Monday Poem

The past is inevitable.
…………—Delmore Schwartz, Poet

Hadn’t Thought of it Like That

home-08-1

Though likely, tomorrow is
not set

This day’s loose ends twist in the wind
like kite tails jerked in blue at the end of present’s string
becoming codas no one can sing—
the future’s not something on which you should bet

Only Now sings real arias

If you stand on the bridge in the middle of town
where the river parts at abutments in bow waves
—splits as the bridge’s foot in the stream
becomes a ship’s prow plowing north to nowhere
and gives the early crimson sky
an oscillating rendition of itself in its otherwise slick mirror
you catch a glimpse of your bobbing head
in flames of pleated clouds

You are its aria

As you turn and walk off you get
that the past is inevitable
and set
.

Jim Culleny
12/17/15
.


Photo: The Bridge of Flowers
by Martin Yaffee

Data Science and 2016 Presidential Elections

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Uselec

Much has already been written about the failure of data science in predicting the outcome of the 2016 US election but it is always good to revisit cautionary tales. The overwhelming majority of the folks who work in election prediction including big names like New York Times' Upshot, Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight and Princeton Election Consortium predicted Clinton's chance of winning being more than 70 percent. This is of course not what happened and Donald Trump is the president elect. And so on the night of November 9th people started asking if there was something wrong with Data Science itself. The Republican strategist Mike Murphy went as far as to state, “Tonight, data died.” My brush with election analytics came in in late 2015 when I was looking for a new job and talked to folks in both the Republican and the Democratic Data Science teams about prospective roles but decided to pursue a different career path. However this experience forced me to think about the role of data driven decision in campaigning and politics. While data is certainly not dead, Mike Murphy observation does lay bare the fact that those interpreting the data are all too human. The overwhelming majority of the modelers and pollsters had implicit biases regarding the likelihood of a Trump victory. One does not even have to torture the data to make it confess, one can ask the data the wrong questions to make it answer what you want to hear.

We should look towards the outcome and modeling approaches for the 2016 US presidential elections as learning experiences for data science as well as acknowledging it as a very human enterprise. In addition understand what led to selectively choosing the data and to understand why the models did not as well as they should have, it would help us to unpack some of the assumptions that go in creating these models in the first place. The first thing that comes to mind is systematic errors and sampling bias which was one of the factors that results in incorrect predictions, a lesson that pollsters should have learned after the Dewey vs. Truman fiasco. That said, there were indeed some discussions about the unreliability of the pollster data run up to the election. Although the dissenting voice rarely made it to the mainstream data. Obtaining representative samples of the population can be extremely hard.

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Reflections on congestion and technology

by Emrys Westacott

Last week I drove from the small college town in upstate New York where I live to New York City. Traffic_330_1a1i8i2-1a1i8i8 We covered the 306 miles from home to the George Washington Bridge, which takes one into Manhattan, in just under five hours. The next 15 miles, through Manhattan to our destination in Brooklyn, with a quick pick up and drop off on the Upper West Side, took an hour and a half. The following day we had a similarly miserable experience driving from Brooklyn to midtown.

I understand that a country mouse like myself is likely to be both not very savvy about and easily unsettled by the ways of the big bad city. Even so, the congestion, the jungle-law etiquette, the impatient honking, the anxiety induced by reckless cyclists passing on left and right, the lanes blocked by delivery vehicles, the need for so many police officers to direct traffic and pedestrians at snarled intersections, the difficulty of finding street parking–all this had me shaking my head. I know that thousands do it every day. Many do it for a living. And a few no doubt enjoy it. But regularly spending hours in congested traffic, even in a taxi on a bus, is no part of the good life in my book. At best, it's a fairly hefty sacrifice for the sake of other benefits the city has to offer.

Strolling around midtown Manhattan, I was struck by how many of the cars on the street were yellow taxis. Apparently there is no official figure for the percentage of New York traffic constituted by taxis, but my impression was that it must be more than fifty percent, especially if one includes cars that provide ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. According to New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission, about 20,000 of the city's 65,000 vehicles for hire are Ubers.

