the tris mccall report

Election Day is two months away. I don’t think we’re prepared for it. There are going to be arguments and hot air, there’ll be disbelief, there’ll be conspiracy theories, charges and counter-charges, accusations, psychological breakdowns, horror shows on the nightly news, psy-ops in broad daylight. Will there be violence? I sure hope not. But the trend lines aren’t too promising.

The last election season was vexed. This one is already beyond belief. With each news cycle, fresh obstacles to fairness, clarity, and calm resolution arise. No prior hazard is ever removed. We’re heading down the rapids toward an unprecedented national disaster, and nobody can do anything about it but gawk.

I hate writing pessimistic stuff. I feel like I’m gloomy enough as it is without reinforcing that for my reader — even if that reader is me. But I’ve looked at our predicament from every angle I can think of, and I have to admit that I don’t see how we’re getting out of this one. We’ve lived through hard years before, and we’ve always been able to rebuild what’s broken. This time seems different. In the hope that I’m wrong, and that I can look back on this in March 2021 and chide myself for my alarmism, I’m going to go ahead and lay it out:

• An ongoing pandemic has killed 186,000 Americans, and put many more in the hospital. We don’t know the precise number, because state and national governments have gotten parsimonious about official communications. Yet we do know that the pathogen is highly contagious, and we fear there’ll be another wave of illness in the fall — right in time for the election.
• A reasonable response to a respiratory illness that threatens to suppress voter turnout: mail-in ballots. Yet the President has done what he can do to discourage voting by post. He’s made it clear that he’d like to torpedo the USPS altogether, and he’s taken steps to do just that. People who don’t want to run the risk of catching the coronavirus are absolutely going to try to vote by mail. How long will it take to count these ballots? Can the post office be trusted?
• The White House claims (with no evidence) that mail balloting will lead to fraud. This is apparent attempt at delegitimating mail-in votes, and, by extension, preemptively delegitimating the results of the election.
• The campaign to re-elect the President isn’t even attempting to win an outright majority. Instead, they’re looking to massage the Electoral College, which, they hope, will deliver the Republican Party its third minority victory of this millennium.
• After the prior minority victory, the President claimed, with no substantiation, that millions of votes had been cast illegally for his opponent. He has been using the same inflammatory rhetoric against his challenger’s campaign, talking openly about fraud, dirty tricks, and election-stealing. Should the former Vice President win the election outright — not impossible — many, many supporters of the President will view the election result as a criminal act of usurpation engineered by a shady cabal of fixers.
• Millions of Americans already believe that the President came to office illegitimately. They’ve concluded that he cheated his way to the Oval Office with a helping hand from international crime syndicates backed by the Kremlin. None of these Americans think that the President is running an honest campaign. Should he win — and incumbents usually do — they’re not going to accept the results of the election.
• Although ample evidence exists that those international syndicates are planing further election interference and should be countered, the President is instead focusing on an internal enemy: American cities run by Democratic mayors. He’s explicitly running an American vs. American campaign: he receives dissent as a personal insult, and reflexively takes the side of police departments against protesters. By now, it should be clear that mediation is well beyond his abilities, and he gives no sign he’s interested in it, anyway.
• Just yesterday, the White House threatened to withhold money from those cities. The governor of New York responded that the President had better have an army with him if ever comes to Manhattan. This is straight-up civil war talk, saber-rattling right out in the public sphere at a time when accelerationism is on the ascent.
• Those of us who live here recognize the President’s characterization of New York City as “anarchist” as the height of absurdist theatre. But not everybody is familiar with New York. It’s frighteningly clear that many of those who don’t are taking this rhetoric seriously and are actively engaging in, and furthering, a ridiculous misapprehension about American cities.
• America is armed to the teeth.
• No, really. There are at least 350 million guns in the United States. That’s more than 40% of all the guns in the entire world. Those weapons are concentrated in places that don’t have restrictive gun control laws. That means that a whole lot of firepower is in the hands of people who don’t live in American cities, and urbanites, by contrast, are relatively unarmed, depending as we do on police forces to protect us from violence.
• Last week, a seventeen-year-old crossed the Wisconsin state line, arrived in Kenosha with an automatic weapon and appointed himself executioner. He brought a loaded firearm to a town that wasn’t his, and used it to kill two protesters.
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, but deeply problematically, many influential Americans refused to denounce the shooter. That included the President. Millions of dollars have been donated to his legal defense fund.
• In Portland, another man shot and killed a supporter of the President who’d come to town as part of a caravan of counter-protesters.
• These street confrontations are taking place against the backdrop of nationwide protests against the police killings of unarmed black men. Many of those who support the police (and, perhaps, the police executions, too) see the Black Lives Matter movement as a socialist insurgency that needs to be stamped out. Yesterday, in shades of Charlottesville, a car slammed into a BLM march in Times Square.
• The Department of Homeland Security has dispatched armed squads in unmarked vans to cities where protests are taking place. Anonymous DHS agents dressed in camouflage have pulled protesters off of the street and detained them without explanation.
• Lots of people — way more than you think — believe wholeheartedly in a theory that identifies prominent politicians and celebrities as members of a Satanic cult of child abductors, sex criminals, and cannibals. For more than four years, they have salivated over the perceived imminent arrest of the Clintons, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and other critics of the White House.
• The President has consistently signaled unwillingness to transfer power to the opposition. Perhaps he truly believes that he is the victim of an international conspiracy, and perhaps he fears losing the immunity to prosecution that the office confers.
• Because of the distortions created by the Electoral College, American Presidential elections tend to go down to the wire. It is possible that the outcome will be made clear by the voters on November 4. But it’s also possible that it won’t. There’ll be mail-in ballots to count, pathogens to avoid, and, inevitably, vote-suppression controversies to resolve. Long lines at polling stations during primaries did not augur well for the night of the general election.
• If there are recounts, or even slow counts, we could be looking at days, or even weeks, of indeterminacy. Based on everything we’ve seen so far in 2020, how do you think those days are likely to go?

