Episode Details

[Apologies for the audio - it was raining pretty hard here and the power kept cutting off]

“We had to do something [in Bush v. Gore], because countries were laughing at us. France was laughing at us.” ― Antonin Scalia, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

I grew up in the 1980s thinking my vote didn’t matter. I became an “election denier” because that is what the Democrats have always been. I grew up with cynicism and mild hatred of the government. My childhood was spent living through the last time the Democrats took a major fall, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan with Watergate and Carter in between.

Democrats felt hopeless until Bill Clinton came along in 1992. He was the first Democrat to serve two full terms since FDR. But by 1999, the cynicism was back because Bill Clinton had been impeached, the party humiliated, and our last best hope hung on the Vice President, Al Gore, the man with no charisma to speak of.

I was one of those angry Democrats in 2000 who watched the Supreme Court stop counting ballots that handed the presidency to George W. Bush. We weren’t thinking about the reasons Gore might have lost, like gun control. We blamed the Court, and we blamed Florida. We blamed Ralph Nader. We blamed everyone but ourselves.

The Supreme Court was corrupt, we believed. So were all of those operatives in the GOP that rigged the election for Bush. A rigged election would result in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If only the Supreme Court hadn’t “selected” Bush.

I remember Oliver Stone’s film Nixon, his best, which suggested that Nixon had JFK assassinated so he could one day rise. And rise he did. To Stone, though, that caused the Vietnam war and all the ravages that followed. That is some election-denying. Nixon himself had believed that the 1960 election had been rigged. After all, he and Trump are still the only two people to have won Florida, Iowa, and Ohio and lost the presidency. Nixon chose not to object to any of it. Trump chose to fight.

Back then, the Left felt Nixon’s win was so destructive that it ended everything for them: their optimism and their counter-culture revolution. Warren Beatty made the film Shampoo to suggest that they were all involved in silly narcissistic games before Nixon won and the world ended. They all blamed Nixon for Vietnam. But they also resented him for ending the 1960s for good.

Coming out of the 2000 election, our main complaint was that Gore gave in too easily and quickly. Many of us thought he should have dug his heels in and fought harder and that we all should have been more insistent in objecting. That’s another word for protests. We didn’t because we were still burned from the landslide loss in 1972, blamed on the the Left’s anti-war protests.

Some protests started around that time, like against the World Trade Organization. But it wouldn’t be until the $700 billion bailout that a whole protest movement would rise, Occupy Wall Street on the Left, and eventually, the Tea Party would form on the Right. Something was happening that would only grow as more people got online and were more connected than ever before.

By 2016, we were again in a protesting state of mind, and we believed America belonged not to Trump, not to his supporters. But to us.

Anyone who pretends like we accepted Trump’s win is lying. There has never been an elected president with that many forces working together to take him out of office. Never. There have never been worldwide protests against the election of a US president. There have never been the kinds of violent protests we had in this country over an elected president.

We didn’t hold “not my president” rallies and pay investigators to see if Russians had hacked voting machines. We never had nervous breakdowns, we never had so many marches. Clearly, we all viewed T