On the Saturday night following the presidential inauguration, after the women’s march had ended, my doorbell rang. On my porch stood a pleasant young woman who had just come from the march. I could tell because she had wedged her protest sign between her coat and her backpack. Her head blocked the top three lines of the sign, but I could see that the fourth line contained the name Trump.

She said she was a high school senior and named a college in Louisiana she would be attending in the fall. She and her classmates were raising money for a school trip and found themselves 47 dollars short of their goal. As she made her pitch, complete with illustrations held to a clipboard, she repeated that number several times. Her situation was transparently genuine. A non-round number, a prime in fact, repeated several times had to be the real deal.

I don’t like dashing the hopes of sweetly dispositioned young women, but I declined to contribute. As she turned to leave, I could see that the back of her sign was identical to the front. It was a clever piece of work, printed in bulk but designed to look as if the sign had been hand-lettered with grease paint. The bottom of the sign read “F- – – Trump.” Both words were spelled out in bold capital letters.

I once attended a garden show at a place called the Scottish Rite Temple. I have always had a weakness for the Scots and the mystery of a temple where the story of their rites might be told was an added attraction. The temple contained several large rooms, each devoted to a different type of flowering plant.

After a time, I was in the Fuchsia room. There were several other devotees, including a docent. However, the person in the room that I best remember was a woman who was the most enthusiastic fan of a plant species I have ever encountered.

The name of this plant is pronounced FYOOsha, but a pedant would note that this pronunciation is inaccurate. The plant is named for a botanist, Herr Doktor Leonhardt Fuchs[1].  The proper German pronunciation of his name rhymes somewhere between “books” and “spooks”, the “ch” making a sound closer to an x than to a k.

When it came to pronouncing the name of this plant, the woman was just enough of a pedant to recognize that the standard pronunciation was technically incorrect. She dropped the “Y” sound in the first syllable, but she made a fresh error. Where you, dear reader, and I see the letter “h” in the middle of the word Fuchsia, she saw the letter “k”. She pronounced the first syllable the same way the high school student at my door would have pronounced it before speaking Donald Trump’s name.

The woman whose story I tell was transported by the Fuchsia flower. She spoke to the docent at length, describing the number, variety, and beauty of her Fuchsia plants. Her voice was very loud and could be heard even in the distant rooms where roses and dahlias were displayed. I still carry with me the image of fellow visitors to the Scottish Rite Temple flinching reflexively every time this enthusiastic woman shouted out the name of her favorite flower.

Times change. The flower lovers of yesteryear who winced when they heard that pungent monosyllable have been replaced by marchers who use it to speak truth to power.

The news reports of the January 21 D.C .march gave the impression that the main point of the speakers and participants was to join that expressive word to the Trump name as often as possible and to attack him personally, just as he attacked people on a personal level during the campaign. He had held certain women up to ridicule for their appearance, and some of the speakers paid him back in kind.

All fair enough. If he insists on handing out personal insults, he should expect to receive them in return. But do the protestors intend to do anything other than deride Mr. Trump’s distinctive appearance? After the fun of attaching his name to their favorite expletive, what comes next?

In the weeks since the inauguration, it appears that the original obscenity-laden line of attack will continue. But it has been supplemented by two additional ones. These are the two Rs: Resistance and Russia.

It’s a curiosity that the Resistance seems to have more power than those it resists. The Resistance can stop traffic on freeways, but the targets of the Resistance have no such power. The Resistance decides when airports will be shut down.

The Resistance has power over commerce. It required retailers to drop the Ivanka Trump line. Nordstrom obeyed orders but felt just enough discomfort that they offered the explanation that her stuff wasn’t selling. There is reason to doubt this. They had to cancel an existing order. And after her line was dropped, it has sold well on its own. None of that is to the point, however. No retailer has any obligation to offer a reason for carrying or not carrying any item or line. Any store, whether or not acting at the direction of the Resistance, has the unlimited authority to drop any line they choose. But the same privilege does not apply to those who do not have the approval of the Resistance. Bakers, florists, caterers who decline to provide their services to a same-sex wedding have been successfully sued and in some cases financially ruined. They have no authorization to resist.

