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I disagree with this in the strongest possible terms.
Personally, I found his approach to discussing the election to be one of the biggest factors in transitioning me from a "I'll be back when woke calms down" Democrat to an actual Republican.
He was a good poster but on the topic of the election he went full Darwin+Lawyer fusion. I watched him to willfully misrepresent people, ignore good points and ignore and reframe to where he had more, he refused to accept the possibility that concerns were in any way valid and so on. He acted like a trial lawyer in court. That can be convincing but it's hollow.*
It was also tremendously inappropriate.
One of the major points I (and others) was making is that this not a situation where you can rules lawyer your way out of it. Democracy requires consensus, you need to be persuasive and to make everyone feel like the elections are free and fair.
You needed to allow audits without complaint and go "see, this was fine" you needed to patch some of the common sense problems with the way the election was run so it doesn't happen again. He refused to engage with these ideas and the Dems refused to do these things and now we have a situation where both side barely accept when they lose and the fabric of our country was hanging on by a thread.
Ymeskhout chose this hill to die and crashed out over it. He was also wrong, but factually and meaningfully.
*And later we know him to be wrong about some matters of fact.
You can't persuade everyone of anything, so this is just the heckler's veto writ large. And your own view can just be flipped, if persuading people is the only measure.
Democracy does require consensus, so YOU (the generic you, not your own personal self) need to be persuasive and to make everyone believe the elections were NOT free and fair. If you cannot convince enough people, then they stand.
See how that works? Republicans pushed for mail in voting when they thought it would help them, then flipped to calling the laws they themselves passed as being unconstitutional (see PA, below), those are not the actions of people trying to build consensus and persuade people objectively that the election was rigged. They are the actions of political partisans seeking advantage.
So they were not persuasive. They failed to persuade the majority the election was rigged. Time and time again expansive claims were walked back. If you want to blame anyone, blame those who claimed they had rock solid proof repeatedly then demonstrated they were untrustworthy. As much as you think Democrats need to persuade you the elections were fair, you also need to persuade them that they weren't. And from Sydney Powell to Rudy Giuliani, to Dan Moul a terrible job was done.
You may be examining this objectively and deciding what would help you trust the process better, but unfortunately many of your fellow travelers were not. So the consensus stood, because your side failed to persuade them.
"Act 77 also had the support of almost all of the Republican state representatives in the Pennsylvania House, including state Rep. Dan Moul, a Republican from Adams County who joined the lawsuit over the mail-in voting law in 2021.
"So my bad. I should've checked the constitutionality of that big bill," Moul says.
Moul is one of 11 Republicans in the state House who are claiming in the lawsuit that the mail-in voting provisions in Act 77 that they voted for three years ago are unconstitutional.
"We pass bills all the time. Do we go back and check every single one to make sure it stays within the confines of the constitution? We'd never get anything done if we did that," Moul says."
Why should we trust Republicans on this matter who vote for a law (because they thought it would help rural turn out and thus Republicans), then "realize" it is in fact unconstitutional and whose excuse is basically: I just voted it for it, I didn't check it was actually in line with the Constitution I was sworn to uphold, right after it becomes a big deal about giving Democrats an advantage? Suspicious isn't it? Almost enough to persuade you that it wasn't anything to do with fairness or election security, just who got the advantage.
And finally. If your argument is that consensus must be reached then:
"Recent polling shows roughly 28% to 36% of the overall U.S. adult population express ongoing doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election"
It was. The majority of people do not believe the election was rigged. They were persuaded. It can't be a requirement to persuade everyone, especially when it becomes a partisan issue. 18% of Americans think the moon landings were faked. 20% think the government is microchipping them. A third of Americans think the FDA has a bona fide cure for cancer they are hiding.
Persuading everyone simply cannot be the standard. And if it were, well your side also failed to meet that standard, significantly more so in fact. That's quite a lot of persuading that still needs to be done for your consensus.
"Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?"
I'm not sure what this has to do with the heckler's veto, which has to do with a 3rd party preventing 1 party from communicating to another consenting party by physically impeding the communication. This seems more akin to a tyranny of the majority kind of thing, which is also heavily misused (since, in a democracy, a majority must be tyrannical sometimes, almost definitionally) and I'm not sure really describes this situation accurately either, though it's more fitting.
Yeah it's maybe not perfect. But if you must convince every single person the election is legitimate, then one person (the heckler equivalent) is able to unilaterally undermine the legitimacy of the election. Much like a single heckler can unilaterally silence a speaker. It's not quite tyranny of the majority either, I agree.
"In discourse, a heckler's veto is a situation in which a party who disagrees with a speaker's message is able to unilaterally trigger events that result in the speaker being silenced."
The issue is that the "in discourse" is a load-bearing portion of what makes the heckler's veto negative. Because discourse is just consenting people talking, rather than imposing their coercive force on others. It makes sense that there are other standards when coercion is involved, and certainly perfection ought never be the standard. I think there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on any value between 50.0000001% and 99.9999999% though.
I would certainly agree with that!
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In a democracy the response needs to be "sure let's calmly and carefully audit the election results to prove things to you." The response was anything but, and in some ways was catastrophically not that. The Democrats acted in a way that was indistinguishable from how you would act if you did do something wrong.
None of what you wrote changes that fact, and much of the negative state of America in the ensuing years was caused by refusing to act as a basic transparent democracy, presumably because orange man bad.
Secondarily, if your penetration tester reveals flaws, you don't refuse to fix the flaws just because nobody has taken advantage of them yet. That's asinine. Meanwhile we still have California trying to act as shadily as possible.
