies and rules-based governments if we are to make it through four years of Trump rudderlessness and isolation. Part of that, in Canada's case, is that Justin Trudeau needs to get out of the way of a 2024 Canadian election, so that Canada has a stable working government, of whatever political complexion, BEFORE Trump takes the reins in early 2025.

Second, they need to come as close as possible to national unity as soon as possible. As several Liberal left-of-centre governments can expect to be replaced by conservative ones in the current milieu, they must still try and cleave to the centre and consensus politics in the face of what they will have to respond to from a Trump administration (e.g. retreat from Ukraine and the Middle East, tariffs, environmental backtracking, etc).

And third, accept that all of this will be expensive. Just as with the pandemic, now is not the time for scrimping and austerity. We will need to up our spending on Ukraine if the US bails, as well as on national security in general in a world that will probably become rapidly more unstable. US tariffs will make everything more expensive, both in America and everywhere else. Suck it up; it will not last forever.

None of this is welcome news, but it is probably wise advice. None of those happy, celebrating Republican faces you have seen on the news have thought through this stuff, and neither do they care (they just think they may be a bit better off next year, and have to deal with fewer people of colour). But we do have to think about it. If America burns, we need stay safe and keep the world turning.

How to concede an election

Last comment on the US election, for now at least.

Kamala Harris' concession speech drew some major contrasts with the Republicans four years ago. With class and poise, she took the high road, saying, "We must accept the results of this election ... We will engage in a peaceful transfer of power". Imagine Donald Trump saying that!

This was not some pusillanimous capitulation, though. "While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign", she said, possibly setting herself up for another fight (likely not with old man Trump) in four years time. 

I don't believe that she performed poorly in the election. I don't believe any other Democrat candidate would have done any better. It just wasn't to be.

Who's to blame for America's election debacle

As half of America and much of the rest of the world is in mourning after Donald Trump's shocking landslide.presidential election win, the inevitable search for a scapegoat has begun.

Some are blaming Black men, particularly as earlier opinion polls had shown them unconvinced by Kamala Harris, with many of them even drifting towards Trump. But according to exit polls, Black voting at the actual election followed very closely their voting during the 2020 election, i.e. overwhelmingly Democrat (Harris 86% and Trump 12%, compared to Harris 87% and Trump 12% in 2020). As in 2020, Black women were much more strongly Democratic than Black men (women 92%, men 78%, broadly similar to 2020). So, they can't be blamed.

What about the Arab-American vote? I have already railed against the ridiculous idea of Arab-Americans witholding their traditional Democratic vote in order to "punish" Harris and Biden in some way, particularly given that Trump is even more rabidly pro-Israel than either Biden or Harris.

But it looks like many of.those Arab-American single-issue voters DID follow through on their threats. For example, in Arab-majority Dearborn, MI, where Joe Biden won by 17,400 votes in 2020, the city went to Trump by more than 2,600 votes. So, whether they voted for Trump, or for third party Jill Stein of the Greens, or just didn't vote at all, the end result is the same: they helped to hand the election to Trump. And - go figure - they have ended up with a stridently anti-Muslim, pro-Israel President-Elect Senate and House of Representatives. Good job, guys. Who could have seen that coming? Er....

So, yes, some blame does attach to Arab-Americans for the predicament the country (and they themselves) find themselves in. It's hard to feel sympathetic, even if they will likely find themselves in the thick of the first wave of Trump's mass deportations of immigrants. That's what single issue voting gets you. But the Arab-American contingent is not actually that large (although larger than you might have thought). So, just how much blame attaches to them is unclear.

The Latino community is much larger, though, about 20% of the population these days. And, yes, they too abandoned the Democrats for reasons that are also not entirely clear to me, continuing their gradual shift to the right (notwithstanding offensive jokes about Puerto Rico at Trump rallies).

But clearly something else happened too - other, that is, than young, testosterone-fuelled rural guys voting for an octogenarian would-be dictator (almost the definition of an urban elite, despite what he says).

The big one, from exit poll data, is white women. Yes, those blowsy, bottle-blonde, slightly overweight, middle-aged women in inappropriate tight clothing you see holding signs behind Trump in all those televised rallies. White women make up 37% of the entire electorate, and I think we CAN legitimately blame them. Yes, Kamala Harris is a woman, and she made a point of campaigning on women's issues, but apparently issues like the economy and immigration outweighed issues like abortion rights and health care, for white women at least. She actually polled worse with women than her Democratic predecessors. Even younger women flocked to the old lecher. It makes no sense to me.

Of course, this kind of granular postmortem analysis is of limted usefulness, particularly in this particular case, where voters are more likely voting according to their social identity and partisan loyalty, i.e. rational considerations don't come into it.

It's also subject to the phenomenon known as "The Pundit's Fallacy" (or, to give it a more scientific label, "motivated reasoning"). This is the idea that political analysts, to a greater or lesser extent, tend to attribute their own opinions to voters. That is, they assume that the policies and beliefs that they hold with themselves are the most advantageous for the country but also for any party looking to get itself elected. This may, of course, not be the case.