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The Essay and Our Post-Fact Moment

by Mara Naselli

Montaigne

The literary debate over the role of fact and invention in essay now appears to have foreshadowed our own post-fact moment. Suddenly this is not an idle matter. When writers knowingly take liberties with the facts in the name of art, they demote the reader from fellow traveler to spectator. Trust me, they say, it will be fantastic. For those who feel tricked, the betrayal is more than just bad feeling. An essayist who flagrantly manipulates fact fails to appreciate the essay’s greatest strength—the convergence of intimacy and shared inquiry.

The most recent review to enter the fray is William Deresiewicz’s “In Defense of Facts,” just published in The Atlantic. Deresiewicz attacks John D’Agata’s three essay anthologies for many things, notably a disregard for history. Deresiewicz rightly situates the historical origin of both fact and essay in tandem. For they are cousins, born out of the same revolutionizing changes that moved the Western intellectual tradition from the medieval world to the Renaissance. These changes laid the path for empirical science in the process. Montaigne’s “scrupulous investigation,” Deresiewicz writes, was the essay’s distinguishing feature in the sixteenth century.

If we pause to consider Montaigne and his time, we may make an even bolder claim that could renew our own contemporary relationship to the essay as an instrument of inquiry. Montaigne’s inward turn was not simply introspective. His scrupulous investigation was in service to a more ambitious endeavor: the relocation of the authority of judgment from the external authorities of the Church and ancient texts to the inward authority of the self. It was the act of investigation and inquiry toward understanding that made Montaigne’s work so remarkable.

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I want to make friendship with you

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

BN-HG637_0305ca_J_20150305173513My time-travel fantasies often include a return to my first memory of romantic embarrassment, wherein I had shied away from the unknown boy in front of me, one who I had seen lurking around five feet away the many past weeks, and who had emerged from the shadows to ask, “Will you make friendship with me?” At that time, I had experienced embarrassment and romantic fulfillment in the same breath. In that moment, I had thought myself a lawful entrant into the mysterious world of boy-girl relationships. And in that very knowledge, I had exercised my rights to refuse and walked away. Now, I wish I had been a different person who had paused to find out. Now, I wish I had for a moment, doubted the common knowledge of what a question like that might mean, and instead, waited. Now, I wish I had taken up the possibility of friendship. For what more a radical question than that can there be? To extend one's hand out to a person of unknown and little experienced character, disposition, and gender. To state merely that one's purpose in approaching, was friendship. Thus far. The no further could have come later on. Or not.

Since then, I have been better at allaying my expert suspicions. I have made friends. And I have grown further fascinated with the set of relationships we so summarily explain away with the term, “friendship”. Movie stars in India, when interrogated as to possible amorous connections between them, often respond in the coded phrase, “just friends”. But how could there be mere-ness in the relationship of being friends?

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Of Foreign Lands and Maths

by Carl Pierer

Goethe Italien

In 1786, Goethe began his famous journey to Italy, of which he kept a diary to be published as The Italian Journey in 1816. Even though his main interest lies elsewhere, he finds time to write about Italians. Early on his journey, he writes, for example (Goether, 1982):

So far I have seen only two Italian cities and only spoken to a few persons, but already I know my Italians well. They are like courtiers and consider themselves the finest people in the world, an opinion which, thanks to certain excellent qualities which they undeniably possess, they can hold with impunity.

22. September 1786

The generalisation at hand is striking. Whilst admitting a very limited experience, Goethe feels in a position to talk about Italians, as a whole. Or does he?

Who are the Italians Goethe is talking about? It seems unlikely that he is talking about all of them, at all times. Yet even restricted to his contemporaries, it would be bold to assert that this is a necessary feature of being Italian. Such a reading most surely would miss the point. It seems more appropriate to suggest that he is talking about some sort of Mentalität, a commonality or stereotypical property of Italians. Even if this were so, it would be a confusion to suggest, anachronistically, that Goethe means by “Italians” the citizens of Italy. The “Italians”, it seems, have a rather different, curious status.

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SOLIDARITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

by Richard King

SolidarityA blast from Hollywood's golden past …

In a dry valley in the Italian countryside, the remaining members of Spartacus' slave army sit in chains, surrounded by their Roman captors. At the front of the group sits Spartacus himself (Kirk Douglas) and next to him Antoninus (Tony Curtis), a slave entertainer and Spartacus' favourite. The victorious Roman general, Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier) sends a disdainful eye over the survivors. His herald speaks:

“By command of His Most Merciful Excellency, your lives are to be spared. Slaves you were and slaves you remain. But the terrible penalty of crucifixion has been set aside on the single condition that you identify the body or the living person of the slave called Spartacus.”

