US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) doesn’t like ranked choice voting. It’s “a scam to rig elections,” he tweeted on August 31, after Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Republican Sarah Palin in a special election for US House in Alaska.  “60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat ‘won.'”

What he leaves out of that claim is that 60% of Alaska voters didn’t vote for “a” Republican. They split their first-choice votes between TWO Republicans, with Peltola getting more votes than either Palin or Nick Begich. Peltola was the second choice of enough voters to give her a majority in the “instant runoff” with Palin.

If this had been a standard “first past the post” election in which a candidate could achieve victory with a mere plurality, Peltola would have won that way too: She received 39.57% of first-round votes to Palin’s 30.79% and Begich’s 28.09%. The ranked choice “instant runoff” merely confirmed that a majority of Alaska’s voters, rather than a mere plurality, preferred Peltola to Palin.

Cotton’s sour grapes tweeting reflects his sense of party entitlement, not any opposition to “rigging elections.”

In point of fact, Cotton’s campaign went to great lengths to “rig” the 2020 US Senate election in Arkansas, sitting on negative opposition research about sole Democratic candidate Josh Mahony until after the filing deadline so that he could hopefully coast to victory in a two-way race with Libertarian Ricky Dale Harrington.

As it turned out, Cotton wasn’t able to clear 2/3 of the vote, even in a deep red state with only one under-funded third-party opponent whom he dared not debate or even acknowledge.

That outcome may explain why Cotton fears and loathes the idea of voters ranking their candidate preferences and making those preferences count,  instead of just heaving a sigh and ticking the box next to whatever supposedly lesser evil one of two parties presents for coronation.

The “major” parties’ shared monopoly on ballot access, debate inclusion, gerrymandering, etc., combines with “first past the post” plurality elections to guarantee political careerists like Tom Cotton the paychecks and power to which they consider themselves as entitled as George III is to his newly acquired throne, crown, and scepter.

Changes that better reflect voters’ priorities and make it more difficult for swamp creatures like Tom Cotton to cling to undeserved power are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As the world knows, the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8 at the age of 96, kicking off weeks of national mourning and ceremonies of transition.

Fewer noticed the passing, the day before, of American actress Marsha Hunt — whose film career began in 1935, and who starred opposite such names as John Wayne, Mickey Rooney, and Laurence Olivier before getting caught up in the McCarthy-era “blacklists” — at 104 years.

While these two women came from different countries and backgrounds, and took wildly different career paths, I’m struck by what they had in common with each other that few of the rest of us can even remember, let alone really understand.

They both lived through the Great Depression, World War Two, the Cold War, and the reorientation of global politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union (which was itself younger than Hunt!).

Most of us know those events only from literature and film (perhaps including Hunt’s None Shall Escape, the first movie about the Holocaust) or, if we’re lucky (and a little older than average ourselves), the oral recollections of our parents or grandparents.

The median global age is around 30. Half of humans now living can’t remember a world before the World Wide Web.

Marsha Hunt and Elizabeth II were adults before television became common and before most households even in “developed” countries had telephones, let alone telephones that could be carried around, take photos, and run sophisticated computer applications.

Between the two of them, they watched most of cultural, economic, political, and military water that ran under the bridge of the last century, a bridge we now find ourselves stranded on far side of without much living memory of where we came from.

Is “institutional memory” a substitute for the real thing? I don’t think so. While the Renaissance-era clothing and trumpet-blowing of Charles III’s ascent to the throne — or for that matter, a film retrospective of Hollywood’s “golden age” —  may be interesting and engaging, we remain trapped in the same tired old cycles of culture, politics, finance, and war that made the 20th century as horrific as it was innovative. We benefit from the advancements, but keep making the same mistakes.

Elizabeth II and Marsha Hunt may have been makers as well as observers of those mistakes, but we’re poorer for their passing: They’re no longer around to remember the mistakes for us, leaving us likely condemned to repeat them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Had I Known was the title of Barbara Ehrenreich’s final book before her passing on September 1, and indeed, the longtime investigative journalist never closed the book on what there was to learn.

In the introduction, Ehrenreich wrote that “I realized that there was something wrong with an arrangement whereby a relatively affluent person, such as I had become, could afford to write about minimum-wage jobs” — the subject that brought her fame and fortune as an author.

Ehrenreich’s reporting on the conditions of low-paying work in the bestselling exposé Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America was summed up by Roderick T. Long as a rebuke “to those on the right who heroise the managerial class and imagine that the main causes of poverty are laziness and welfare.”  As Charles W. Johnson noted at the time, Nickel and Dimed manages to also be “a frighteningly real response to those feel-good liberals who proclaim the virtues of voluntarily living in poverty and complain about how frustrated they feel with their Palm Pilots and SUVs.”

A decade later, Ehrenreich wrote in the afterword to a new edition of Nickel and Dimed that having assumed that “the standard liberal wish list” of more “public programs” was the way to “reduce poverty” had obscured how the same government increases poverty by criminalizing efforts of the poor to get by.

Had I Known includes a lauding of “informal networks” which “put the official welfare state, with its relentless suspicions and grudging outlays, to shame.”  Yet it also ascribes economic inequality to “the free-enterprise system” which “depends only on markets.” Ehrenreich suggests this is really a “free-president system” in which elected officials are “free of all responsibility for the economically anguished.” Yet her own muckraking shows an economy actually existing far closer to Paul Goodman’s term “un-free enterprise.”

In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Ehrenreich viewed a Templeton Foundation report’s rhetoric about how “free enterprise and other principles of capitalism can, and do, benefit the poor” as indicating “a foregone conclusion.”  While not “a right-wing conspiracy,” free-enterprise advocacy by groups like Templeton and the Association of Private Enterprise Education was inherently “conservative.”

Ehrenreich should not have been so sure if she had attended a panel at APEE’s conference the following year making the case for “free market anti-capitalism,” including contributions from both Johnson and Long. Unhindered by obstacles such as what Johnson calls “the government-supported stranglehold of big banks on capital” withholding funding for business outside of big business, market forces would not conserve entrenched power dynamics but dissolve them. Ehrenreich might even have recognized a comrade in Long when he concludes that “libertarianism is the proletarian revolution.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, USA Today, September 9, 2022
2. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, The Spectrum, September 9, 2022
3. What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, Yahoo! News, September 9, 2022
4. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, The Montana Standard, September 9, 2022
5. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, The Daily Star [Hammond, Louisiana], September 12, 2022
6. “What Ehrenreich Didn’t Know” by Joel Schlosberg, Williston, North Dakota Herald, September 26, 2022