We've had numerous examples of people acting shadily in elections in America that resulted in jail time, and some major instances of people acting in a way that most people agree was sus.
The refusal of Dems to say "okay we won but let's change things so everyone is more comfortable next time" may be the single most important thing behind the future death of America.
I feel like that might be overstating it, though I have no real strong argument for anything else being a more important thing other than maybe AI being the one most important thing behind the future death of [all nations]. But it's certainly an important point, and I'm not sure why other Dems don't get this, other than hubris, ego, and blindness by hatred. It seems obvious to me that, for my party to be the party that actually deserves to win, it needs to actually be better in some meaningful sense than the other party, and for them to be better in any meaningful sense requires having enough humility to open oneself to attacks of cheating and fraud and other bad things, taking those seriously, and correcting ourselves based on that, especially when they come from our opponents whom we've judged as being evil or whatever. This is abusable, but also, the reverse is also far more abusable.
Though the saying "the way you do anything is the way you do everything" isn't strictly true in every case, I do believe that when it comes to ideological thinking, it's almost always true. The only way we can have any confidence that our proposed policies are truly better than the other guys' proposed policies - instead of merely policies that we've convinced ourselves is better - is by coming to those policies in a humble, self-critical way (necessary, not sufficient, though), which we can only have any confidence we did if we also treat political attacks from our enemies in a humble, self-critical way. The idea of crushing my enemies in order to forward policies that I've genuinely convinced myself is better than the other guy's just because I genuinely consider the other guys evil seems just completely obviously far more evil than that to me.
My pitch here is that the worst about Trump is and always has been the way that people respond to him. The response concerns about elections created an cavalcade of disasters - selling out objectivity and professionalism to oppose Trump, BLM Riots and the inequality in response to Jan 6, accepting the way that tech and public health put fingers on scales (and that includes governmental agencies messing with the election), media collusion, the tremendous failure that was the Biden administration (and the way that the administration should be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics and just isn't). All of these things are about Trump, but second run is the place that most generated some of them.
America in the mind of many isn't really a democracy anymore after that election and I think it's going to be a long time before the loser accepts the results again.
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As did the Republicans as I showed you an example of.
In a democracy run by rationalists with good faith politicians and rational voters, the responses should be "let's audit" I agree. That is not the world we are in. So it is not the response you should expect. Because it is not what Republicans would do in return as they demonstrated perfectly. That is the the framework everyone's actions need to be interpreted within.
But your point was all about the fact that persuading had to be done, not anything beyond that. And Republicans failed at that harder than Democrats did.
And you may well not fix flaws! They might be too expensive to fix or have other trade offs. Remember there are two competing axes of voting legitimacy, maximizing legitimate voters and minimizing illegitimate voters. Those trade off against each other. There is no objectively correct answer. It's a values choice. And within our non-good faith framework, Democrats would be crazy to do anything to reduce turn out even fractionally if they think high turn out helps them. Likewise Republicans would be crazy to do the opposite.
As PA demonstrated, Republicans took an act they erroneously thought would help them, then flipped on it as soon as they discovered it would not. That is the framework our democracy operates within. No-one is operating in good faith. They are all acting for what will help them most. Expecting the Democrats to rise above when Republicans do not is an isolated demand for rigor.
Your good faith framework might be nice (I'd surely prefer it!) but it is not the world we are in and both Democratic and Republican politicians need to act accordingly. And they largely do.
I think you are massively over-estimating the "future death of America" issue here. Democracy will continue, politicians will continue to be conniving rats (in my direct experience of working with national level politicians!) and that the best we can do is set one group of conniving rats against the other such that they broadly even out, by attempting to out connive each other.
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I feel like I see this kind if application of rules-lawyering in a lot of inappropriate contexts, such as interpersonal relationships. As if there were some 3rd party judge or jury observing the proceedings who everyone is trying to convince, rather than the reality that it's just the other person or people who you need to convince. You can't rules-lawyer your way into someone apologizing to you, forgiving you, being grateful to you, liking you, liking someone else, disliking someone else, etc. You need to actually understand what it would take to convince that specific person and do what it takes to do it, including sacrificing values you might hold sacred, if that's what it takes. Or just understand that you can't do the convincing and stop wasting everyone's time and energy.
Though maybe that's my secular atheistic upbringing speaking, and in extremely religious societies where everyone follows the same religion, this rules-lawyering is both effective and healthy. Maybe that's why this tendency to rules-lawyer is so common; our brains might have evolved to survive in extremely religious societies where everyone can appeal to some god or another to convince others.
I find it irritating and honestly sometimes pathetic on the internet (it's almost always not intended, just the rationalist personality style, but it often comes across as "I'm afraid to debate as a debate, so I want to set the exact frame of the argument exactly where my evidence is strongest, declare the win condition which is easiest for me to achieve, then put every burden of proof I can on you, and declare victory if I can claim I keep the 10% of my argument I choose as my win condition"). Note that this is also how ratbetting works, frame control is often much more important than the substance of the bet. It doesn't help that I grew up around lawyers who tended to see that adversarial mode as implicitly a lesser form of lawyering compared to understanding relationships, pragmatics, iterated games, etc. In comparison, trying to "win" a conversation is a little gauche.
What I do understand is that a full debate, where both sides are fully allowed to contest the frame, takes a lot more work on the internet. You have to write instead of speaking, you have to deal with the inherent difficulty of conveying full meaning via posts, and you lack a direct relationship to your audience/interlocutor. Still, people here should recognize the difference between the two, that one is a lower mode than the other, and that winning or losing a rules-lawyering debate really doesn't matter very much unless the specific question of fact is seriously prior-shifting, which it very rarely is.
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