Cut to Spartacus, looking steely: he knows the jig is up and rises to his feet. But Antoninus rises with him and speaks first. “I'm Spartacus!” he shouts, as another slave stands: “I'm Spartacus!” And another: “I'm Spartacus!” And so on and so on, until the valley is alive with voices. “I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus!”

Cheesy, yes; but stirring all the same. And Douglas's flinty visog is a picture: mud-streaked and tear-stained, like an Easter Island moai after a downpour. We know the scene was personal – an allegory of the solidarity shown amongst writers and performers in the face of intimidation from the HUAC – and it would be nice to think that Douglas had certain US Senators in mind when he aimed those piercing eyes at Olivier. At any rate, it was a great day's work.

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Liberalism’s Minsky Moment: How decades of peace, justice and prosperity sowed the seeds for populist revolt

by Thomas R. Wells

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands…… Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. (Fukuyama, The End of History)

ScreenHunter_2459 Dec. 19 10.42Liberalism is facing its most severe challenge for 70 years. In country after country across the comfortable, safe, prosperous western world populist parties and movements dedicated to its overthrow have been advancing steadily towards power. How can this be? Politics is particular, and particular explanations have been given for the triumphs of Orban, PiS, Brexit and Trump. But while these may explain the timing and building blocks of each particular populist victory, they do not explain the pattern. Why do so many people around the world hate liberalism so much that a Trump election became possible?

Another class of explanations seek to pin the blame on the liberal order, most commonly by characterising populism as a revolt by the losers of globalisation. Except that globalisation has been a tremendous success. Of course there have been some losers, especially in countries like America and Britain with feeble policies for using the winnings from freer trade to compensate and retrain workers in unlucky industries, but not enough to win elections. And populism is riding high even in European countries with elaborate compensation and retraining schemes.

I have another explanation. Liberalism works just fine. It's just that the people got bored with it.

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Monday, December 12, 2016

Trump’s Wall and Alexander’s Gates: Managing the “Barbarians”

by Stephen T. Asma

ScreenHunter_2436 Dec. 12 11.06According to U.S. border patrol, Donald Trump's wall scheme (and Hillary Clinton's amnesty proposal) have inspired a northward rush to our border in recent months. Trump's proposed wall is unrealistic and unlikely to happen. But his desire to build it, and the giddy excitement it has inspired in his supporters, reminds us that “a wall” is a longstanding cultural answer to fear and xenophobia. The West has a storied tradition of trying to contain the foreign hordes –people who we recreate as monsters and barbarians.

The xenophobic idea of dangerous barbarians culminated in a popular story about “Alexander's Gates.” The European version of the story, of a barrier erected against savage enemies, seems to have first appeared in sixth century accounts of the Alexander Romance, but the legend is probably much older. Alexander supposedly chased his foreign enemies through a mountain pass in the Caucasus region and then closed them all behind unbreachable iron gates. The details and the symbolic significance of the story changed slightly in every medieval retelling, but it was very often retold –especially in the age of exploration.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the meaning of Alexander's Gates had long since been Christianized, and played an important role in both the geography of monsters and the ultimate end-time purpose of such fiends. The maps of the time, the mappaemundi, almost always include the gates, though their placement is not consistent. Most maps and narratives of the later medieval period agree that this prison territory, created directly by Alexander but indirectly by God, housed the savage tribes of Gog and Magog. Recall that Gog and Magog are referred to, with great ambiguity throughout the Bible –sometimes as individual monsters, sometimes as nations, sometimes as places. In the story of Alexander's Gates, a kind of synthesis occurs, in which “Gog and Magog” becomes a label for designating infidel nations and monstrous races –a monster zone, which different scribes can populate with all manner of projected fears.

