Two former attorneys general take to the opinion page of the Washington Post to plead with Americans to keep the peace and with political leaders not to stoke or condone politically-motivated violence:

Over the years, in the course of disputing matters of law and policy, each of us has said critical, even harsh, things about the other. Please do not conclude from our joint authorship of this article that either of us would retract or even reconsider any of those past statements.

Far from it.

Rather, we write jointly because we would like to continue to disagree the way we have in the past, the way Americans generally have in the past. That is: within a political system in which winners of elections get to execute their policies for a prescribed period, so long as those policies conform to the law. Within a system in which winners of elections do not face the threat of societal and political paralysis as they attempt to govern.

concluding this section with

Of course, the First Amendment guarantees people the right to demonstrate their views to their fellow citizens and to try to garner support for the changes they would like to see. But it assuredly does not give them the right to use those demonstrations to impose their will on fellow citizens. It does not give them the right to act out the view that if they cannot get the political outcome they want, their fellow citizens should not be able to lead peaceful lives.

Carrying signs and chanting slogans is completely acceptable. Throwing rocks, setting fires, or blocking streets is not. Following buses belonging to political campaigns, honking horns and shouting opposing political slogans is normal raucous American politics. Running them off the road is not. Neither is calling 911 if all they did was be there honking horns and shouting slogans.

They then transition to the second part of their message:

This should not require saying, but we feel compelled to say it: nor should our political leaders stoke or condone violence.

It is not only violence that can undo us. Even before Election Day, disagreements about how to count votes have generated legal disputes, and of course those disputes have gone to the courts. But there is a difference between taking legal disputes to court when necessary and conducting a campaign of litigation that obstructs more than it resolves. We strongly agree that votes must be counted fairly and voices heard in a way that preserves peace and promotes confidence in our system.

I completely agree with that but, if you believe that the problems are limited to a single party, you are looking at the present through partisan blinders. For every instance of a political leader of one party condoning political violence I could produce an example of a political leader of the other party condoning it. That’s what makes the present situation so fraught. Each side is attempting to use whatever means necessary to work its will. Each side sees their own supporters as, to use a heinous phrase, “mostly peaceful”.

I don’t agree with their conclusion:

Finally, there is the insidious danger posed by charges that have nothing to support them other than an accuser’s invitation to us to hallucinate evil. The widespread distrust of our institutions and processes that such rhetoric encourages can paralyze us just as surely as violence or the uncertainty generated by a torrent of litigation.

The House spent the first part of the year impeaching President Trump on little more than “an accuser’s invitation to us to hallucinate evil”. While there is plenty of smoke, no one to date has been successful in producing fire. Where were they during that process?

I would welcome pledges from candidates not to appeal the results of elections to the courts. Can you imagine them making them? Me, neither.

And I don’t believe that political institutions deserve trust by default as some sort of birthright as they imply in that second sentence. Quite to the contrary they should distrusted by default and must earn trust by consistent probity, fairness, and political impartiality. Institutions not limited to governmental ones but extending to education and journalism have been squandering the trust they had built up over decades. Trump has abetted that loss of confidence but it is the institutions themselves that are at fault.

Update

Advice from Karl Markowicz at USA Today on what to do if your candidate loses:

There’s a good chance your presidential candidate will lose on Tuesday. It doesn’t matter if you support Donald Trump or Joe Biden, your chance of disappointment is approximately the same. You hear people on your side wonder: What will we do if our guy loses?

Here’s what you will do.

You will wake up the next day, or whenever the results are finally confirmed, and be sad. You will feel let down. You thought you knew your fellow Americans and then they went and did this! How could they?

Read the whole thing. While I think that most Americans will follow that advice, it’s a large enough country that some will not. How numerous “some” are and what they’re willing to do is what’s got people worried.

I want to commend a post by David Anderson at The Moderate Voice to your attention. Here’s its opening:

The incredibly misguided 1619 Project and the new religious movement of “wokeism” has finally jumped the shark. Yes, fellow liberals: we have our own deplorables now.

