Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba, and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for the president.
The Republican National Committee swung in to support her false claim that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, while Michigan election officials have tried to stop the certification of the vote.
It is wildly unlikely that their efforts can block Joe Biden from becoming president. But they may still do lasting damage to American democracy for a shocking reason: the moves have come from trusted insiders.
American democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.
This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.
When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.
Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.
It’s obvious how these kinds of claims damage Republican voters’ commitment to democracy. They will think that elections are rigged by the other side and will not accept the judgment of voters when it goes against their preferred candidate. Their belief that the Biden administration is illegitimate will justify all sorts of measures to prevent it from functioning.
It’s less obvious that these strategies affect Democratic voters’ faith in democracy, too. Democrats are paying attention to Republicans’ efforts to stop the votes of Democratic voters - and especially Black Democratic voters - from being counted. They, too, are likely to have less trust in elections going forward, and with good reason. They will expect that Republicans will try to rig the system against them. Mr. Trump is having a hard time winning unfairly, because he has lost in several states. But what if Mr. Biden’s margin of victory depended only on one state? What if something like that happens in the next election?
The real fear is that this will lead to a spiral of distrust and destruction. Republicans who are increasingly committed to the notion that the Democrats are committing pervasive fraud - will do everything that they can to win power and to cling to power when they can get it. Democrats - seeing what Republicans are doing will try to entrench themselves in turn. They suspect that if the Republicans really win power, they will not ever give it back. The claims of Republicans like Senator Mike Lee of Utah that America is not really a democracy might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
More likely, this spiral will not directly lead to the death of American democracy. The U.S. federal system of government is complex and hard for any one actor or coalition to dominate completely. But it may turn American democracy into an unworkable confrontation between two hostile camps, each unwilling to make any concession to its adversary.
We know how to make voting itself more open and more secure; the literature is filled with vital and important suggestions. The more difficult problem is this. How do you shift the collective belief among Republicans that elections are rigged?
Political science suggests that partisans are more likely to be persuaded by fellow partisans, like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who said that election fraud wasn’t a big problem. But this would only be effective if other well-known Republicans supported him.
Public outrage, alternatively, can sometimes force officials to back down, as when people crowded in to denounce the Michigan Republican election officials who were trying to deny certification of their votes.
The fundamental problem, however, is Republican insiders who have convinced themselves that to keep and hold power, they need to trash the shared beliefs that hold American democracy together.
They may have long-term worries about the consequences, but they’re unlikely to do anything about those worries in the near-term unless voters, wealthy donors or others whom they depend on make them pay short-term costs.
This essay was written with Henry Farrell, and previously appeared in the New York Times.
My entry yesterday had the title of The HTML <pre> element doesn't do very much, which as you'll notice has a HTML element named in plain text in the title. In the wake of posting the entry, I had a couple of people tell me that their feed reader didn't render the title of my entry correctly, generally silently omitting the '<pre>' (there was a comment on the entry and a report on Twitter). Ironically, this is also what happened in Liferea, my usual feed reader, although that is a known Liferea issue. However, other feed readers display it correctly, such as The Old Reader (on their website) and Newsblur (in the iOS client).
(I read my feed in a surprising variety of syndication feed readers, for various reasons.)
As far as I can tell, my Atom feed is correct. The raw text of my Atom feed for the Atom <title> element is:
<title type="html">The HTML &lt;pre> element doesn't do very much</title>
The Atom RFC describes the "type" attribute and its various interpretations in section 3.1.1, which helpfully even has an explicit example of '<title type="html">' in it. For 'type="html"', it says:
If the value of "type" is "html", the content of the Text construct MUST NOT contain child elements and SHOULD be suitable for handling as HTML. Any markup within MUST be escaped; for example, "<br>" as "<br>".
The plain text '<pre>' in my title is encoded as '&lt;pre>'. Decoded from Atom-encoded text to HTML, this gives us '<pre>', which is not HTML markup but an encoded plain-text '<pre>' with the starting '<' escaped (as it is rendered repeatedly in the raw HTML of this entry and yesterday's).