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Current Genres of Fate: Just Deserts

by Paul North

373212-the-three-stoogesIn the tale about the princess and the pea, the pea is more than a tiny little irritant, it is more than an interrupter of a good night's sleep. The pea is the enemy of desert. The princess doesn't deserve such bedding. She is someone who's deservingness is so thorough and so refined that it is an insult to her very being, this one tiny pea. We accept some things without question as what we deserve—shelter, food, human relationships. Some things we struggle to claim that we deserve—a voice in politics, hope for the future, freedom for self-determination. All this is trivial to this girl. The princess deserves all that of course, but as a princess she deserves even more: she deserves every single thing to her liking, down to the smallest pea.

This is obviously a comic situation. So let's talk about comedy for a minute. At first look ‘deservingness' doesn't seem like a fateful word and comedy has little to do with huge, sinister forces. Tragedy is the place for those. The tragic hero stands up against the gods and gets crushed. This is how ancient audiences learned the workings of fate. No matter how good or how noble the hero, forces beyond her were stronger than her will. Antigone wanted to bury her brother. She was caught in a clash of principles much bigger than she was, bigger even than the cause of her unburied brother. Her death was inescapable, and in a sense trivial. Mortals were not supposed to cry for Antigone so much as learn that the gods' law was the highest and had to be respected.

By mortal standards, Antigone doesn't deserve her fate—from this springs its tragic character. Still, we don't usually talk about tragic fate as a matter of desert. Fate is neutral. It is the way it is, the way it must be, irrespective of the worth of the participants. Mortals have a kind of horrible freedom to stumble into fate regardless of what they personally deserve. Aristotle does say that a tragic hero should be noble. Even this is not a matter of ‘desert,' however. It is only so that the hero looks like they have something to lose.

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Monday Poem

Love Kitchen
—Mary Mraz Culleny, 12/8/17-3/2/03

The tsunami scent of yeast inundated our house
the mornings our mother baked bread
up through floorboards it came, up the stairwell
it spread stirring our dreamselves alive—
fresh loaves, bells for the nose
their toll sent sleep from somnolent heads

I’d written that thinking of her floured hands,
sifting, kneading, table strewn
with the tools of her art and the stuff she teased
and blended with such skill, without need to measure,
knowing by sight and weight —by feel, what it took
to fold matter and love into sustenance
in her confectionery mill, her love kitchen
.

Jim Culleny
5/8/16
.

Circles in Time

Arrival8-1-600x450by Leanne Ogasawara

Two months ago, I wrote a post in these pages called The Romance of the Red Dictionaries. It was about the possibility of romance without a shared language; that language can make things more complicated and, well, less, fun and romantic! In my case at least, things went downhill fast the more I learned my husband's language–and indeed, I always looked back on our early days of mutual incomprehension as a golden time.

While love may have declined, my experience of thinking and dreaming in Japanese allowed me to experience life through a different mindset. And that was an experience I would not trade for anything.

I was like a different person in Japanese. I certainly said thank you more often, and I believe I became more considerate and compassionate. Speaking in particular, allowed me to gain a certain kind of inner harmony, as I have always been much more agitated in English.

I also think in the spoken language, there was an element of fun to be had with verbs coming at the end of sentences. Endless jokes could be made as a person expected you to say one thing, only to be taken off guard to see the action verb was something quite different from where they thought you were going with the sentence. I felt more on my toes and tended to listen more carefully than I did in English till I found out the verbs of each sentence.

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The Counter Revolution

by Akim Reinhardt

FDRThe United States boasts a deeply conservative economic tradition. From its origins as a colonial, agricultural society, it quickly emerged as a slave holding republic built on the ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide of Indigenous peoples. After the Civil War (1861-65), it reshaped itself in the crucible of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism straight through to the Roaring ‘20s. A post-Depression Keynesian consensus led U.S. leaders to reign in the most conservative impulses during the mid-20th century, but the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s set the stage for the current neo-liberal moment.

Consequently, ever since the industrial revolution, the United States has typically trailed other developed nations in establishing a basic social welfare system. It has never fielded a competitive socialist or labor party. It was the last major nation to implement an old age pension. More recently, ObamaCare made it the last major nation to mandate that all of its citizens receive some sort of healthcare coverage, even if it's quite wanting in many cases.

Amid its overriding conservativism, the United States has had only three presidents with any real socialist tendencies: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45), Harry S. Truman (1945-53), and most recently Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose presidency (1963-69) ended before half of current Americans were born (median age 37.9).

