Novelist and short story writer Joseph Conrad
Only once, in four decades before the mast of journalism, has an editor ever asked me to go anywhere in the world that I chose and damn (or at least file) the expense. A newspaper’s weekend magazine planned a special issue on literary travels and needed a contribution. Typically, I decided to visit a place marked on no map. Or rather, it exists everywhere and nowhere, like the “haze” of obscured meanings that Charlie Marlow seeks to penetrate on his voyage upriver in Heart of Darkness.
I longed to explore the “Eastern port” of Joseph Conrad’s fiction, conjured in spellbinding prose in a dozen stories and novels but seldom actually named. Where was it? As a seasoned seafarer, Conrad knew Singapore and Bangkok well, but no high-rise Asian megalopolis of today would preserve the look and feel of the late 19th century harbours he frequented. Even the smaller coastal towns of Borneo and Sulawesi, where the first mate of SS Vidar often called in the late 1880s, had changed beyond all recognition.
I settled on somewhere he hardly knew; a port whose conserved old town might still serve as the archetypal Conrad backdrop even as the towers, malls and resorts of booming south-east Asia sprawl beyond it. In George Town on the Malaysian island of Penang, I mainlined my “Eastern port” fix, from Chinese clan temples and labyrinths of “shophouses” to verandah-girt colonial hotels, florid mansions built by Chinese-Malay “Peranakan” merchants, and jostling places of worship along the “Street of Harmony”. In a way, historic George Town has itself become a polished, curated fiction, with help from its Unesco World Heritage listing. Still, it did the job for me. Besides, old Penang had played a pivotal role in the annual business of transporting pilgrims from eastern Asia towards Mecca: the background of Conrad’s first great full-length novel, Lord Jim (1900), with its guilt-ridden sailor who seeks atonement for deserting a shipload of Muslim passengers in mid-ocean.
No one, and nowhere, will ever quite capture the thrill of the Asian encounter summoned, for instance, in Conrad’s story “Youth” — “the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the wealth of green infinite and varied, the sea blue like the sea of a dream, the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of vivid colour” — precisely because the sea, and the port, always belong in part to memory and dream. But Conrad’s ever-shifting line between reality and delusion, past and present, the rocks of observation and the shoals of fantasy, still mesmerise. “He’s absolutely the most haunting thing in prose there ever was,” gushed T.E. Lawrence, no slouch as a rhapsodist himself. Henry James, meanwhile, Conrad’s antithesis but his firm friend and admirer, stood in awe of the outlandish reality that informed his work: “No one has known — for intellectual use — the things you know.”
Jozéf Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, that “Polish nobleman cased in British tar” (his self-description), died on 3 August 1924. The child of aristocratic revolutionaries who vainly fought against Poland’s subjection to a Russian empire that Conrad loathed in all its political guises, he had gone to sea in Marseilles in 1874. After two decades as an able seaman, mate and (only briefly) captain, he wrote full-time, to a slowly rising tide of acclaim and honour, after the appearance of Almayer’s Folly in 1895. Yet he remained an outsider, refused a knighthood, and spoke a thickly-accented English — his third language, after Polish and French — to his dying day.
His modest funeral at the Catholic church in Canterbury — he had lived in Kent since 1898 — was swamped by jolly crowds descending on the city for a cricket festival. Without even that excuse, the centenary of his death has also been submerged in random noise. A few academic conferences (the most substantial in Paris and Krakow) mark the anniversary. London’s Polish Cultural Centre has mounted events. The UK ambassador of a state that did not exist until the final years of Conrad’s life visited a small display at Senate House. The BBC excavated a couple of radio adaptations but, on television, failed to revive even its 2016 version of The Secret Agent, with the incomparable Toby Jones as the sleazy anarchist, Verloc. Thus, on iPlayer, you could until recently view the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now but search in vain for any substantial tribute to the masterpiece — Heart of Darkness — behind Francis Ford Coppola’s act of re-creation. Indeed, Franz Kafka, who died in June 1924, has done rather better with UK cultural institutions (a serious Bodleian Library exhibition, an imported biopic series on Channel 4) than the writer who so cherished his British citizenship. Conrad gained that high distinction (as he saw it) in 1886. In the same year, at the third attempt, he won his Master’s certificate in the merchant marine.