(My Atom syndication feed generation encodes '>' to '>' in an excess of caution; as we see from the RFC, it is not strictly required.)
Despite that, many syndication feed readers appear to be doing something wrong. I was going to say that I could imagine several options, but after thinking about it more, I can't really. I know that Liferea's issue apparently at least starts with decoding the 'type="html"' title attribute twice instead of once, but I'm not sure if it then decides to try to strip markup from the result (which would strip out the '<pre>' that the excess decoding has materialized) or if it passes the result to something that renders HTML and so silently swallows the un-closed <pre>. I can imagine a syndication feed reader that correctly decodes the <title> once, but then passes it to a display widget that expects encoded HTML instead of straight HTML. An alternate is that the display widget only accepts plain text and the feed reader made a mistake in the process of trying to transform HTML to plain text where it decodes entities before removing HTML tags instead of the other way around.
(Decoding things more times than you should can be a hard mistake to spot. Often the extra decoding has no effect on most text.)
Since some syndication feed readers get it right and some get it wrong, I'm not sure there's anything I can do to fix this in my feed. I've used an awkward workaround in the title of this entry so that it will be clear even in feed readers, but otherwise I'm probably going to keep on using HTML element names and other awkward things in my titles every so often.
(My titles even contain markup from time to time, which is valid
in Atom feeds but which gives various syndication feed readers some
degree of heartburn. Usually the markup is setting things in
'monospace
', eg here, although
every once in a while it includes links.)
Over at GQ, Lincoln Michel shares 12 Books to Read After Binge-Watching Black Mirror. Among them:
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Version Control by Dexter Palmer.
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang.
Earlier this month, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker shared 105 cultural artifacts that influenced the series, including some surprises like Fawlty Towers — “often in our episodes, someone is trapped at the center of a dilemma they never get out of, and that describes every episode of Fawlty Towers” — Airplane!, and Radiohead’s The National Anthem, as well as more familiar influences like 2001, The X-Files, and The Matrix. Only a handful of books on the list though, including:
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders.
On Killing by Dave Grossman.
On Twitter recently, Joshua Topolsky called Black Mirror “the show for people who’ve never read any science fiction”. Perhaps that’s because Brooker hasn’t really either?
Tags: Black Mirror books Charlie Brooker Joshua Topolsky Lincoln Michel TVSo I'm chewing over the idea of eventually returning to writing far future SF-in-spaaaace, because that's what my editors tell me is hot right now (subtext: "Charlie, won't you write us a space opera?"). A secondary requirement is that it has to be all new—no sequels to earlier work need apply. But I have a headache, because the new space opera turns 30 this year, with the anniversary of the publication of "Consider Phlebas" (or maybe "Schismatrix")—or even 40 (with the anniversary of the original "Star Wars"). There's a lot of prior art, much of it not very good, and the field has accumulated a huge and hoary body of cliches.
Some of you might remember the Evil Overlord's List, a list of all the generic cliche mistakes that Evil Overlords tend to make in fiction (16: I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."). I think that it might be a good idea to begin bolting together a similar list of the cliches to which Space Opera is prone, purely as an exercise in making sure that once I get under way I only make new and original mistakes, rather than recycling the same-old same-old.
This is not an exhaustive list—it's merely a start, the tip of a very large iceberg glimpsed on the horizon. And note that I'm specifically excluding the big media franchise products—Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, and similar—from consideration: any one of them could provide a huge cliche list in its own right, but I'm interested in the substance of the literary genre rather than in what TV and film have built using the borrowed furniture of the field.
List follows, below the cut.
Planetary civilizations
This subheading covers common cliches/mistakes made in discussing inhabited (Earthlike) planets and the people who live on them.
Space and cosmology
Common blunders in cosmology, planetography, orbital mechanics, and related.
Biology
Biology is complicated—so much so that many SF authors suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome in approaching the design of life-supporting planets.
Economics
Fingernails-on-blackboard time for me. (See also: Neptune's Brood)
Politics
Culture
Technology - space travel
Technology - Pew! Pew! Pew!
Aliens
What do you think I'm missing from the list?