The whole “White Fragility” nonsense has its own original sin, its saints (St. Di Angelo, St. Kendi, St. T.-N. Coates and other grievance grifters), its own dogma, its metaphoric witch burning, twitter pile-ons and career cancellations of the “problematic”.

Outraged? Keep reading and try cancelling me. Go ahead: my editors always defend me.

Read the whole thing. He places himself on the political spectrum:

Before you excoriate me below in the comments as a conservative, don’t: my lefty-liberal bonafides are bulletproof. I donated to, volunteered and worked for the Hillary campaign, I (also) write for far left Counterpunch and previously was a cheap defense attorney for impoverished minorities in the courtrooms of Queens and Manhattan. I’m no Fox News sucker, Jack!

I think that reflects a misconception. For the “woke” there is no such thing as “bulletproof left-liberal bonafides”. There is only adherence to the ever-changing script.

I’m gravely concerned that what Mr. Anderson refers to as the “Woke-Rouge” are waxing not waning and their power will only grow in the coming years.

If you wonder why I’ve expressed concern about violence in cities tomorrow or thereafter, consider this story from the Chicago Tribune:

The first time Potash Markets’ Gold Coast grocery stores were vandalized this summer, the boards covering both stores’ windows came down as soon as the damage was repaired.

The damage happened during the civil unrest that followed George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May. When one store was hit a second time in August, CEO Art Potash decided to leave the boards up through the election.

“If it can happen once, and then it can happen twice, the door’s wide open for how often this is going to happen,” he said.

Between the civil unrest this summer, the coronavirus pandemic and a divisive election whose outcome may not be known Tuesday, business owners are weighing the prospect of further unrest in a way they haven’t during past elections, said Eric White, executive vice president at security firm Brosnan Risk Consultants.

Many retailers including Macy’s are boarding up, some are not opening on Tuesday, some are closing early on Tuesday. That includes Chase Bank.

And Chicago isn’t alone. It’s true in New York, in Los Angeles, and, I have little doubt, of most major U. S. cities.

That has been the story of my life, whether politically, in job terms, economic terms, or even personally. I won’t burden you with my problems and I have been incredibly fortunate in my marriage but other than that I haven’t achieved any of the goals at my advanced age that I imagined for myself when younger. C’est la vie.

Let’s limit this to politically. In an earlier post I made my best guess as to what is likely to happen tomorrow in the election. Now let’s turn to my broader objectives. They’re easily stated. I want the United States to be at peace both at home and abroad, both domestically and internationally. I don’t want us to be at war with each other or with other countries.

My “Best Case” scenario in the post mentioned above approximates what I wish would happen, at least domestically, but I think it’s vanishingly unlikely that will come to pass and everything I’ve read today supports that view.

To be at peace domestically we would need to embrace a radically different view of politics that most presently hold. Many countries in the world have consensus-based societies. Under such conditions there is general or, at least, widespread agreement among the people about norms, rules, and regulations. In my ancestral Switzerland, for example, there are three levels of government (local, canton, and federal) and each level largely goes its own way so long as it doesn’t contradict the laws and regulations of the next higher level. At the federal level laws are enacted by the Federal Assembly but most laws are turned over for referendum to the people. To become law they must be approved both by a majority of the people and by a majority of the cantons. That’s not as chaotic as you might think. There’s a broad consensus among Switzers about the nature of Switzerland, its place in the world, and the relationship between its government and its people.

The consensus among Switzers is so strong I have occasionally amused myself when meeting a Switzer for the first time by “pushing their buttons”. If ask them certain things you are practically guaranteed of getting the same answer from most Switzers.

There is no such consensus in the United States and major disagreement among substantial portions of its population about the United States, its place in the world, and the relation between government at any level and the people. Such consensus should not be unexpected in a country as large and diverse as this. For the U. S. to be at peace with itself such differences of opinion need to be tolerated. For many years they were but that is not longer the case and, bit by bit and increasingly, the federal government is pushing itself into every aspect of life. Sometimes that’s fully justified, e.g. when Eisenhower used federal troops to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, but not every expansion of federal power is justified.