Whatever the reason, this major anniversary for one of Britain’s most important modern authors has glided by almost as stealthily as a lightless sloop on a midnight tide. Blame ignorance and inattention for this neglect rather than conscious silencing. True, Conrad has stirred whirlpools of critical controversy at least since, in 1975, the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe bombarded Heart of Darkness for its allegedly racist depiction of Africa as “a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity”. Yet Achebe’s indictment proved the opposite of a “cancellation”. Conrad studies proliferated for a while in its wake. As a navigational star for later writers, so brilliant that Graham Greene gave up reading him for fear of being outshone, he endures. The crew of those who wrestle with his legacy stretches from Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Naipaul to the leading Colombian novelist, Juan Gabriel Vásquez. His The Secret History of Costaguana both pays homage to, and turns the tables on, Conrad’s South American epic Nostromo. And Conrad’s devastating tale of migration and exile, “Amy Foster”, haunts My Friends: the new, Booker-longlisted novel by the Libyan-British writer Hisham Matar.
Still, a passage with Conrad can prove arduous both in terms of style and vision. His sceptical pessimism leaves little space for political, or metaphysical, hope. He befriended the anti-colonial socialist — and swashbuckling adventurer — R.B. Cunninghame Graham but wrote to him in a bleak testament that he viewed the universe as a giant, oblivious knitting-machine of fates: “I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled”. The world’s existence “is a tragic accident — and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it”. The son of high-minded rebels against Russian autocracy, he respected reforming idealists: whether Cunninghame Graham, or the human-rights pioneer Roger Casement, whom he met in the Congo during the ill-starred 1890 stint in Belgian riverboat service that resulted in Heart of Darkness. To Casement he wrote of his utter disgust at the profit-driven atrocities of Belgian rule in the monstrous King Leopold’s private domain of rapacity and cruelty: “It is as if the moral clock had been put back many hours”. But he was never a joiner, a campaigner. He detested all zealotry, and retained a deep-rooted suspicion of (in The Secret Agent’s words) “personal impulses disguised into creeds”.
As for his sheer mastery of tight, closed, male worlds (not only at sea but in political or financial cabals), it stamps him with an indelible taint of exclusive masculinity that literary culture now finds uncongenial, or worse. All the same, readers will meet some extraordinary women on Conrad’s shores: not least, at the outset, Nina in Almayer’s Folly. The mixed-race daughter of a burnt-out Dutch trader and his Malay wife, Nina becomes “more contemptuous of the white side of her descent” as she suffers the racial scorn of Europeans. In any community, she finds only “the same manifestations of love and hate, and of sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar in all its multifarious and vanishing shapes”.
And it is that perpetual hunt for the “uncertain dollar” that helps keep Conrad’s fiction afloat today. He surely counts as the greatest and — in many respects — most prophetic writer of the first age of globalised commerce and finance. Whether ferrying sugar around Borneo or migrants to Australia, Conrad’s maritime experience over two decades tracked the rise in cross-border, and trans-oceanic, traffic. That growth had led, on the eve of war in 1914, to an international web of investment, trade and profit in which 20% of global GDP derived from assets held in foreign countries. Not until the Seventies would that figure be matched. In his Economic Consequences of the Peace, J.M. Keynes famously evoked the pre-Great War world in which a Londoner “could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth… and reasonably expect their early delivery on his doorstep”. As sail (which he loved) gave way to steam (which he tolerated), Conrad’s ships aided the frictionless flow of those products, and their profits. By the 1880s, the British merchant fleet in which he served carried 70% of globally traded goods.
In this “earth girt round with cables”, pulled together by telegraph wires, capital flows, fast steamships, and tentacular railways, he gives the view from the cargo hold, the skipper’s bridge, the bale-stacked quay, and the upriver trading post peopled by “human outcasts such as one finds in the lost corners of the world”. His fiction ventures, as Lord Jim puts it, “three hundred miles beyond the end of the telegraph cables and mail-boat lines”, to where “the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation wither and die”. Even in the remotest backwater, however, capital-driven modernity arrives to dismantle and remake places, cultures — and people. The Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff’s book The Dawn Watch (by far the finest study of Conrad as a global author) chooses as its epigraph a wonderful line spoken by a crooked entrepreneur to another stranded European misfit in his late novel, Victory. “I am the world itself,” says the sinister Mr Jones, “come to pay you a visit”.