Whether you believe that the "fault" for the Democrats losing this election was Joe Biden's (for not handing over the leadership earlier), Kamala Harris' (for not pandering more to the left wing, or to the right wing), or any or all of the various subsets of American society mentioned above, the bottom line is: I am severely disappointed with the American public, pretty much all of them. 

What really rankles is that so many of them couldn't tell the difference between the lies and the (few) truths Trump offered, between the jokes and the threats, between policy announcements and logorrheic drivel. Or, worse, that they could and ignored it anyway because it served their own selfish ends. Kamala Harris repeatedly appealed to their better natures in her campaign, but they threw it back in her face (or maybe they have no better natures).

One of the biggest casualties of this election is respect: Trump's win has vindicated his controversial aggressive campaigning "style". Populists and would-be dictators around the world have been looking on and the see that it's okay to lie, insult, play the victim, and generally engage in ad hominen character assassination. What's more, it works. The Democrats do still have the moral high ground here, but the results show that moral high ground does not win elections.

How do you tell when Trump "jumps the shark"?

It's hard to tell when Donald Trump is "jumping the shark", the guy is in an almost permanent state of shark-jumping. But maybe this was it.

Here's video of Trump at a rally in Milwaukee, masturbating and fellating a microphone. I kid you not. Maybe there was some context, you say? Nope. This was just Trump complaining (again) about the incompetent and "stupid" guys who set up his microphones. I mean, who wouldn't resort to similated sex acts if their microphone didn't work?

I'm sure the Trump faithful are lapping it up [sic]. Trump supporters are not big on policy announcements, empthy, that sort of thing. They are just there for some entertainment, preferably low-brow and not too intellectually taxing [sic], and Mr. Trump is happy to oblige. "Presidential"? What's that got to do with anything?

The US elections are not just about the next president

There's a timely article in the Globe about the OTHER elections going on in the USA. The presidential election takes up so much media oxygen, and it's so hard to look away, that it's easy to forget that there are also elections for Senate and House of Representatives going on this Tuesday, and these are also really important for the US, for Canada, and for the rest of the world.

One third of Senate Seats (34 out of 100) are up for grabs, as are all 435 House seats. Whoever becomes President, will either be constrained or aided by the make-up of the new Congress. Yes, there is still the possibility of executive orders (effectively presidential decrees, not requiring a vote by Congress), an expedient of which Donald Trump was particularly fond (he used them 220 times in his four years, compared to just 143 by Joe Biden in his), but Congress will still be critical for the passage of major legislation.

The Democrats currently have a slim majority in the Senate, but 19 of the 34 seats being contested are Democratic holdings, with only 11 being Republican, so the Dems face a large potential risk. 14 of the 34 seats in play are considered solidly Democrat and 11 solidly Republican. So, 9 could go either way and, in particular, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are considered too close to call.

In the House of Representatives, where the Republicans currently have a three-seat majority, no less than 25 seats are seen as toss-ups, 14 of which have a Republican incumbent and 8 a Democrat incumbent (3 seats are currently vacant). It is almost impossible to predict where this will go.

So, as with the presidential election, things sit on a knife-edge both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, and a few votes here or there in a handful of swing states could make a huge difference in how the next four years go. Scary stuff, but fascinating.

Expect the US election to go wrong, seriously wrong

The American democratic system - once thought so sturdy and robust, the envy of the world - has never looked so flimsy and fragile. 

The Electoral College system itself, Byzantine in its unnecessary complexity and rife with internal inconsistencies, as I have explored in a previous post, is already quite capable of converting a substantial popular vote majority into an effective loss (as we have seen). The whole antiquated system is shot through with what I have charitably termed "vagaries", which are open to exploitation by capable but unscrupilous hands.

Another excellent article by Andrew Coyne in the Globe and Mail lists some of the many ways this system can be gamed or weaponized. Trump's plan, should he lose, is to tie up the election results in certain states in legal knots long enough to prevent the certification of Electoral College votes within the statutory time limit (as far as I can tell from what I have read, this is December 17th). Tame election administrators can be called on to refuse to certify apparently clear vote results, or Republican-controlled state legislators can be pressed into setting aside the results. 

If neither party can be legally said to have won the Electoral College, the 12th Amendment of the Constitution allows for it to be thrown over to the newly-elected House of Representatives to decide. Of course, this is not by a normal majority of the House's members, but by a vote of its state delegations, i.e. one vote per state, of which the Republicans will probably hold a majority, regardless of the actual elected Representatives. Other options also exist, such as tossing out electors in some states to manufacture a Republican win despite the popular vote and even the Electoral College vote (yes, apparently it's technically possible). Did I mention Byzantine?