The crabbed version of democracy that some are embracing these days is not a step in the right direction.

Internationally, we have not been at peace for most of my life and we are not at peace now. I have been dismayed at the willingness of a succession of presidents—Reagan, Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Younger, Obama, and Trump—to use military force unjustly and without the permission of the United Nations Security Council, as we are obligated by treaty, or the authorization of Congress, as the Constitution requires. To his credit President Trump hasn’t started any new wars but he hasn’t ended any old ones, either, and we continue to support illegal wars by allies who aren’t actually our allies like Saudi Arabia. He has actually expanded the illegal and immoral use of armed drones.

I have no hope that regardless of who is elected president that we will see peace either domestically or internationally and, indeed, both our present low level civil war and our various international conflicts may well heat up.

This year’s Halloween was quite unusual as you might imagine. My creative and inventive wife decorated the door of our home for the first time and set up an arrangement by which she could avoid opening the door and maintain social distancing, dropping candy to the few Halloweeners who showed up through a length of PVC.

On my regular afternoon walk with Kara I saw quite a few of my neighbors had set up tables outside their homes, in some cases manning them, in others just leaving them with a sign.

It will be interesting to see if there’s a spike in COVID-19 cases within the next week. I’m guessing if there is one it will be less due to Trick or Treat than to Halloween parties.

I rarely eat candy bars. I didn’t even when I was a kid. Practically the only time I purchase them are a) at Halloween and b) when my wife needs them to make her famous toffee. I thought it might be fun to consider their history and how they’ve changed over the years.

The grand-daddy of all commercial candy bars sold today in the U. S. is, of course, the humble Hershey Milk Chocolate Bar. It was first produced in 1900 and so is a newcomer relative to the English Fry’s solid chocolate bar (1847). It sold for a nickel, a price it held for more than 50 years, but its weight fluctuated with the cost of chocolate. In 1969 the price was increased to a dime and that was just the start of the price increases. They’re typically $1.59 now.

The Baby Ruth was introduced in 1920 and contrary to what you might think it wasn’t named after the ballplayer but after Grover Cleveland’s daughter, Ruth. It originally cost a nickel, too.

The Butterfinger bar was introduce in the nickel candy bar market in 1923.

The Milky Way was introduced in 1923, too. It was named for milkshakes.

The Snickers bar was introduced in 1930. It was named after a horse.

The story of 3 Musketeers is a bit interesting. As originally introduced in 1932 it consisted of three pieces sold in the same package: one chocolate-flavored, one strawberry-flavored, and one vanilla-flavored. That changed during the war due to restrictions on sugar. It has always been sold as shareable. When I was a kid, the slogan was “Big Enough for a Pal and You”. I can probably still sing the jingle used to advertise it on the Howdy Doody program.

You could probably write a history of American mass-merchandising just around candy bars.

I found this piece at the New Criterion pretty darned amusing. The president of Princeton University, eager to jump on the “anti-racist” bandwagon, has confessed his institution’s persistent racism:

For many years now, woke administrators, professors, and other activists at all the toniest colleges have been like the parade of flagellants in The Seventh Seal: skirling in public about their sins, above all their institutional or (as we have lately been taught to say) their “systemic” racism. Their cries are accompanied by the demand for alms—$50 million at Yale to support “diversity,” $100 million at Brown for kindred exercises in political penance, and so on.

On September 2, Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, made a major contribution to this emetic genre. In an open letter to the university “community,” he beat his breast about America’s overdue “profound national reckoning with racism.” He didn’t exclude his own university. Indeed, he beat himself harder as he bemoaned Princeton’s long history of “intentionally and systematically exclud[ing] people of color, women, Jews, and other minorities.” Nor, according to him, has that history ended. “Racist assumptions from the past,” President Eisgruber sobbed, “remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”

Taking the university at its president’s word, the U. S. Department of Education responded:

On September 16, the Department of Education sent President Eisgruber a letter. The letter minutes an interesting discrepancy. Since Christopher Eisgruber became president of Princeton in 2013, the university has received more than $75 million in taxpayer funds. It has also “repeatedly represented and warranted to the U.S. Department of Education . . . Princeton’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” What’s Title VI? Among other things, it’s the law that stipulates that no institution receiving federal funds may discriminate against anyone because of “race, color, or national origin.”

demanding that the university provide in detail specific instances of discrimination on its part which would render it ineligible for some federal funding.

