![\"pence-and-trump\"](\"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/pence-and-trump.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Should Mike Pence become president, the Left will surely lead us in a national chorus of \u201cWhew! Back to normal.\u201d Correct? After all, our friends in the Democratic party have been saying for many months that President Trump is not normal, that he is uniquely unfit for office, that his brand of mendaciousness, volatility, poor character, and immaturity have no precedent in the Oval Office, that he is a Nazi sympathizer and even a fascist, that he is an extremist who exists outside the bounds of ordinary political disagreement.<\/p>\n
— Kyle Smith<\/a> in National Review Online<\/i>
\n(with gratitude to Yastreblyansky, who discusses the article here<\/a><\/i>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nTo believe in America is to believe in democracy, and to believe in democracy is to believe in democratic systems, meaning, constitutional systems (including all the correctional mechanisms\u2014the creation and enaction of laws vs.<\/i> the voters’ referenda and all of that). It\u2019s a sliding scale because any system can be gamed, its weaknesses found and exploited over time\u2014whether it\u2019s courtroom rules (where, say, computers allow impossibly fast retrieval of case law for objections, or where software-based or audio-recorded testimony can challenge the accuracy of stenographic court reporting) or basketball rules (where, over decades, the arrival of taller and taller players changes the timing of play so completely that the “shot clocks” and other new constraints have to evolve), the idea is that if you\u2019re going to do the thing at all, you have to stick with the template you started with. (The taller basketball players aren\u2019t the only biological<\/i> change that\u2019s relevant to how systems work\u2014increasing human longevity makes \u201clifetime appointments\u201d mean something very different now than it did 241 years ago, so those rules may eventually have to change, too.)<\/p>\n
Along that sliding scale, messing with voting machines or voter rolls, or taking advantage of bad ballots (as in Florida in 2000) is not<\/i> OK; breaking into your opponents\u2019 campaign headquarters is not<\/i> OK (as in Washington DC in 1972). Gerrymandering districts or refusing to hold confirmation hearings on a Supreme Court nominee are on the edge\u2014technically, that\u2019s working within the system, but it\u2019s still dirty pool. And, in general, technology changes it all, as with my previous examples of how Fascism or just bad democracy results from media shifts\u2014Leni Reifenstahl or Joseph Goebbels or Roger Ailes getting monstrous results from film, radio and television, or (just to argue the other way) local Democratic candidates getting \u201cunfair\u201d boosts in funding across state lines thanks to DailyKos.<\/p>\n