The Election

On the easiest vote of my life.

Obviously.

I have a very small platform here, and whatever I say will largely be preaching to the converted. But regardless, you do what you can with what you have.

I’m not a partisan. If this were an election between Kamala Harris and Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush, I would have to think a lot harder about my vote. I would have to look over their policies, their backgrounds, watch their speeches and their debates.

But instead, Donald Trump is running against Kamala Harris. Given that, to hear people speak of the 2024 election as if policy analysis is the appropriate approach is nothing short of crazy-making.

I am not a blinkered liberal. I have spent hours arguing with and listening to Trump supporters, both those I know personally and those I don’t, over the course of nearly a decade at this point. I am not unaware of their grievances. I am not a wealthy, out-of-touch elite-I’ve spent the Trump decade working blue collar jobs, in many cases with conservative coworkers. And even though I understand why they exist, I am no less appalled than I was on the afternoon of January 6th, 2021.

There is no ambiguity about the facts of the case. Trump commissioned and actively participated in a plan to overturn the 2020 election by using a slate of fake electoral votes from the 7 swing states to prevent the certification of the vote, including a plan succinctly laid out in the Eastman Memorandum, and merely augmented by the Capitol Riot, the intention of which was to intimidate Mike Pence into going along with the plan. Thankfully, he didn’t.

How would this have affected a stolen election? Eastman’s first plan was to have Pence reject the dual slates of electors, eliminating them from the electoral count, which would have given the election to Trump. This, to be clear, is a violation of Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution. If and when that failed, Pence would pass the decision to the House of Representatives, whose state delegations were majority Republican, and could have been convinced (read: intimidated) into giving the election to Trump.

This was the actual plan to steal the election. No, it was not likely to succeed. But the fact that they tried to carry it out despite that is only further proof of their commitment to subverting democracy in pursuit of power. Trump not only commissioned it from Eastman, he was aware of its details and participated extensively in the attempt. He was not ignorant. He was not confused. He sought to subvert the Constitution and steal a presidential election. By any reasonable standard, that makes him a traitor and an enemy of the people of the United States, whether or not he had deluded himself into believing he had won the election, despite being told over and over again that he had lost.

That leaves two options for his supporters. Either they are ignorant-many of them willfully so-or they are not. If they are not-if they know what Trump did and either approve of or dismiss it-they want a traitor to re-enter the White House. I have nothing to say to these people. They are the true enemies of this country, and they should be regularly and unambiguously labelled as such.

This is harsh language. It is also absolutely necessary, and must become commonplace. The fact that Trump supporters have been allowed to persist in the delusion that they are patriots, or that their movement is in any way normal or acceptable, is one of the greatest failings of American society. Thankfully, I do believe those who know what Trump is and support him anyway constitute at most a small minority of Trump supporters, since most Americans in general simply don’t know what occurred on January 6th and its surrounding context. But shame by association must still be shame.

I am not interested in a conversation about abortion, or immigration, or taxes, or tariffs, or the deficit, or national security. I have enormous substantive disagreements with Trump’s plans (to the extent they can be flattered with the term) on all of these issues, and in many cases I disagree with Harris as well. I am not interested in sitting and patiently hearing out your concerns about Harris being a socialist, or a woke ideologue, or wanting to blow up the deficit to buy gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants, or whatever other fantasies you may harbor about her. Donald Trump attempted to prevent a peaceful transfer of power. He is a traitor and an enemy of the U.S. Constitution. This should be the mantra of all sane Americans for as long as his name passes through our minds. The conversation ends there.

I am aware that what I am saying is not exactly an antidote to the polarization of American politics. I’m also aware that polarization is the number one way to destroy a democracy. But Trumpism is an illness that pervades the body politic. It can’t simply be ignored or lived with. It needs to be categorically repudiated and destroyed, along with the anti-intellectual cynicism that birthed it, if we are ever to be able to act as a united nation again. All other priorities are secondary to this.

The past several years have, in many ways, made me and many other liberals nostalgic for the conservatism of the past. I am not about to carry water for the Bush-era GOP. The War on Terror remains indefensible. The failures of the elites that precipitated the rise of a populist GOP candidate are real and serve as lessons our elite must learn.

But as disastrous as the Bush years were, I at least don’t doubt that the neocons thought they were doing the right thing for the country. At the very least, they wanted the country and its values to succeed. And they cleared the very low, but very important bar of being able to accept the results of an election even when they lost.

But over and above this, the Old Right was actually capable of making a good point every once in a while. Obama was too soft on Russia, as he himself would likely admit today. The New Right, on the other hand, aspires to become Russia. Ironically, the conservatives have become victims of democracy run amok. The party elite are terrified of their own voters, and have no choice but to try to survive against one lunatic primary challenger after another.

This is a disaster of their own making, and they deserve to pay the price of their ruthless cynicism. But they have afflicted the rest of us in the process. The modern Republican Party is not really a party so much as a cabal of conspiracy theorists, radicals, cynical opportunists, and traitors. Through a mixture of sheer stupidity and an apparently endless appetite for cognitive dissonance, all are in the thrall of Donald Trump. This is all liberal boilerplate at this point, but the point is that this must change somehow, because the status quo is not sustainable.

To restore a right which can serve as a healthy counterbalance to the excesses of the left, they must first be forced to pay the full price for their allegiance to Trump. That means they must lose, badly. If that means armed militias that have to be suppressed, I say that’s a fair price to pay. Trump is a tumor pinching a nerve which grinds all other action to a halt, and there is no solution that doesn’t involve his excision. There is no sustainable future for this country if one of the major parties is incapable of accepting the results of its elections without breaking out into violence and embracing conspiracy theories, particularly not with massive foreign threats looming on the horizon. Perhaps this means the creation of a whole new center-right party led by the likes of Romney and whatever else remains of the old GOP, which many Americans could easily be persuaded to support again with Trump effectively marginalized or, ideally, imprisoned.

Without the constant threat of Trump legitimizing the far left, patriotic liberals will be able to continue excising the radicalism and anti-Americanism from our own party. Perhaps, if these two things are accomplished, the nation can begin to heal as we prepare for the enormous challenges of the coming decade, in much the way the nation healed following the cultural upheavals of the 1960s.

These are vague notions of a future I think we could have, provided we first elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. If we fail to clear even that bar, I have very little hope for the future of liberal democracy and of the American project as a whole.