The election of Donald Trump as president and, just as important, the impending Republican dominance of Congress, make certain that the United States will not correct its social welfare shortcomings anytime soon. Indeed, the nation may take significant steps backwards.

However, a quick review of America's stunted progressive history suggests that the opportunity for a progressive counter-revolution may be closer than it appears at this dark moment.

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Not necessarily the best ambient and space music of 2016

by Dave Maier

OfftheskyIt's that time of year again, when lists of all sorts start appearing everywhere you look. 2016 featured a *lot* of ambient, space, and other electronic releases, and only the hardiest of us got through more than a small fraction of it. I certainly didn't, anyway, so while our list (and accompanying podcast; see widget below) features excellent music released in 2016, it is in no way a best-of. Just so that's clear!

Now here's our list:

Steve Hauschildt – Same River Twice [Strands]

We’ve heard from Steve before on our journeys, when he was channeling Jean-Michel Jarre as I recall. His new record is not quite so retro, but on the other hand this particular sequencer workout is well within the boundaries of its genre, which is fine by me. Steve tells us that

Strands is a song cycle that is about cosmogony and creation/destruction myths. The title Steve alludes to the structural constitution of ropes as I wanted to approach the compositions so that they consisted of strands and fibers which form a unified whole […] I was also inspired by the movement of rivers, particularly their transformative aspect and how they’re in a state of flux and change, in particular the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland where I live, which notoriously caught on fire thirteen times because of industrial pollution in the 1960s and before. I was very interested in the dichotomy of oil and water and the resulting, unnatural symptoms of human industry. It’s a very personal record for me as it is a reflection of my hometown where I grew up and where it was mostly recorded.

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You Call This A Democracy? The American Government Does Not Represent The American People

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Screen-Shot-2016-05-26-at-1.21.42-PMHillary Clinton won the popular vote for president by 2.8 million votes and counting, yet serial liar Donald Trump will be our next president.

In the three states that gave him his electoral college majority — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — Trump won by 100,000 votes, which are fewer than the number of voters suppressed by various Republican measures. In Wisconsin, a federal court found that 300,000 fewer voters cast ballots because of new ID restrictions; Trump won there by only 27,000 votes. Similar suppression efforts in other states also worked well.

Nationwide, Democratic voters outnumber GOP voters, yet Republicans control the House and the Senate.

So the government of America does not represent a majority of us Americans.

If this is democracy, Superman poops kryptonite.

The policy positions most favored by most Americans — get money out of politics, reverse climate change, have free tuition in community colleges, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, reverse mass incarceration, rebuild our infrastructure, get equal pay for women, take on Wall Street, protect the most vulnerable Americans, improve Obamacare (why not Medicare for all?) — were those of a candidate who was not even on the general election ballot. Bernie Sanders, known as a radical progressive, but whose positions are totally centrist, lost to the neoliberal Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

So: you call America a democracy?

No way.

Our president does not represent the majority.

The House does not represent the majority: the Republicans control it because of gerrymandering, i.e. cheating.

The Senate does not represent the majority: the Republicans control it because of gerrymandering, i.e. cheating.

The Supreme Court does not represent the majority: it would have, if the GOP had not refused to consider President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, in a radical move unprecedented in American politics. (This same do-nothing Congress, the least productive Congress in history, has obstructed everything President Obama wanted to do to provide us with more jobs, a fairer economy, and a better America.)

We have a minority-chosen President, Congress and Supreme Court.

We do not have a democracy.

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The Stradivarius Complex

by Michael Liss

Stradshp

Are opera singers dumb?

As a child, dragged to the Metropolitan by opera-obsessive parents in order to practice sitting absolutely still for three hours, I sometimes wondered about this. Certainly, on stage, there was a lot of dumb going on. What intelligent person could possibly trust evil Baron Scarpia to keep his word, or would sing full-out when dying of tuberculosis, with only a delicate, tuneful cough to show the gravity of the situation?

Opera singers were like Rat Pack Era movie-stars—they dressed well, they smoked and drank, they seemed always to be alighting from planes surrounded by Rolleiflex-bearing photographers. I heard a great story about Franco Corelli, the “Prince of Tenors,” who, when irritated by a soprano lead, would have a pre-performance meal laced with garlic. Did wonders for the love scenes. To an eight-year old that sounded pretty darn smart.

