Standing On Principle

Now that it’s clear who the contenders are, I thought I’d make a few statements about the upcoming election. I doubt anyone who has read these pieces over the years will be surprised at who I’ll be voting for. But I want to address a problem that plagues us in aggregate and I see it raising its problematic head again. Let me start though with something that may strike you as curious.

My mother is frightened.

My 89-year-old mother is terrified that Trump will win. She was mightily disturbed back in 2016 when he did. Today she has reached a point of near-despair.

To put this in perspective, she was born 1934. She remembers World War II. She remembers fascism and how the country came together to oppose it. She has never not seen Trump as a homegrown embodiment of everything this country fought against back then. Now, you might quibble with me, a so-called Child of the Sixties, and question my sentiments, but her feelings are different, formed in a different time, a time I hear too many of the die-hard adherents of Trumpism claiming they want to take the country back to. (They seem to have their geography wrong, though.) From her youthful experiences, it seems that this is something few then would have supported.

Some would have, that’s true. But then as now it was the same kind of pathology. People wanting to seal off an idea of America and keep anyone that didn’t measure up to the vague and rage-inspired metrics of the self-selected arbiters of what “America” is out. When you break it down, that’s all this is—hatred of the Other. Any other, which is what makes it so frightening.

During the four years of his presidency, I watched and listened, often in dismay, as those who began as supporters and those on the inside spoke up about the dysfunction, the corruption, the low-down meanness of his administration. People from his inner circle, who had been counted among the elect, changed their assessment and yet when they did they were not listened to but were summarily cast out and defined as pariahs, traitors. Those who had been reliable ideologues up till that point suddenly, once they suggested that maybe things were not as they seemed, were wrong, were out of control, lost in a heartbeat the confidence they had enjoyed from supporters not a day before. That was a set of tea leaves we all should have been able to read, that no matter how much one approved of this policy or that, this was a broken administration that would leave ruin in its wake because it was not about the good of the country but the ego of a leader.

My mother hears the echoes. She saw what people like this did to the world. We’ve seen this before and she is dismayed and disillusioned that a country with so much possibility and success in being human would even contemplate choosing that.

Those who would return this man to office rely on the principles of those opposed to them.

I’m already hearing people grumbling that they will not vote because Biden has not lived up to their expectations. They will stand on principle rather than support a man who hasn’t delivered on all his promises. In spite of some understanding of how politics work, knowing that no single leader can simply wave a hand and accomplish what he may want, seeing evidence that the failures are the result of the in-fighting in Washington, they blame Biden. Alone. As if.

It is not possible for a president to simply do what he intends. No president ever has. Not even FDR, which is probably the model on which these wishful assessments are based.

But it is possible for a president to wreck a great deal, especially if he has a loyal congress to rubberstamp his acts. We saw too much of that between 2016 and 2020.

It astounds me that the choice is not obvious. Guaranteed ruin or the chance at moving the ball forward. To say “you didn’t move it forward enough, so we’re going to let the other guy win” is the epitome of political childishness.

That this matters nothing to Trump’s supporters surprises me not at all. They have bought into the whole Government Is The Problem nonsense and any argument that what Biden has done has been working means exactly the opposite of what it means to us who support him. What Biden’s success means to them is the failure of government to be nothing. Until we understand that, until we internalize the bizarre mirror-think of the current Right, we will continue to argue with them without effect. What we want and what they want are so apposite as to constitute separate and mutually incomprehensible languages.

But stand on principle, stay at home. Give the demagogues another shot. Maybe this time the mob will manage to kill some congressmen.

Because what should be crystal clear after January 6th is that Trump has all the makings of one of those dictators who win a democratic election and then never leave. Because they think they only had to get into office and then it would be forever. Per the Constitution, if he wins this time he can’t have another four years. I have no doubt he will try his best to change the rules so that he can stay there. He has all but said it and what he has stated clearly (which too many people, then as now, believe was nothing but campaign rhetoric) should trouble us to our core.

I do not for a moment believe he is smart enough to engineer all this himself. The gray eminences, the moneyed interests, those unelected directors who have enabled him and who whisper in his ear, they’re smart enough. But of course that kind of thinking borders on conspiracy theory and it’s not that. We’ve seen them, we know mostly who they are, and somehow we have been unable to say no to what they do. If it all ends with this election, it will not be that we didn’t see it coming or understand how.

But by all means, stand on principle and refuse to vote or write in some third-party ghost you know will never get elected and enable Trump to seize the throne. Be pure, clear of conscience.

Say what you will about his handling of the office, Biden is a traditional American who believes in our institutions and a basic idea of democracy.  I believe it’s possible he may be the last of his model we will ever see. He will leave it all intact for the next generation. The other guy will not. By word and deed he has shown us that he won’t.

So there’s my position. Just in case anyone wondered.

I’ll leave you to ponder your choices ahead of November.