The Resistance gets to decide who can speak and who can’t. Charles Murray, a careful, humane scholar of libertarian leanings who relies on facts, data, and peer-reviewed studies to reach conclusions that his critics find objectionable, is shouted down and physically assaulted at Middlebury College. In reporting on the incident, the Associated Press, little more than a stenographic service for their political allies, has the gall to refer to Mr. Murray as a “white nationalist” (a term earlier applied to him by the Southern Poverty Law Center). Incidentally, before Mr. Murray appeared at Middlebury, some 450 alums of the college sent a letter to the administration objecting to the invitation. Various faculty members had sent a letter of their own. Will any member of the Resistance suffer any serious consequence as a result of this incident? Will any member of the Resistance be asked even to provide the facts and data that demonstrate Mr. Murray’s errors?

I have never read anything written by Milo Yiannopoulos, so I don’t know why the Resistance found him objectionable. He was the subject of a riot here in Seattle and then a few days later in Berkeley. The Berkeley police stood by as members of the Resistance broke plate glass and committed mayhem. In Marxist ideology, the police are the enforcers of norms imposed by the ruling class. So, who was in charge?

Have any speakers favored by the Resistance been shouted down? As a politician who should be much favored by the Resistance once asked, Who/Whom? Who has the power and who is on the receiving end? The Resistance is filling the “Who” role comfortably.

And that brings me to Russia. To put cards on the table, I think the case that Russia affected the outcome of the 2016 election is tissue thin to the point of being laughable. The word “hack” gets used very loosely in this context. Assuming for the sake of argument that the active parties were Russian state agents, what they “hacked” were the servers of the Democratic National Committee and various prominent Democratic operatives. What they accomplished through their hack was the publication of private email correspondence connected to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, but nothing more than that.

There is no suggestion that the “hackers” caused illegitimate votes to be cast or that they got into the vote-counting systems and affected the outcome that way. As President Obama pointed out two weeks before the November 2016 election, the U.S. voting system is operated at the county level. The system’s mechanics are spread so diffusely across the landscape that it would be impossible for even the most stealthy and sophisticated hacker to affect the result nationwide through remote means.

Local means are something else. Naturally, results can appear questionable in extremely close elections. When the result hinges on a few hundred votes out of millions cast, we start looking at hanging chads, asking about missing ballot papers, looking into the sudden appearance of previously missing ballot boxes. Witness Florida 2000 (presidential election); Washington state 2004 (gubernatorial election); Minnesota 2008 (U.S. Senate).

When the difference is measured in tens of thousands of votes as it was in the three states in 2016 where Trump broke through the “blue wall” – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – the likelihood that the result is due to computer hacking drops practically speaking to zero, whether we are talking about fraud in the casting of votes or in counting them. That’s not to say that fraud doesn’t occur, only that it isn’t achieved through computer hacking operations conducted from remote locations.[2]

There appears to be almost universal agreement that what the “hackers” did to influence the election was to steal and then publish emails sent to or from various Democratic agents and operatives, some of them employees of the DNC, others part of the Clinton campaign, still others members of the press or media. The hackers did not create fake correspondence that they falsely attributed to those agents and operatives. They stole the private correspondence of these individuals and published it verbatim.

What was the impact of the hack? While no candidate obtained a majority of the popular vote nationwide, Mrs. Clinton received more votes in aggregate than did Donald Trump. The problem for Mrs. Clinton was that millions of those votes were obtained in states that she had already won easily. Nevertheless, the hack has to be deemed a failure. The candidate that the Russians are said to have favored received fewer votes nationwide than the one the Russians were supposedly trying to defeat.[3]

Trump won because he was able to put together narrow victories in Ohio – a state that no winning Republican candidate has ever lost – and Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. George H. W. Bush carried Pennsylvania and Michigan in 1988. No Republican has carried Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin since then. Hence, the “blue wall”. Who predicted that result? Some people in the Trump campaign, perhaps. Where are the independent pundits who saw it coming? Is it likely that the Kremlin’s experts on American elections figured their intervention would be particularly effective in those three key states, enough so that they could concede a 2.8 million vote advantage nationwide to the woman whose presidency, we are asked to believe, they feared and wanted to avoid?