Yet, if you ask many musicians, they will tell you that the average opera singer just isn't that bright. I had a conversation a few months ago with a classically trained instrumentalist who is now a cantor. In his conservatory, the pure vocalists were looked down upon as lesser beings. He used the example of a Stradivarius. If he were suddenly to hand me this most cherished of instruments, I would scrape the bow across the strings and produce a sound similar to an alley cat. Without learning how to play, how to sight-read, without hours and hours of daily practice, I would never have the ability to make music. That was a musician's burden–endless efforts towards perfection, and the instrumentalists paid it. But the singer, through some completely random mixing of DNA, almost as God's afterthought on a busy day, got the Strad implanted, and all she needed to do was open her mouth and beauty would pour out.

This “Strad Complex” is not confined to instrumentalists and vocalists. There is the brilliant scene in Amadeus when the desperate Constanze brings Mozart's music to Salieri. Look at F. Murray Abraham's face as he leafs through page after page—it's just eating at him. In the space of a few moments you see incredulity, envy, opportunism, but, above all, an anguish that can only come from being talented enough to grasp that, on his best, most creative day, he can't even approach what this silly little man-child writes as a first (and only) draft.

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Prelude and Exordium to the Ordination, Coronation, Inauguration, and Installation of the Grand High Singularity, Donald of Trump, Ruler of Universes Known, Unknown, Unimaginable and Phantasmagoric

by Bill Benzon

ScreenHunter_2438 Dec. 12 11.48What then are we to make of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, an event as preposterous as the title of this essay? However fervent his supporters were, and are, it appears that, come Election Day, not even Trump thought he would win. And now he’s stuck with having to govern. He’s caught the tiger by the tail and now he’s got to hold on to stay alive.

To be sure, I wasn’t at all happy voting for Hillary, for she seems to be more of the same. Obama is in many ways an admirable man and leader, but he’s also the Drone president and, though he did something about health care – Thank you, Obamacare! – he also seems to be out of the Clintonist triangulation Wall Street school of governance. Of course, Hillary is also a Clintonist, and even more of a hawk than Obama.

No, Hillary did not fill me with joy. I felt the Bern.

But Donald Trump? I cannot comprehend. Hence the term “singularity” in that preposterous title. The term is best known in the context of computing and artificial intelligence, where The Technological Singularity is when the machines become self-aware, bootstrap themselves into Superintelligence, and take over the joint, lock stock and barrel o’ monkeys. I think that’s nonsense, but the machines surely have been busy.

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The Electoral College Can and Must Stop Donald Trump

by Evan Edwards

Hamilton

Before getting to the argument for why the electoral college should reject Donald Trump on December 19th, let me begin with that which now seems to be more and more dangerous to risk: a bit of reasoning. What I want to establish, right off the bat, is why it is right to at least consider the possibility of putting someone else in the Oval Office; only after that can we begin to consider why it is right to actually do so.

We begin with two options with respect to the authority of the electoral college: either we accept it or reject it. If we reject it, then Clinton wins the election. By a long shot. The latest tally puts her ahead of Trump by at least 2.8 million votes, which makes this year’s outcome “the biggest gap between the popular vote and the electoral college in almost a century and a half.” As Atlantic author Ronald Brownstein put it, Trump “is on track to lose the popular vote by more than any successfully elected president ever.” But the question of whether or not we should change the way that elections work is one that we need to return to down the road. There is no reasonable situation in which between now and January 20th, the electoral college is be abolished and popular sovereignty is established through direct election. Since that is the case, let us, like Socrates in the Crito, “honor the decisions the polis makes,” and also its laws.

If we accept that the electoral college is what ultimately decides the highest office, then we have two further options: the college either votes with the dictates of tradition, choosing Trump, or it chooses otherwise, and rejects him in favor of someone else. There’s no reason not to do the latter, since there is no provision or law requiring that voters in the electoral college vote the way that their states did. It is, as I just said, simply traditional to do so. Trump’s campaign, and his followers, argue that to do so would be to “reject the will of the people.” But what “people” are they talking about? Does “the people” mean everyone in the nation or just a select subset? If it is the former, then to accept Trump would, in fact, be against the will of the people, since he did not win the vote of most actual people. They must mean, then, some other kind of “people.” We’ll come back to this.

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