For Conrad, the world pays everyone a visit, near or far. In “Amy Foster”, it arrives on the Kentish coast in the shape of poor Yanko Goorall (“Johnny Highlander”), a castaway from somewhere near Conrad’s own ancestral home in present-day Ukraine, shipwrecked after falling for an emigration scam run by Hamburg people-traffickers. In this most topical of tales, the love of a local girl can’t protect this small-boat survivor from “the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair”. In the magnificent story “Karain: a Memory”, it fetches up on a silver beach in Mindanao (in the southern Philippines) in the form of a rascally band of British gun-runners who fall under the spell of a vagabond Malay warlord, himself in exile from his Sulawesi home. The narrator of “Karain” voices the pure Conradian ideal of fellowship between free, but solitary, spirits. He affirms that “No man will speak to his master; but to a wanderer and friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things”. Then, “words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One heart speaks — another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life”.
Conrad’s global perspective is, at heart, a tragic vision. He writes of the forces that still sway lives — trans-continental commerce, geopolitical rivalry, resource extraction, cross-cultural encounters and migrations — not as steps along the road of progress but tsunami waves of fate. His people both love and hate the destiny that the modern gods of money, traffic and technology have decreed for them. Just as the sailors of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ — his astonishing novella not just about shipboard solidarity, and its failure, but about the creation of racial difference itself — both love and hate Jimmy Wait. He is the talismanic West Indian seaman who becomes their scapegoat, their sacrifice, but also (in a way) their idol. The first words spoken by Wait, “calm, cool, towering, superb”, are worthy of Othello: “I belong to this ship.” Thanks to its title, and Conrad’s casual use of the shipboard vernacular of his time, no students in the Anglosphere will ever now read this stunning work. Yet it has more to say about the making of “whiteness” as the outcome of world-spanning patterns of commerce and contact than a dozen academic tracts.
Conrad’s outcasts, drifters and adventurers belong to the vectors — the vessels, the romances, the schemes — that take them far from home, as much as to their points of origin. When he wrote, relatively few people shared such lives in transit: seafarers, merchants, settlers and ocean-crossing migrants. Now, not only in geographical but cultural terms, billions do. Many more than in Conrad’s time literally find themselves, like Yanko, “a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible… in some obscure corner of the earth”. But even those who stay put may now feel like castaways marooned by inexorable change. Conrad refuses to indulge in nostalgia for immobile communities: his characters lust after new discoveries, and the enrichment they can bring. Curiosity and desire, as much as greed or ambition, thrust his people into one another’s arms. Neither does he pretend that the human agonies brought about by global disruption are passing wrinkles on an otherwise placid sea. Cables, colonies, and capital have knit the wide world into a precariously unified network. Now its thrown-together peoples must live with their inescapable entanglement. That will be hard labour. Jasanoff counts 17 suicides in Conrad’s works. Their depression-prone author tried, clumsily, to shoot himself in Marseille in 1878.
On the starboard side of Conrad’s tragedy of globalisation lies a philosophy of exile and estrangement, tempered only (as he writes in the manifesto-preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’) by glimpses of “the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity”. On the port side looms political-financial power, and its drive to hold ever more of the planet and its peoples firmly in its grip. In Nostromo, Conrad’s most elaborate pursuit of his vision (and, by the way, as vehemently “anti-capitalist” novel as you will ever read), the tycoon Holroyd acts as the mouthpiece of the dawning American century, with his “temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest”. Plotting his interference in the republic of Costaguana, he admits that “We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it — and neither can we, I guess.” Holroyd is still a prince of the age of silver and steel, even if the historical event behind his trajectory — the American-backed revolt that permitted the completion of the Panama Canal — remains as crucial to the global economy in 2024 as in 1904. Curiously, though, he comes from the same city as his digital-age successors in world-devouring tech: San Francisco. His heirs, however, aspire to control not merely mines, but minds.
Conrad, ironic to his calloused fingertips, objected to the label of gloomy tragedian as much as he disliked the patronising sea-story pigeonhole. Yet the human costs of a globally integrated system, which he witnessed in embryo and at the margins, now occupy the forefront of our social stage. These days the metropolitan heartlands of Europe and America may suffer all the pangs of displacement and dispossession once felt in a jungle-fringed Borneo creek. It was Charlie Marlow, after all, who in Heart of Darkness gazed down the twilit Thames and saw in it “one of the dark places of the earth”. As for Nina Almayer, offspring of a freshly confused and intermingled world, she feels herself “shivering and helpless on the edge of some deep and unknown abyss”. We know more about that abyss now but, in Eastern or Western ports, it still exerts its disorienting power.
Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor, and literary and music critic, and author recently of The 100 Best Novels in Translation.
