When the binary-choice perspective overrides all other considerations
. . . it can calcify into a pair of parties neither of which is capable of delivering a healthy American future
I did what I could in both 2016 and 2020 to keep my decision to write in a presidential candidate on Election Day under wraps. I was more successful in 2016. Even my wife, with whom, as is our custom, I went to the polling place, wasn’t certain what I was going to do. It was a year or more before I publicly announced what I’d done on social media. In 2020, due to discussions with some people to whom I’m close - people who, now, having Trump’s record in office to confirm their perception of him as objectionable, but were, in my view rightly, aghast at the prospect of Democratic rule, I was not able to be quite as tight-lipped.
It’s not as if I had been silent about how repugnant I found Trump. A perusal of the archives of my blog, Late in the Day, from 2015 and 2016, make it abundantly clear.
But conservatives generally aligned with my outlook, to whom I was close personally, but who were going to hold their noses and vote R were the least of the haranguing I came in for. From the newly emergent Trumpist right and from left-leaners who were going to vote Democrat no matter who the Republicans nominated I had to deal with the look-the-choice-is-going-to-be-binary argument.
And the way the political chips fell in both election cycles confirmed the reality that had been in place in America since the 1860s. Third parties and lone-wolf candidates usually failed to make even a dent in the outcome. At most, as in the case of Ross Perot in 1992, it swayed the outcome, but the outsider has never had a chance at victory.
But now we have six years or so of new political developments to observe.
I won’t revisit the voluminous record of regrettable Trump behavior over that time. For one thing, that behavior in the last year has gotten so ridiculous, most recently in the form of his big-baby if-I were-president-this-would-all-be-different pronouncements in various sycophantic interviews, that it seems ever less likely that he’s going to be the GOP standard-bearer in 2024.
Then again . . .
In his wake has arisen a Neo-Trumpism embodied by figures who have outdone the Very Stable Genius in behavior at once both ridiculous and dangerous. To a certain type of voter, Trump may look like the most moderate choice in three years.
In recent days we’ve seen this:
A Republican running for Northampton County Executive in Pennsylvania gave a heated address on August 29 about mask mandates in schools. Steve Lynch is tired, he said, of providing his school board arguments and data (he apparently thinks the data support letting kids go maskless), but the important thing about his rant is the threat of force:
Forget into [sic] these school boards with frigging data. You go into school boards to remove ’em! That’s what you do! They don’t follow the law! You go in and you remove ’em. I’m going in there with 20 strong men, I’m going to speak to the school board and I’m going to give them an option. They can leave or they can be removed.
“You don’t follow the law.” That’s the kind of language that Republicans are now employing. You go in with “20 strong men.” Lynch has not run for public office before, but he did attend the January 6 rally in Washington, D.C. and has postedon social media that the violence that day was a false-flag operation meant to discredit Trump supporters.
And this:
Farther south, Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina spoke last weekend at an event sponsored by the Macon County Republican Party. He delivered the kind of lies that have become routine among some Republicans. The election was stolen—and not just the presidential contest but also that won by Gov. Roy Cooper (who defeated his opponent by a quarter of a million votes). Cawthorn told the crowd that vaccines are harmful to children and urged them to “defend their children.” A woman asked what he plans to do about the “535 Americans who have been captured from January 6.” Cawthorn, who has apparently heard this before, thundered, “Political hostages!” He went on to assure the audience that “we” are working on this and mentions “busting them out.” When someone in the crowd asked, “When are you gonna call us back to Washington?” he replied that “We are actively working on that one.”
He wasn’t finished. Insurrection talk is becoming his specialty: “The things that we are wanting to fight for, it doesn’t matter if our votes don’t count. Because, you know, if our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place—and it’s bloodshed.”
You may remember Cawthorn. He was the young man who, addressing the Stop the Steal rally on January 6, praised the crowd’s courage and contrasted it with the “cowards” in Congress.
Cawthorn’s work experience before serving in Congress consisted of a stint at Chick-fil-A and a part-time job in a congressional office. He dropped out of college after a single semester in which his grades were mostly Ds. But he was apparently active in that one semester: More than 150 of his classmates signed a letter accusing Cawthorn of being a sexual predator. One woman told the Washington Post that he drove her to a rural area only to become enraged when she rebuffed his sexual advances. He drove back at speeds of up to 80 miles an hour.
So maybe the above-mentioned certain type of voter won’t be a factor. Most Republicans don’t seem to have a problem with, say, death threats against the Raffensperger family in Georgia. Or Kevin McCarthy trying to make it look like there’s something nefarious about the House select committee on the January 6 insurrection requesting preservation of phone records and social-media activities of particular members of Congress.
Then there is the continued leftward lurch of the Democrats. Again, space considerations don’t permit a rehashing of that whole process, from the early-twentieth-century progressives up through Rexford Tugwell and Frances Perkins, through the Great Society programs, Carter-era malaise, and the election of a president mentored by the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, Rashid Khalidi, Heather Booth and Bill Ayers.
But it’s obvious it’s gained a momentum that could scarcely have been imagined ten years ago. Identity-politics militancy has infected, to the point of sepsis, societal institutions from government to arts and entertainment to the corporate world to academia (and not just the humanities; STEM disciplines are now subject to it) to religion. The term “infrastructure” has been imbued with an elasticity that has it including child care, education and housing. The current Democratic president has no problem being quite public with his disregard for the sanctity of the Constitution. He also appears to have resigned the nation to leaving behind hundreds of its own citizens in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Three Democratic House members are imploring that president to replace Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell with someone who will prioritize "eliminating climate risk and advancing racial and economic justice," not only once again beating the drum of their radical agenda, but putting their ignorance of the scope of a Fed chair’s responsibilities on full display.
The current lay of the land is what a nation gets when it refuses to look past the seeming exigencies of the moment and remember its foundational principles.
Would that we could take a step back and ask ourselves how we ever got to the point of it’s-Trump-or-Hillary or it’s-Trump-or-Biden. What has gone awry on spiritual and cultural levels to bring us to such a juncture?
If such an undertaking is still possible, we need to be about it.