Arrivederci
In which I'm about to go abroad and yet I'm hastily sharing a few thoughts on the upcoming election.
I'm about to head overseas on a long-anticipated adventure with my wife. Our flight departs in a few hours.
Of course I’m excited. I’ll be seeing some of the great treasures of antiquity and the Renaissance. We plan to enjoy food, wine, art, architecture, history, culture, and our fellow humans. I haven’t taken a full week off of work in almost 3 years. We've been dreaming about this vacation for years, when we realized that 2022 would represent both a milestone anniversary and the beginning of our new life stage as empty nesters.
When we planned and booked the trip many months ago, we considered what else would be going on around this time. Would we mind being gone for Halloween? No big deal. Would we miss attending parents' weekend at our son's university. Not ideal, but we can visit him another time. Could we be gone for our daughter's birthday? She’s a young adult; she won’t mind. How about missing election day?
Hold on. That didn’t seem right. We should be in America on election day 2022.
We timed our trip accordingly.
It's a strange time to be leaving the nation whose promise you love and whose threats you loathe. It’s like I’m abandoning a broken friend in a time of dire need. Should we be leaving her like this? Shouldn’t we spend these days knocking on doors? Doomscrolling on Twitter? Consuming too much news? It feels irresponsible to be leaving. Surely, a couple of middle-aged Minnesotans stepping away for a few days can’t somehow cause the wobbly American contraption to finally collapse. That's not how it works, right?
We had a long list of things to do before leaving: make sure our dog is cared for, obtain travel-sized toiletries, run last minute errands, clean, and pack.
I had another task on my to-do list: furiously scribble another stack of letters to a batch of American citizens through Vote Forward (votefwd.org). Vote Forward is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that promotes voting among American citizens. Their primary tactic: letter-writing campaigns from citizen volunteers to Americans who might not have a pattern of participating in elections. I started writing letters for them in 2020 and continued it this year. It's such a lovely and weird little way of advancing democratic fundamentals. In my sloppy hand I scrawl letters to people I'll never meet, using Vote Forward’s template. I usually sign off "your fellow American." It feels good, even if it feels dorky. I like it. I don't mind a little dorkiness. After all, I'm leaving the country in just a few hours, and here I am banging out this essay like an undergrad with a comp 101 paper due at 8 AM. That’s a dork move.
My plea to anyone reading this: vote hard, friends. Vote well. Check those boxes with as much forcefulness and hope as you can muster.
I hope most American voters agree that your first duty, no matter your political preferences, is to repudiate any candidates for any office who want to ruin the fundamental ideal of a democratic system where the elected are beholden to the will of their electors. Taxes, gas prices, your attitudes toward wokeness: none are as critical as protecting the notion of a government of, by, and for the people. I hope that‘s obvious to all voters. I hope voters know to consider up vs down before they consider left vs. right.
When a coalition of state secretary of state candidates (Arizona’s Mark Finchem, et al) vow, if elected as their states' chief election official, to ensure Democrats never win elections again, that’s not democracy. That’s counter-majoritarian authoritarianism. There’s a reason several Republican politicians in those states are backing the Democrat candidate for those offices. I hope enough voters in those states do too.
Or consider this chilling, widely reported fact: something like 60% of Trump supporters believe the presidential election was stolen in 2020, and that Joe Biden is not the legitimately elected president. But don’t think about that 60%; I want you to think about the other 40%. Here’s what we know about that cohort of citizens, by definition.
We know they understand Trump didn’t win in 2020.
Therefore, we know they must understand that Trump is either lying or terribly deluded when he says he did win in 2020.
We also know they support him. They want Trump to be president.
Think of what it takes to reconcile points 2 and 3 — to support Donald Trump, to wish he had been re-elected, even while you understand that his constant boasts about rigged elections are lies or delusions. You must simply not care for democracy. I can’t resolve this any other way.
OK. I really need to run. I have to leave for the airport shortly. I won't even have time to proofread or even really finish this essay — but I’ll leave with a couple other thoughts.
First, here’s Joe Walsh, former Republican congressman and media figure, an arch conservative throughout his career, reflecting on the modern Republican party.
And here’s Eric Trump saying there is no longer a Republican party.
I understand that if you’re inclined towards what we once called conservative political principles, you might loathe the idea of voting for a Democratic candidate. I have a lot of problems with the Democratic party, too. But before you eliminate the Dems from your ballot, you should eliminate the election deniers and the gerrymanderers and the ballot box seizers. In many races, that probably means voting for a Democrat, even if you’ve never done that in your life.
If you are selecting candidates because of the “R” next to their name, remember what that party now is. It is not the party you thought it was. Walsh and Eric Trump are telling us this. It is authoritarian, counter-majoritarian, and weirdly dedicated to the personal and political well-being of one strange, bombastic, orange-haired man. Perhaps you wish this weren’t so. Perhaps you wish there were a reasonable conservative option of the sort you used to vote for.
But in many races, that candidate doesn’t exist. Please, fellow citizens, when you cast your ballots, don’t pretend one does.
See ya in a 10 days, America.
Ciao.
Image Source: The Last Senate of Julius Caesar, by Raffaele Giannetti. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/The_Last_Senate_of_Julius_Caesar_by_Raffaele_Giannetti.jpg
Great piece, and have a wonderful trip! I am writing postcards to North Carolina voters right now and am going to be an election judge on November 8.