Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • What Happens if Elections Are No Longer Legitimate?

    Two years ago, just a couple weeks before the 2016 presidential election, I asked what does it look like when citizens don’t trust elections?

    Perhaps more than anything that he has said through his campaign, Donald Trump’s charge that the upcoming presidential elections will be rigged have frightened political observers, and especially political scientists. The reason is that elite and public acceptance of electoral procedures is essential to democratic politics. Political scientists understand that the foundation of democratic political order is the acceptance of the rules of the game. The only way that we really know that losers accept those rules when they lose and respect the outcome. The politics of a losing presidential candidate rejecting the election itself is almost unimaginable. It would risk a crisis of systemic legitimacy.

    But what would such politics look like, now that we must imagine it? American history is no great source of information. There is the case of the Civil War, which began when southern states seceded from the union. But this was a cleavage first and foremost over policy—slavery—and the political order that it required. And as such, the Civil War had a clear regional divide over that policy. Trump’s allegations about vote-rigging are not regionally defined, and they are not about specific policy. They are channeling mass dissatisfaction with the entire political system, refracted (as is often the case with Trump) through the candidate’s own self-obsessions. No state could, or would, secede from the union over Trump’s electoral defeat. The crisis of systemic legitimacy would be national, within the states, between supporters of Trump and his opponents.

    The answers are not good, and I used the examples of Thailand and Madagascar to make my point. In the event, President Trump did not question the legitimacy of the 2016 election because he won it. But this morning, things have changed.

    It is now the official White House position that constitutionally-mandated recounts are illegitimate.

    In a month of harrowing news, this development is still almost incalculably bad for American democracy. I now assume that a substantial minority of Americans believe that the results of the elections in Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and California are democratically illegitimate unless the Republican candidate wins. Updating the lessons from the previous post,

    1. When electoral procedures lose popular legitimacy, it is nearly impossible to get that legitimacy back. Elections are one great way of building popular legitimacy, and if by assumption they no longer do, what will?
    2. Non-electoral sources of power are particularly dangerous when elections no longer legitimately empower politicians. It now falls to the very politicians who are involved in the recount to vouch for its legitimacy. The safest way to defend that legitimacy would be for the losing candidates to rebuke the President, directly and publicly. A public endorsement would be most meaningful if it were to come from, for example, DeSantis. Let us just ponder how likely that is.
    3. The downstream consequences from the loss of electoral legitimacy are nearly impossible to predict. I suspect that one consequence will be an ever-greater tolerance for executive malfeasance, on the logic that Congressional representatives and state governments lack democratic legitimacy.

    Caveats, as always, apply.

    Any number of Americans can tell you that they have never considered the current U.S. system to be legitimate. But even the strongest critics of electoral democracy must take seriously the gamble that they entertain when candidates like Trump undermine the legitimacy of U.S. elections. After all, look what happened when U.S. politicians tried to undermine the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency: Donald J. Trump became the GOP nominee.

  • False Cognates: The Case of Village Patrols in Indonesia and Peru

    False cognates are words of two different languages with similar meaning that look like they share a common origin, but which actually do not. They are fun because they get us thinking about how languages develop and how they relate to one another, even when looks can be deceiving. Classic examples include arigato (Japanese) and obrigadu (Portuguese), both of which mean “thank you” but are entirely unrelated etymologically. Recently I stumbled across a pair of false cognates that are particularly interesting for political scientists: ronda kampung and ronda campesina, both of which refer to a local village security patrol.

    The Spanish term ronda campesina comes from Peru. It translates literally as “peasant rounds,” and describes a form of local security patrol. They are most well-known as “peasant self-defense forces” that resisted the Shining Path insurgency, although to the best of my understanding the concept of the ronda campesina predated the insurgency movement, and they originally developed organically before being legalized and armed by the Peruvian state under Fujimori.

    The word ronda shares an etymology with the English word round and means roughly the same thing, a “going around of” something. Campesino derives from the Spanish word campo, meaning field or countryside, so a campesino is literally someone who lives in the countryside. Campo derives from the Latin campus, the source of the word camp in English and champs in French.

    The Indonesian term ronda kampung, by contrast, translates as “village rounds.” These are not as well documented in English as are ronda campesina,[*] but descriptions can be found in the literature on village organization and local security in the post-independence period, frequently appearing near the term siskamling (or sistem keamanan lingkungan [= system of environmental safety], which also refers to local security provision). Sometimes ronda kampung is translated as “neighborhood watch.” The settlement that a campesino would inhabit could be described, in Indonesian or Malay, as a kampung, although the proper word for peasant (see, e.g., the authoritative Echols and Shadily) is petani [= farmer] and the word desa in Indonesian connotes something more decidedly rural than kampung, which can be an urban settlement too.

    The word ronda in Indonesian has no etymology that I can find. It is not listed as an Indonesian loanword on Wikipedia, but it almost certainly comes from Portuguese, as in Spanish above.

    The word kampung is more interesting. It is the source of the English word compound, as in encampment, via Malay.[**] Its etymology seems to trace back to Old Cham, the predecessor of the Cham language spoken today in mostly in Cambodia and a relative of Malay/Indonesian that also happens to be the first attested written example of any Austronesian language. Variations of kampung also appear in regional languages unrelated to Cham or Malay/Indonesian, namely Khmer and Thai (there is even a province in Cambodia called Kampong Cham).

    Here is where things get interesting. Observe that the meanings for Old Khmer kaṃveṅ are given as “enclosing wall, rampart.” And then observe that the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European source word from which the Latin campus derives is given as *kh2emp- (“to bend, curve”). Are these two more false cognates? I am aware of no historical linguistic work that documents borrowing between proto-IE and proto-Austronesian, in the way that we do have evidence of links between proto-IE and Old Sinitic. But it strikes me as entirely plausible that this parallel is not an accident.

    Maybe a historical linguist can help set me straight. To clarify exactly what I’m asking: is there any evidence that Latin campus and Old Cham kampong are derived from a common root shared (through borrowing) by proto-IE and proto-Austronesian? If not, is that link at all plausible?

    NOTES

    * A google search for ronda kampung returns mainly recordings of a moderately well-known Javanese gamelan song.
    ** Best Malay loanwords in English: amok, compound, cootie, gingham, ketchup, rattan.