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SubscribeWhen I was a student thespian many years ago I did a couple of David Mamet things. He was incredibly clever and astute then – seems like he still is. I very much enjoyed this.
cisheteropatriarcy Huh? Since this came after Patriarchy in the list of transgressions, as a refinement, it must mean there’s a transhomopatriarchy, a cishomopatriarchy and a transhetropatriarcy.
I’ll send the NEA a letter.
You can agree with the idea that the USA is sliding (or has already slid) into tyranny. But when did this start?
Biden? Yes the argument holds. Trump? Appealed to the masses. Obama? Many Presidential edicts. G W Bush? Iraq. Clinton? George H W Bush? Ronald Regan? The incidence of tyranny weakens the further back you go, but the thread runs true. Basically as soon as the incumbent President ‘gets around’ an unhelpful balance of powers the democratic rot starts.
And now radicals within the general public have learned the lesson. Laws don’t apply if they don’t help your cause.
I’ve long suspected that religious instincts are as much biological as theological; and when, for reasons of cultural fashion, established religions fall out of favour, that instinct will manifest itself in secular religions. Hence why so much of today’s so-called discourse / polity is relentlessly intolerant.
Fantastic, thought-provoking article.
The only thing I can add is that societies, unlike the family in the car, can reset to a point before Dad said the Bad Thing. Each new generation grows to adulthood without the cynicism and sense of innocence corrupted that weighs down their fathers – so there is always a chance of something better.
Also – Mamet’s “Oleanna” predicted cancel culture decades before it was a force. It’s an extraordinary, wonderful, terrifying work.
Good article yet somehow more disjointed and thus less easy to read than something by, say, Peter Franklin or Tom Chivers. This is odd considering David Mamet is such an experienced writer. I can only assume that writing good plays and writing good columns require slightly different approaches.
Brilliant and thought provoking article.
Now how can this game be made to work for better government?
Shurely “work better for the people”?
I am constantly on the look-out for articles to send to people I know who are on the edge of falling out of the acceptable narrative. I cannot decide if this extended car metaphor will go down well. The first half of the article is well pitched and illustrative of your point, I’m not sure the second half lands.
The photo at the top of the article almost turned me off reading it. It looked like the photo of yet another an article about race and the rate of incarceration. But when I saw the author’s name I decided to start reading. Then as I was slogging through his lengthy description of a hypothetical unhappy and dysfunctional family I almost gave up again, as I could not see how this long writing had any relevance to me, but again, because of the author’s name, I skipped to near the end to see what the ultimate point — if any — was. It was only then that I realized that there was a point, and scrolled up to read more.
I wonder how many potential readers were lost by the top photo and the opening part of the article.
A very thought-provoking article.
A brilliant piece of writing. And all too true.
This is an interesting article, but I wonder why Mamet coined the term “designated criminal” when the already known terms “scapegoat” or “identified patient” may have sufficed?
To me, ‘scapegoat’ has a strong moral or religious connotation; whereas ‘designated criminal’ has a clearly legal connotation. This, in my mind, connects with the trend in US politics to cast one’s political adversaries as criminals and turn all political contests into legal contests (Watergate, impeachments, endless investigative hearings in Congress and Senate, special prosecutors, etc). Of course, this could just be my imagination in overdrive
Patsy?
‘..a lifelong champion..of his race..’ – which one is that? I think Mr Mamet may find that there is only one: the human race.
I do mourn past participles from British English but I suppose in the grander scheme of things of whether someone is sawed or sawn, it’s a moot point if the author is American [sigh].
As I was taught at school – the magician sawed her and she was sawn..
While I agree that there is essentially only one race, though quite a few breeds, like horses, I can imagine why the British might feel that saying “sawed” sounds rude.
I don’t think it sounds rude, and when used as the past tense there is no problem, its just a problem when it’s used as a participle when it is not a particple.
How is this different from any other anti-change whinge?
What is Mamet saying should be done to resist Woke, and what’s he saying should be done to bring about his preferred culture model?
Terrific playwright, turgid polemicist. Ex the tortured metaphor the whole thing could have been reduced to a couple of paragraphs.
Very good writing. The Family Road Trip is an irresistible hook! And implies analogous references to Ship of Fools etc. In my life so far, we Americans have gone from the era of Starship America to twigging that we’re in actuality on The Raft of the Medusa. Repel all boarders!
Isn’t it “co dependent” not “co dependant”?
