September 1, 2023
The entire case against Trump and his fellow defendants in the 2020 election-interference prosecutions can’t even get off the ground unless it is more or less evidently true that the election was not stolen.
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The fact of the matter is that it’s not unreasonable to believe that the election was stolen, and consequently it isn’t possible for it to be (more or less) evidently true that the election was not stolen. That is why the case against Trump and his collaborators necessarily collapses, whether or not a corrupted legal system recognizes this. There is no case against Trump and his confreres insofar as it’s reasonable to believe that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trying to stop an apparently stolen election is what everyone should do. There is no reason to bend over and be reamed — or, if you will, penced — in the name of comity. Social peace is a spurious ideal if it’s based on lies and election-stealing. Trump knows that, even if his enemies in the Deep State pretend not to.
How malevolent is the Deep State? The Trump indictments give us the answer: malevolent enough to torture logic itself in the pursuit of power and social control. Informal logic warns of the danger to good reasoning of certain logical fallacies. One of these is the fallacy of begging the question — that is, of assuming what must be proved. This fallacy often arises in philosophical analyses, which suggests it occupies a central place among logical fallacies — because even philosophers are frequently foiled by it. It’s not, therefore, to be lightly dismissed. Quite the contrary: question-begging is a major deformation of reasoning. The Deep State may be willing to run roughshod over it, but we shouldn’t be.
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Yet, begging the question is the central feature of the idea that it’s unreasonable to believe the 2020 election was stolen — given the pre-election irregularities, the bellwether county anomalies, and the unbelievable (in the sense of Stalinesque) voting ratios in the ballots arriving in the several days after Election Day.
It so happens that there is a contra-Trump position that is not question-begging. This is that it’s reasonable to believe that the election was not stolen. It is epistemically, and of course socially, respectable to believe this. We may think it’s an error or mistake to believe the 2020 election was not stolen, but, all the same, it’s a reasonable belief, one that is not remotely question-begging.
An analogy can help us to see what’s wrong with the whole case against Trump. It will be fruitful to consider it in some detail.
The analogy is to men competing in women’s sports. Certain biological males who “think” they are women are very anxious to compete with women in various sports. One can foresee a number of difficulties. These have to do with the fact that human females aren’t as fast or as strong as males. Now consider the relative plausibility or implausibility of the following three propositions:
- It’s unreasonable to believe that biological males competing in women’s sports is unfair.
- It’s reasonable to believe that biological males competing in women’s sports is unfair.
- It’s reasonable to believe that biological males competing in women’s sports is not unfair.
The first proposition is question-begging. Those who embrace it are, in fact, fanatics. Committing a logical fallacy appears to be a necessary condition of the intellectual blindness that makes them fanatics. The second proposition is that of conservatives. The third proposition is that of any moderate transgender advocates who might be out there — no one has seen them. Perhaps they are too cowed to speak out.
Now, since Trump’s adversaries clearly take for granted that it is downright unreasonable to believe that the 2020 election was stolen, they should, one and all, support the analogous first proposition above, the fanatical one. So here’s a question for William Barr and Steve Calabresi (the co-founder of the Federalist Society), both of whom are broadly supportive of the Trump indictments: Do you think it’s unreasonable to believe that biological males competing in women’s sports is unfair to women? If not, why not? After all, based on your public declarations in the aftermath of the Trump indictments, you apparently think it’s unreasonable to believe that the election was stolen, as opposed to merely thinking it’s reasonable to believe that the election was not stolen. The former, but not the latter, commits the fatal fallacy of begging the question. (The latter is also much harder to get any anti-Trump traction out of, boo-hoo.)
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It’s a good question. Since the government didn’t seriously investigate the 2020 election, we aren’t able to know — in the sense of having a justified true belief — whether the election was stolen or not. And yet the unreasonableness postulate, in the proposition that Barr and Calabresi implicitly embrace (as confirmed by their own public speech), just is the claim that we do more or less know that the election was not stolen — that it’s unreasonable, indeed, to think otherwise.
But why aren’t they taking the exact same approach to transgenderism and women’s sports as they are taking to Trump and the 2020 election — assuming they do, in fact, oppose that particular aspect of transgenderist lunacy? To ask the question is to answer it. It’s because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The analogy seems pretty exact in its essentials. To be sure, there are differences in the two things analogized — the election of 2020 and biological males competing in women’s sports — but they are relatively minor differences. The analogy shows how feckless and unreasoning is the case against Trump and his associates and their efforts to resist the rubber-stamping of an arguably fraudulent election.
One good thing about the Trump indictments is that the contours of the Deep State are really starting to become clear. It now appears that a nihilistic irrationality, typified by radical unreasoning in the law, is at the heart of the Deep State. It’s not just Weberian bureaucratization, not at all.
It was Abraham Lincoln in a speech in 1854 who said, “Our [civic] republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust.” He was referring to the national effect of a great travesty of reasoning by the Democratic Party in regard to slavery, and which Lincoln rightly said would grievously damage the nation. The speech was about the disastrous repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which the increasingly intemperate and fanatical Democrats of the time unswervingly supported.
But hear the words of Lincoln that immediately followed: “Let us repurify it [i.e., the republican robe]. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”
Image: Fulton County Sherrif’s Department
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