Now let’s fast forward this a bit. It will be interesting to see how a future Biden Administration responds to this. Will it withdraw the demand and become objectively in support of Princeton’s racism or will it double down on the investigation?

Okay, with only two days until Election Day and with more than of the eligible voters having already cast their votes, it’s time to start making our predictions about what will happen. I’m going to divide my remarks into Most Likely, Alternate, and Best Case scenarios. I think that Worst Case scenarios are impossible to predict. It can always be worse than you can imagine.

Most Likely Outcome

I think the most likely outcome is that the polls have been right all along and Joe Biden is elected, possibly with an electoral landslide and a clear majority of the popular vote. Although that will be clear on election night, it won’t be certified in a number of states for weeks and there will be a flurry of cases filed in court by both campaigns. There will be some violence in American cities.

Democrats will retain control of the House, possibly gaining a few seats and take control of the Senate, probably by just one seat.

Once President Biden is sworn in there will be a sort of feeding frenzy among progressives in Washington. Parts of the Green New Deal will be enacted into law, the Affordable Care Act will be expanded, and a “stimulus” package will be enacted. All of this will work out well especially for elected officials including such Republican elected officials who remain, professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, and college professors) but possibly not so well for everybody else. There will be an attempt at restoring the status quo ante in foreign policy. It won’t be successful; that ship has sailed.

I can’t speculate on what the “lame duck” period will look like.

Progressives will solidify their control over the national Democratic Party. Such Clintonistas as remain will be sidelined.

Alternate Outcome

This scenario is what might happen if the polls have drastically understated President Trump’s support. Trump wins an electoral victory, once again falling short of a popular vote majority. Although that will be clear on election night, it won’t be certified in a number of states for weeks and there will be a flurry of cases filed in court by both campaigns. There will be some violence in American cities.

Democrats will retain control of the House, possibly gaining a few seats, Republicans will retain control of the Senate.

A second Trump term will be just as chaotic as the first and much like it. The anti-Trump rhetoric will be much stronger.

Progressives and more moderate Democrats will blame each other for the loss. They will contend for control of the party.

Best Case Scenario

I think this scenario is extremely unlikely. Biden wins a narrow victory but that isn’t known until the Electoral College convenes or slightly before. There is no political violence during the week following the election or right up until inauguration.

Democrats retain control of the House; Republicans retain control of the Senate. That insulates the country from the worst instincts of the House leadership. Faced with four more years of a Trump presidency and a Senate opposed to them, Speaker Pelosi does the statesmanlike thing and decides to start working out compromises with the Senate.

President Biden is as good as his word and runs a conciliatory administration on behalf of all Americans. He improves on the Affordable Care Act and advocates for an infrastructure plan. His attempt to repeal the tax cuts of the Trump years are blocked by the Senate. Campaign rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, he’s actually tougher on China than the Trump Administration was.

He serves a full four year term; news of his incompetence has been greatly exaggerated.

I recognize for some that this is far from the best case. For some the best case is like the Likely Outcome but more so. For others the best case would be like the Alternate Outcome but more so. I believe that we are one country not two countries or fifty. I believe that we are one country. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

What do you think will happen?

So far there have been 668 homicides in Chicago in 2020. That’s more than at this point in any year in decades and undoubtedly the most ever relative to Chicago’s population. I will not be surprised if, by the end of today, that number will have risen to 670 or more.

Of those six have been killed by Chicago police officers—less than 1% of the total. Of all homicides 79% of the victims have been black, 16% Hispanic, with the balance any other.