Bravo! It’s a rich and sometimes electric experience reading Mamet—clarity with complexity and poetry and sizzle.
I really enjoyed reading that, thank you.
“In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera”
As the two million unvaccinated in Austria have just discovered…others will follow. My guess is France next.
The designated criminal is a great idea but stretching it to the body politic doesn’t really work.
Really? I think it does. Isn’t the designated criminal the ‘racist’, the ‘transphobe’, the ‘white supremacist’ and on and on and on? It’s all of us if we are unlucky to be designated as such. For example, should the NEA’s platform be universally incorporated into every public school everyone involved in the system is a potential criminal. What is the crime? The list of potential offenses in their declaration. Likewise, should it be agreed upon as some sort of enlightened national code of conduct (as some already insist it should be) who is not a potential criminal? We all are if we utter the wrong statement and run afoul of ‘Dad’.
Huh?
What did you say?
I swear, this is the LAST ‘click bait’ article that I am going to read on UnHerd.. but then again, I said that last time..
Obviously, the busy body journalist tactics are working for them.
So, at least something works!
Thought-provoking article. I share most of his concerns, and agree how important it is to jointly back up the system (game) that keeps power rotating and everybody on board the same show. But there seems to be a few things missing in his story. How would he see people who use a systematic strategy of making it harder for their opponents to do their voting as their main strategy for staying in power? Or who decide, based on no evidence, that they really won the election, even when they clearly have fewer recorded votes in both the population and the electoral college?
Has mr Mamet considered whether he has any beams in his own eye?
Notwithstanding the somewhat bizarre and/or patronising suggestion that a subset of specifically Democrat voters struggle with basic citizenship procedures, I view the actions you mention as those of the political party labelled Republican rather than of the Jeffersonian principles loosely espoused by the author.
Apart from general principles, the author has some quite specific attacks on the Left and its policies. If he is not similarly considering the policies of the Right, it is not because he is sticking to principles. Could he have a blind spot?
As for ‘basic citizenship procedures’, Republican efforts seem uniformly to try to make voting more difficult, and include at least one measure that makes it illegal to provide food and water to people queueing up to vote. Which basic citizenship procedure are we talking about here?
Which policies of the Left would Mamet be attacking? It seems that he is observing how political ends have long outweighed the political means. In my view, it is overwhelmingly the Left who pay lip-service to the political framework and consistently try to game the system. As the entire piece compares the history of the political process to a rotating chair, I would aver that he is neither ignorant nor dismissive of the pendulum pattern and it’s consequences.
In what way is it being “illegal to provide food and water to people queueing up to vote” discriminatory or suppressive? The putative ID laws feel long long overdue to me. I still maintain that it is unsupportable to assert that such of these measures that I am aware of are in any way either difficult to comply with or unjust.
Which policies is he attacking? Imposition of ideological taboos on race and gender (“Birthing Parent” etc.), woke orthodoxy, cancel culture. I share all his criticisms by the way, but it is specifically an attack on the Left. In my view, both sides are gaming the system – I do not know enough to say who does it more – in part because neither side fully accepts that it can be legitimate if the others win. I would argue that the shenanigans around when to put forward candidates for the Supreme Court, the continued threats to shut down the government via the debt ceiling, and the unsuported claim that the election was stolen, are things that do not belong in a healthy system (as, of course, are ‘Sanctuary cities’). And I think you have a moral obligation to at least face up to the negative consequences of the policies of your own side, and the times when they, too, are trying to game the system. It is too easy – and dishonest – to ignore the failings of your own side and just attack the others. Which is what Mamet, and you, seem to be doing.
For the rest, mail voting is a known weak point in electoral systems, and ID laws have at least a theoretical justification – whether either is a real problem in the US today is debatable, but they are valid points. But reducing opening hours, removing drop boxes, making registration harder, making it more cumbersome to queue – what is the purpose of that if not to reduce the number of people who vote? And what can you say of a political party that tries to reduce the number of voters – except that they clearly think they can improve their chances by excluding more enemy voters than friendly ones?
Rasmus, I presume you are aware that the voting requirements of Delaware, President Biden’s home state, are far more restrictive than the new requirements in Georgia. You currently must show an official id and proof of vaccination to eat in a restaurant in many states. Yet the Democrats oppose the requirement of a government issued id to vote. Do all these people who supposedly do not have ids not eat? Just asking.