Did Mr. Trump win those states and did Mrs. Clinton lose those states because of the “hack” – the release of stolen emails? The two demographic groups that appear to have been decisive in those three states were African-American voters and blue-collar white voters. African-American turnout in 2016 was slightly less than 90% of that in 2012. Of those African-Americans who voted, about 8% voted for Donald Trump, which is up from the 4% or so who voted for Mitt Romney. So, Trump received a slightly higher percentage of a decidedly lower total number of votes from African-American voters. A Democratic advantage was reduced.

White blue-collar voters tend to vote for Democrats. When they went for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, they were called “Reagan Democrats”. After him, they went back to being just plain Democrats. They were important parts of the formerly impregnable blue wall. This time, they favored the Republican. Theirs is an economic interest often persuaded by protectionist rhetoric. (“I can sell you the exact same thing, but at a higher price.”) Possibly Mr. Trump’s protectionist message seemed more genuine than did Secretary Clinton’s.

The question then is: Did African-American voters stay home because they were disgusted by the DNC shenanigans disclosed by the “hackers”? Did blue collar workers rally to Donald Trump because they were fed up with reporters submitting their work to the Clinton campaign before publication? Did voters from either group decide that they could not forgive the DNC for ending the candidacy of a 74-year old Vermont Socialist[4] with an outer-borough accent that puts Donald Trump’s to shame? I think it’s fair to say that the publication of DNC emails was not important to the Trump victory in the three key states.

We must wait to see if the Democratic party, with all of the power and influence from academia, Hollywood, and new outlets behind it, can organize an opposition based on more than what we have seen so far. The opposition group that has had an impact so far is the Freedom Caucus in the House (fka the Republican Study Committee). Their behavior demonstrates that Republicans appear to be more comfortable as an opposition party. Facing significant opportunities for governmental reform, the Republicans seem not to know what to do when they win, even as the Democrats appear to gain power by refusing to recognize that they lost. Events will unfold and we will, I hope, witness an opposition based on something more than what we have seen so far. There is plenty to oppose. But it’s going to take more than name-calling, expletives, and broken glass to accomplish anything.

 

[1] Had the good doctor been an Englishman instead of a German, his name would have been Leonard Fox. Mark Twain notes that many German names mean something. When Twain was studying German, he read a newspaper article that said in German that a fierce tigress had eaten an unfortunate fir forest (Tannenwald). Twain was about to protest that such a thing was impossible when he learned that Tannenwald was a man’s name.

[2] During the Michigan recount back in November and December, votes from 248 precincts in Detroit were not recounted due to irregularities. The number of votes originally counted in those precincts was greater than the number of votes cast. Those precincts gave some 95% of their ballots to Hillary Clinton. This kind of outcome is not unheard of in America’s large cities and is attributable to conventional methods older and less sophisticated than computer hacking.

[3] A couple of results underscore how fragile is the claim that Mrs. Clinton’s national vote plurality tells us anything. The aggregate tally in California and New York favored Mrs. Clinton by some six million votes. Yet her nationwide plurality was roughly 2.8 million votes. In other words, taking the 48 states apart from New York and California as an aggregate, Mr. Trump had a plurality of some 3.2 million. Data found at: http://cookpolitical.com/story/10174. Taking a closer look, subtract five counties from the total – New York, Bronx, Queens, and Kings counties in New York (that is, New York City minus Staten Island) and Los Angeles County in California – and Mr. Trump had a 526,000-aggregate vote plurality in the remaining 3000+ counties. Data found at: http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president.

[4] An inaccurate label, surely. His philosophy seems to be distribution rather than socialism, properly understood. Incidentally, I have read that his wife formed a firm to broker all of the advertising purchased by his campaign. Brokers receive a 15% commission. Redistribution has to start somewhere, and that might as well be at home.