And it doesn't end with the Electoral College. Gerrymandered electoral districts make a mockery of one-person-one-vote rhetoric, and the Republicans in particular have been hard at work manufacturing more such inequities. 

A badly-unbalanced Supreme Court is now stacked with extreme partisans willing to sacrifice judicial fairness and ethical judgement for partisan political advantage, as it has repeatedly demonstrated over the last few years. So. if any of the legal wrangling mentioned above ends up at the Supreme Court, you know how it will end before it even starts.

All this is well-known, but Trump and the current band of feckless Republican enablers have blown these weaknesses up into unprecedented dangerous territory with their willingness to pursue suspect and often downright illegal avenues of procedure in their lust for power. 

Trump has made no secret that he will not accept a Democratic victory, even one that plays by the rules, Byzantine though they may be. He has repeatedly said that there is no way the Democrats can win without cheating, and has been preparing the way for such a claim for months now, laying the groundwork to challenge the results if he loses. 

He is already claiming that election fraud is under way, from millions of fictitious illegal migrants voting Democrat to fraudulent overseas ballots to tampered election machines in swing states. According to him, all of these ploys are supposedly aiding the Democratic vote. None of it is true: despite what Trump says, electoral fraud is exceedingly rare in the USA, as several inquiries and court cases after the 2020 vote have confirmed.

What IS happening is widespread intimidation and harassment of voters and electoral workers by Republican "poll-watchers", who are being trained to be "assertive" and "aggressive" in their work. While monitoring elections might seem like a good idea in principle, extreme partisan monitoring can work against the stated goal of fairness. Armed and mask-wearing poll-watchers like we saw in Texas and Arizona in 2022 are not just trying to maintain fairness, and Republican poll-watchers in North Carolina were accused of blocking access to poll booths and generally disrupting the electoral process. 

Some Republican states like Florida, Texas and Missouri, on the other hand, are refusing to let the normal Justice Department  election monitors enter polling stations on election day. I'm not sure how legal that is.

The latest security twist comes from the Sheriff Lieutenant of Springfield, Ohio (yes the same place accused by Republicans of eating cats and dogs...), who has vowed not to help Democrats requiring security aid, only Republicans. It doesn't get much more ridiculous than that, does it?

Anyway, you can expect Trump to declare victory on Tuesday, whatever actually transpires. What happens then is extremely uncertain, but it will probably involve weeks of chaos and, quite likely, violence. We here in Canada like to denigrate our own political and electoral systems, and they are certainly not perfect. But God, am I glad I'm not American! 

Half of the voting population of the United states appears quite content to vote in a guy they see as a "straight talker" who "tells it like it is" and who will release them from the "woke liberalism" that is strangling their starry-eyed notion of America. They seem oblivious, or wilfully ignorant, of what is happening behind the scenes, even though the information is out there. When the chaos and violence descends on their country, as surely it will, they will all have been complicit.

UCP not right wing enough for Take Back Alberta

The United Conservative Party (UCP) of Alberta is having its annual general meeting in Red Deer, among reports that the party is anything but united.

Specifically, the meeting will be voting on whether Premier Danielle Smith, who has been at the helm of the UCP since October 2022, is fit to continue leading the party. Ms. Smith is regarded by the rest of Canada as a rabid right-wing hawk, but most of the grievances against her leadership seem to be coming from the RIGHT of her party, particularly groupings like Take Back Alberta and the 1905 Committee that helped get her elected in the first place.

Take Back Alberta seems still to be hung up on opposition to COVID-19 restrictions - remember those? - although they also claim to be exercised by "freedom, accountability and healthcare choices" in some vague, general way. For some reason, many of them feel that, for all Smith's radical and extreme legislative agenda over the last couple of years, she has been something of a "disappointment" to Take Back Alberta. Which is a scary  thought.

These people would not be out of place in Texas or Wyoming. They seem very out of place in Canada.

UPDATE

In the end, Smith won a resounding 91.5% of the UCP vote, so I guess she's right-wing enough after all. Not exactly the "stern message" her right flank was thinking of...

If you are losing track of Trump's lies...

It's no secret that Donald Trump lies. A lot. It's easy to lose track of just how many mistruths he has spun over the years, even from.wrrk to week and day to day. 

Yes, Joe Biden is not above the odd fib from time to time, and even the much more careful Kamala Harris is not entirely squeaky clean (as even CNN admits). But no politician EVER has lied as much as Donald Trump. Neither he nor his people bother to refute allegations of lying - they just don't really care, and it's just seen as part of Trump's campaign style and indeed his whole persona.

So, thanks to a recent CNN article that neatly summaries Trump's main recent lying campaigns, without literally listing them all which would be tedious (and depressing). It makes sobering reading, not least because half of Americans either believe them or just don't care. 

As I have argued elsewhere, though, the sheer amount of lying that happens in politics these days - not just by Trump, but mainly as a result of Trump's campaigning "style" - is ushering in a period of political cynicism and nihilism that makes a complete mockery of our democratic systems.