Zuckerberg spent billions of dollars to “fortify” the 2020 US elections. One thing he did was to donate money directly to the local election officials to get out the vote. The bulk of the money went to blue areas, such as where I live in Philadelphia, with a pittance going to areas that were more likely to vote red. This is legal, amazingly. So Pennsylvania, a hotly-contested, key state, had money given by a billionaire to government officials to encourage the Democrat voters to vote.
I can’t agree with withholding food and water from people in a queue! I can agree with having appropriate ID, that seems a no-brainer to me.
The likely reason it is mostly the Left which tries to game the system is the progressivist roots on which it feeds – where notions of truth are more constructed.
As opposed to the classical liberal premises of ‘perceived and proven timeless principles’, such premises on which conservative parties insist their raison d’etre is founded.
But have long strayed from in their own versions of that practised, by both Left and Right, which is the game of bribing key voter segments with other people’s money
But Mamet is right in his charge that the tacitly agreed game of rotating or oscillating Blame Carrier, including the built-in incentives for the aforementioned voter bribery, has been dangerously fractured by abandoning a plurality which accepts that differences aside, we’re all in this together as accepted, common citizens.
And instead aggressively pushing in plurality’s place, an ecclesiastical style of those Included, who may participate and direct, and the Excluded, who by vitrue of designated category, must be stripped of their social licence to participate
It is a good thing to make voting more difficult for the ineligible. It is also quite revealing that the Democrats are so opposed to this
A lot of the measures are making it more difficult for eligible and ineligible both. To justify them you need to show that ineligible voters are a real problem, and that the impact on the eligible is proportionate to the effect you claim to want. If you have convincing proof of that, all you have to do is present it – but I, for one, have not seen it yet. Failing that, it looks uncomfortably like one party trying to suppress the vote of the competition and that the talk of ineligible voters is mostly just a pretext.
Republicans are making it difficult to cheat, you mean.
Allison, thank you for the most sensible 9 words on the issue.
If he is, it is possibly because the Left is overwhelmingly culturally and institutionally dominant in the United Sates, and, for the time being, politically dominant as well. I am always being attacked on here for criticising Trump, but his breaking the rules, if such it was, and even the ‘insurrection’ failed and ended up weakening the Right.
Postal voting is far too open to fraud, as has been shown here and in the US. The need for ID seems to me absolutely obvious. If the Republicans are using other methods to make it difficult for some groups of voters per se, then I’d be opposed to that.
As to “Republican efforts” you are inadequately informed. I speak to the voters in line issue: Food and drink can be given to the voting site personnel, to be distributed. When private parties were allowed to do that, they were known to slip in a bit of bribery and corruption. Nothing wrong with protecting the integrity of the vote, albeit in a minor way. Nor any sanity in practices which demand a talismanic piece of paper around a dubious “vaccination”, and yet demand no identification to cast a vote … Mamet is right in his assessments, although he does communicate in a leisurely parable.
Historically, western democracies have tried to guard against the practice of entreating of voters. We roll our eyes up when reading of favours handed to queues of voters by the dominant party, say in African or other countries with shorter democratic histories.
However entreating tries to turn up everywhere all the time because of the political incentives to entreat.
It’s surely vital to resist entreating, both by maintaining a consensus
for voter respect and acceptance of voting outcomes, as well as rules guarding the integrity of the voting system
The ultimate privilege and power of citizens to ‘throw the bums out’ every few years without bloodshed, is an absolute necessity.
The history of liberal democratic governance is too short for to yet become normalised as a deep cultural meme we collectively reflex to. Maybe it never will and freedom is forever tenuous, as others have taught us
OK, that was useful information. I would have concluded that there was nothing here for Europeans to debate about after all – were it not that the ‘food and drink’ issue was just one of a multitude of ‘make it harder to vote’ initiatives.
The Georgia law didn’t make it illegal to provide food and water to people “in line” to vote. Electioneering (partisan activity on election day within close proximity to the polling place) is prohibited in every state.
Georgia amended their existing statute against electioneering by adding food and water to the list of prohibited activities. Self-serve water stations would not be affected—only activity by partisans within a certain radius. Here’s the statute, I’ve underlined the new language:
Said chapter is further amended by revising subsections (a) and (e) of Code Section 21-2-414, relating to restrictions on campaign activities and public opinion polling within the vicinity of a polling place, cellular phone use prohibited, prohibition of candidates from entering certain polling places, and penalty, as follows: “(a) No person shall solicit votes in any manner or by any means or method, nor shall any person distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector, nor shall any person solicit signatures for any petition, nor shall any person, other than election officials discharging their duties, establish or set up any tables or booths on any day in which ballots are being cast:
(1) Within 150 feet of the outer edge of any building within which a polling place is established; (2) Within any polling place; or (3) Within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.
