I consider it a thing of monstrous arrogance to support a political candidate because he or she agrees with me. For starters, my judgment is compromised in dozens of ways. I take it for granted that I’m misinformed, and woefully ill-equipped to untangle the sort of knotty problems that leaders face. John McCain stands out as a political figure whose positions on things I hardly ever agreed with, but what would it mean if I did? Our frames of reference couldn’t have been more different. He was a hothead warrior who went on combat missions in Vietnam. I’m a writer, musician, and aesthete from Northern New Jersey. Instinctively, I didn’t think his disposition was very well suited to the jobs he wanted. I’m sure he would say the same thing about me, only with much greater vehemence. Maybe we’d both be right.
So I am not eager for a replica of myself to attain ultimate political power. I feel that would be a disaster for everyone. My positions on the issues, such as they are, are pretty much what you’d expect them to be given my temperament and my geopositioning. No big surprises there, and not too illuminating. Some of my friends who identify as socialists have periodically expressed frustration and disappointment with my willingness to cast votes for corporate-party candidates — they see that as an unacceptable compromise with a value system that I don’t share. I get that, and I do understand why they can’t find it in themselves to abet the rise of whichever Clinton or Clinton-like individual is asking for their support. It hurts their souls, and I don’t like to see my friends accrue soul bruises.
That said, when it comes to elections, I am 100% realist, preferring to save my flights of fancy for the recording studio or boardgames or story hour. I am not going to pretend that there aren’t but three possible outcomes to the national election in November. Either the incumbent will win himself a second administration, or Joe Biden will win himself the opportunity to set up a new one, or, because of the public health crisis and related disasters, electoral democracy will crater and there won’t be a vote at all. Honestly, I doubt that the third thing is even a possibility, and I spent some time in my last dispatch explaining why we shouldn’t want that to happen anyway. Utopia is not dawning in that direction. Trump and Biden are the only two people with a shot at winning Election 2020, and the chance to make an intervention in that binary choice passed us by months ago. It’s going to be one or the other, so you’ll either have to pick the one you believe will be a better steward, or, if you think they’re both equally bad, you might cast a vote for a protest candidate with no shot at winning, or just sit this one out.
But… if you’re taking that position in 2020, I have to admit that I don’t believe you; not entirely, anyway. American politics is not a math problem, politicians are not integers, and no two possibilities are ever equally bad. Even if we can agree that our system is no longer delivering us palatable options, the way in which those options are bad will still differ, and as citizens invested in the health of the republic, we ought to be able to discern which of the unappetizing choices we’ve been served is more digestible. It’s actually our responsibility to do just that. If the nation is poised to travel down one of two paths, it really doesn’t do us much good to insist on the merits of a path that we’re not going to take, or stand at the crossroads and throw a tantrum because neither road is lit with fairy lights.
In November 2016, I voted for Hillary Clinton. I didn’t do that because I believed we shared the same quadrant of the Nolan Chart, or even because I wanted to see history made. I did it because I didn’t think her opponent could do the job. New Jerseyans had been privy to a view of Donald Trump that other Americans weren’t; we had a good idea of his limitations and a strong sense that he lacked the crisis management skills that are mandatory for a chief executive to possess. Many of the intuitions I have about famous people, mediated as they are through publicists and prejudices, turn out to be wrong. In this case I was right, and then some. My sense is that some of those whose image of the President was formed by game shows and television appearances are waking up to his incapacity. Maybe they aren’t. Regardless, it seems that the reelection effort is determined to make an issue of Biden’s age and mental frailty, which seems awfully strange to me, given that the President is neither young nor sharp. He appears to be inviting a comparison that flatters nobody. And it occurs to me today, on the Fourth of July of the twentieth year of the twenty-first century, that that might be the exact plan: discredit the Presidency, make it all seem like a pointless joke, further depoliticize people, shake their faith in the process and get them to sideline themselves. Democracy dies by attrition. Those who don’t want you to exercise your rights will celebrate your discouragement.
Eventually, systems are judged by the results they produce. By that standard, our electoral democracy isn’t doing well. It keeps empowering people with iffy ethics, deep tribal allegiances, and very little interest in unity. But even among unappetizing options, gradations still exist, and it is always worth remembering that the name on top of the ticket isn’t all you’re voting for. You’re also voting for the many people who’ll attend to the President, and have the President’s ear, and will determine the direction of the President’s policies. Republicans didn’t vote for Stephen Miller directly, but Stephen Miller is what we got, and it’s certainly what we’ll continue to get should they return Trump to office in November.
Certain wishcasters have revived the theory that Trump will stand down. Polls haven’t been wonderful lately, and he doesn’t enjoy the grind of the Presidency, so why wouldn’t he spare himself the aggravation? I don’t doubt that the President is having a lousy time, but I do think it’s a huge stretch to imagine he’d ever let go of power voluntarily. It’s clear that he recognizes that he’s been saved from prosecution by the immunity conferred to him through his office. The moment he returns to private life, he’s going to fly straight into a spiderweb of court cases — and he’s not going to have a subservient attorney general at his disposal. But no special counsel or Congressional investigation or, God forbid, military or police coup was ever going to oust the President. The only one with the power to do that is you, and me, and everybody else with a vote. They’re going to do everything they can to make you believe that vote is irrelevant. But it is relevant. Its relevance exceeds that of any other tool we’ve got at our disposal. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t be trying as hard as they are to discourage us from using it.