This otherwise unremarkable article includes a rather curious construction:

My major concern about Clinton’s comments (aside from the fact that her identity instantly polarizes any discussion of this topic and makes “independent” inquiry impossible) is her use of the word “legitimacy,” a word that is derived from the Latin word legitimus, which means lawful. Does a legitimate election mean one in which no laws were broken by the winning campaign? Quite likely there has never been such an election.

If “legitimate” means “legal,” and every presidential campaign has involved illegal behavior, then it is literally Logic 101 to conclude that every presidential election has been illegitimate. One would think that the whole point of puffing oneself up and belching out a Latin etymology, all in italics and shit would be to draw precisely this sort of logically necessary conclusion, but, amazingly, the only purpose of the author’s nitpicking is to draw the empty conclusion that the official results of the election were the official results of the election.

Of course, if we’re going to take concepts seriously, then the question of “legitimacy” goes far beyond picking grammatical nits. The U.S. government’s claim to legitimacy rests on the idea of “the will of the people.” Because the citizenry is not directly involved in almost any government decision, elected representatives have to be able to claim that they’re just doing what their constituents want them to do, that people are “getting what they voted for.” This argument requires two premises to hold: everybody has to pay attention and vote, such that the input to the system is sufficiently representative, and the candidates have to accurately represent themselves and their interests, such that what people think they’re voting for is in fact what they’re voting for.

Neither of these premises actually holds. Relatively few Americans vote, and the electoral spectacle, as a rule, avoids discussion of policies and even values as much as possible in favor of pageantesque preening and reality-show drama milling. These problems are fixable; the solutions are mostly obvious and I won’t bother recounting them here. But nobody in the government is actually trying to fix them. On the contrary, politicians spend most of their time catering to the spectacle and actively suppressing votes. This, then, is the true sense in which elections are illegitimate: they simply to do not pass a reasonable evaluation of the relevant criteria.

For example, very few people voted Republican because they wanted corporations to get a huge tax break. Yet that is precisely the Republicans’ top priority; furthermore, they aren’t trying to convince anyone or even discuss the issue at all, they’re just trying to ram it through as quickly and with as little oversight as possible. Thus, this behavior is illegitimate on basic democratic principles, regardless of the specific institutional mechanisms by which it transpires. Talking about “legality” or “process” here entirely misses the problem.

But the criteria themselves are also not set in stone. Consider, for example, the debate over money in politics. Some people believe that, because those with money “earned” their money, they have the right to use it as they will to attempt to affect society. Others believe that politics should be a sacred ground where the pernicious influence of money is banished so the focus can remain on actual discussion rather than propaganda. This is a live debate on which there is currently no consensus among Americans, and which position you take directly determines which elections you can consider legitimate (if you take the latter position, then, again, no elections are legitimate). So if you only focus on legalities like campaign finance laws and bribes and things, you’re ignoring the bulk of the issue. The fact that particular actions happen to be legal at this exact point in time says nothing about the moral standing of the actors; on the contrary, it says something about the state of the law. It’s tautological to describe a particular government action as “lawful” when it’s the government making the laws in the first place. The reason Nixon was full of shit when he said that “if the President does it, it’s not illegal” was not because he was technically incorrect, but because that’s beside the point. If it happened to be legal to break into your political opponents’ facilities and steal their information, that wouldn’t change the moral legitimacy of an election whose results were premised on those actions.

This is also one of the many reasons why all of these Russia histrionics are so disgusting. We don’t need Russian interference to give us something to criticize about the U.S. election process. Even if the all of the imagined Glenn Beck chalkboard arrows turn out to be real, it would all still amount to nothing more than a drop of piss in our vast ocean of bullshit. We have several beams to remove from our own eyes before it will become worthwhile to bother with splinters like those.

People think the current situation, where everything is premised on lies and analysis has no impact, means that rationality has failed, but the truth is they don’t really know what it looks like. As soon as you fail to draw a conclusion that reason requires you to, you lose the name of action. Analysis doesn’t ever have an impact unless it ends in a fist. “Reason” in such a case is merely the guise you assume as a peddler of comforting fictions. The alarmist tenor of the moment is actually a perverse means of reassurance: it is the subconscious insistence that, once the crisis has passed, everything will go back to normal.

This is why theory matters – and why facts don’t matter until you have your theory right. Complaints about “re-litigating” this or that election are premised on the notion that elections are atomic: the only purpose of an election is to generate a result; the result has already been generated; there’s no point in discussing it any further. And it’s true that specific infidelities, such as Clinton’s financial arrangement with the DNC, stop mattering at some point. What is the point, though, is that revelations such as these show us not how things went down once, but rather show us how they always are. It’s not that we’re going to going to change the results or that Sanders “would have won,” it’s that, as long as this is the way things are, any candidate who is even remotely Sanders-like will always lose. Which of course means that we didn’t need really the revelations at all. We just needed to draw the real conclusions of what we already knew. The only way you can understand this is by figuring out not what happened but rather how things work.

The sticking point here is pretty straightforward. It’s cowardice. Literally all the signs right now are pointing not to the conclusion that things have gone wrong, but to the conclusion that the world was always constituted wrong. A situation this grotesque can only have arisen because it was inevitable. But that’s too scary, so people just don’t think about it. They feel like they need to say something “serious,” so they adjust their spectacles and cite their references, and then go right back to reading Harry Potter. Unfortunately, ceasing to believe in evil wizards is one of the basic preconditions for being an adult human. Trump being president is one problem. The fact that someone like Trump was able to become president is all the problems.

And it is in fact rationality that can solve these problems. Yes, I will admit that, despite everything, in the midst of insanity and in the face of looming catastrophe, I still cling to the dying embers of the oldest faith. Seriously though, rationality isn’t just a dull matter of calculating statistics and conjugating verbs. Real rationality means real engagement with the real world as it really exists. That doesn’t mean that things are always what they seem. It means that, behind the curtain, there is always a reason, a physical cause, that makes things seem the way they do. And because the universe was not designed but is rather an unintentional jumble of proteins, those reasons are generally not going to be appealing plot developments that slide easily into place. They’re generally going to hurt.

Etymology isn’t destiny, but it can help show you what the world is made out of – assuming you’re actually willing to find out. If you’re going to claim that you’ve gotten to the root of the issue, you’d better have dirt on your hands. There’s nothing more pitiful than fake scholarship.