I doubt if Mamet is a Republican at all. Your post echoes the problem in the US – tribal binary thinking.
Funny, I think that is his problem, not mine. He is saying that you need a system that guarantees a exchange of power, that all parties can feel part of, and that functions. And for that to work, all parties need to feel at home the system and respect its rules. And I absolutely, totally, completely agree with him. He then proceeds to blame only one side of politics for things going wrong. And that is no way to get where he wants to go. For both sides to sign up to the system,both sides need to respect the rules, listen to their opponents, and take responsibility for the way their own actions might harm the system. All I am saying – I am European and anti-woke, I do not belong to either tribe – is that you need to at least acknowledge the failings of your own side even as you blame your opponents for most of it.
Rasmus, you present us with an fine example of the illusion being preferable to knowledge. You take comfort in the illusion that both sides are responsible for fueling the unreason which is consuming America and its institutions. But only one side writes stuff like this:
That is pablum for the politically insane, it is the language and currency of the left, exclusively.
Not sure why this comment has attracted so much negativity. The systematic strategy referred to is clearly a reference to the Democrats ‘import the third world and gerrymander’ method.
No, it is not.
As a voting redident of Cook County, IL, The home of the Democrats’ infamous Chicago Machine, I am very familiar with vote fraud and how hard it is to stop.
For example, chain voting was quite common in Illinois at one time. The precinct catain started with blank ballots. He marked the ballot, then gave it to one of his paid voters. The voter walked into the polling place, cast the marked ballot, then brought out a blank ballot and got paid.
To make this harder, all ballots in Illinois are printed with a precinct number on them, identifying the voting place where they are to be cast. During the count, ballots from other precincts are not counted.
Absentee ballots were often used fraudulently, so all absentee ballots in Illinois are returned to the voter’s precinct to be counted. Of course, absentee ballots for Republican areas are often lost by Democrats controling the process. That’s why Republicans, like me, vote in person on election day unless we’re dead. Then we tend to vote Democrat.
The voter suppression meme is complete bunk. Black voters support voter ID by over 60% in polls. Democrats want to make the world safe for vote fraud.
Claims that anti-fraud measures are unnecessary are also ludicrous. At the height of vote fraud in Chicago, the Chicago Machine cast 100,000 fraudulent votes in the 1982 race for Governor of Illinois. The Republican, Jim Thompson, beat the margin of fraud by just under 9,000 votes. Federal prosecution put 63 Machine Democrats in prison. You can do a web search for it.
Most amusing — “…I vote Republican unless I’m dead. Then we tend to vote Democrat.” And isn’t Chicago the place where the phrase originated “Vote Early. And often” ?
I can understand that people forgot about the clouds of suspicion over Kennedy’s results in Illinois – it’s a long time ago – but Bush v Gore was not so very long ago. How can anyone deny there is a problem with voting integrity in the US? And, in case my point is not clear, I mean that the mere appearance of a problem is just as bad an actual problem. Lack of faith in the voting system is just as corrosive as actual fraud. Remedying this gap in public trust should be a top priority for all sides. This is not acceptable in a democracy.
My impression (and I read the MSM) is that Bush v. Gore was essentially too close to call, but that both sides accepted (if sometimes with ill grace) that the result was legitimate. Who says fraud was a problem there?
As for lack of faith that is a real problem, but it is too easy to allow people to whip up unfounded suspicions and then demand measures (that favour you) to allay those suspicions. A surprising number of people seem to think that Hilary Clinton was involved in a cabal of satanistic paedophiles. Should she had been banned from running (e.g.) to allay those suspicions? Before you start fixing the voting system, surely there should be some kind of credible evidence that it is broken, and how. Otherwise a better measure might be to stop supporting people who spread unfounded accusations
My impression (and I read the MSM) is that Bush v. Gore was essentially too close to call, but that both sides accepted (if sometimes with ill grace) that the result was legitimate.
Not accepted. It was litigated before the Supreme Court.
Who says fraud was a problem there?
No, I don’t think it was fraud. As I remember, it was a something about ballot punching irregularities.
As for lack of faith that is a real problem, but it is too easy to allow people to whip up unfounded suspicions and then demand measures (that favour you) to allay those suspicions.
In a democracy people are allowed to question the integrity of democratic processes. These should be transparent. It’s entirely reasonable to demand that standards be enforced. I don’t understand why you would attribute this demand to bad faith. If the standard is applied uniformly, it cannot favour either side.
A surprising number of people seem to think that Hilary Clinton was involved in a cabal of satanistic paedophiles.
Wasn’t her husband taking trips with Jeffrey Epstein?
Should she had been banned from running (e.g.) to allay those suspicions?
I don’t see the connection…..
Before we start fixing the voting system, surely there should be some kind of credible evidence that it is broken, and how.
No. There is an absolute obligation to maintain integrity in the voting system. You seem to have imported some criminal law principles that don’t apply here.
Otherwise a better measure might be to stop supporting people who spread unfounded accusations
Sure, that’s a problem but how do you suggest controlling this?
The supreme court was brought in to solve deadlock, effectively. They did, and Gore conceded.
I would suspect that these demands were in bad faith when I cannot see a rational reason for those fears, and when the remedies proposed benefit those who demand them. If your four-year-old son became convinced that the big bogeyman was coming to get him in the night, and only eating a big bar of chocolate at bedtime would keep the bogeyman away, would you maybe suspect an ulterior motive?
It is not true that uniform standards cannot benefit either side, because the sides are not symmetrical. To take a fairly simple example, you could demand ownership of real estate, a test of English proficiency, a high school diploma, or a proven grandparent with US citizenship as a requirement for voting. Do you think those requirements would hurt both sides equally?
It is too easy to claim without evidence that the system is broken, and then demand you own list of fixes. Anyway,the Democrats could make their own claim that Republican measures are turning away many more legitimate Democrat voters than illegitimate ones, and demand a fix for this problem to ‘restore their faith in the system’. Elections are not fair, either, if the voters of one side are preferentially discouraged from voting.
Ultimately, as David Mamet writes, a functioning system requires that both sides are on board, refrain from undermining it, and are willing to make some sacrifices in the interest of keeping things together. If the Republicans want US democracy to maintain legitimacy, it is not enough to make demands of their opponents, however legitimate many of those demands may be. It might help if they would also consider solutions that could satisfy both sides, provide some evidence for their fears of voting fraud, and find a way to distance themselves from people who refuse to accept the official election result and/or pressure officials to declare winners that do not reflect the tally of votes cast.
I do not have time to pull this apart but I will just point to this one remarkable sentence: It is not true that uniform standards cannot benefit either side, because the sides are not symmetrical.
First of all, someone always ‘benefits’ in an election. There is always a winner. That is the entire point of an election. The issue previously raised was whether someone was unfairly ‘favoured’. Second, in a system with universal suffrage, a uniform standard will apply to all voters rather than ‘sides’. Outside of South Africa during Apartheid, I struggle to think of an example where voting is consciously and explicitly organised around collective sides rather than individuals.
Short version:
A standard that is apparently neutral and that is applied uniformly to all voters can still make an enormous difference on election results and favour one group or party over another. This is something you have to deal with, not just deny.
This is actually interesting. I was aware in general terms of problems with fraudulent machine voting in the past. LBJ, ‘Landslide Lyndon’, is another one you hear about. The thing is, the way you do it is that you identify a problem, you show that it it real and that it is serious, then you introduce measures that solve that problem. And for the current list of measures I have seen no actual evidence that there is a current problem these measures would solve.
I have asked in the past on Unherd about evidence that voting fraud is actually a current problem, and that the proposed measures, like voter ID, actually solve it. The only answer I got was a link to a republican-run list of thousands instances of voting law infractions going back 50-60 years. Most were of a kind that was unlikey to make a material difference, like ‘NN used his cousin’s voting card to vote for selectman in Podunkville’ or ‘three voters (who otherwise were entitled to vote) were registered after the registration deadline’. If you can point me to somewhere that shows evidence that fraud is a problem for current elections, and that the proposed measures would help, I would love to see it. I might even change my mind then.
Is this a pitch for House of Games II? Or Car of Games?
As always, when I encountered the capitalisation of “black” I immediately stopped reading.
You shouldn’t have – it’s an excellent essay.
“And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.”
If you had continued, you would see that he does the same for ‘Whites’. Maybe give it another chance?
How peculiar that people should comment only to share a unique neurosis apropos of nothing. Drahcir’s comment is the didactic equivalent of “every time I smell strawberries I immediately open an umbrella.”