I am not a fighter. I don’t own a weapon, and I’m not going to go get one. Words have always been my defense, and they’ve held me in good stead so far, so I’m going to keep on using them. Yet I know that the battle hasn’t reached its highest pitch yet, and we may all be marching to a field where words are useless. Honestly, we might be there already, and people are just too polite, or too cagey, to tell me.

Because what I’ve learned over the past two weeks is this: I am a sitting duck, and the hunters are well-armed and well provisioned. I am effectively defenseless in my own nation. This is something I’ve always believed (and it’s something that black Americans always feel) but rarely has the point been driven home so authoritatively. If an angry teenaged vigilante from the sticks comes to my city with an AR-15 and shoots me, I understand that powerful people are going to excuse his actions. If I am loaded into an unmarked van and driven god knows where by a goon squad from out of town, those same people are going to say that I had it coming. All illusions are shattered: millions of countrymen aren’t my friends, and never will be. They’re not people with whom a peaceable conversation can be engineered. They don’t want to sit down at a table and break bread. They want to see me hurt.

As we all wake up, however groggily, to an internal conflict that started awhile ago, we’re coming to the realization that there’s nowhere to hide. The time to learn Norwegian and move to Oslo has passed — and they wouldn’t want us there, anyway. As a non-combatant by nature, my utility to the cause is minimal, and my desire to fight is less than zero. But to those authorities who are lighting the matches and pouring the kerosene, and engaging in calumny against the place where I live, I would like you to know: I see you. I know what you’re doing. You don’t want an election, and you certainly don’t want a discussion. You want a brawl. You want to use that arsenal you’ve amassed. You may just get your wish. I can’t say I’m ready, because I never will be. But I will not be taken by surprise.

The Kentucky primary election is still too close to call.  A landslide of mail-in ballots are going to need to be counted, and that’s going to take time. Understandably, many voters were reluctant to head to the voting booths in the middle of a pandemic. But many weren’t, and the lines outside polling places became a story, as they did in Georgia, and as they did in Wisconsin, and as they also did right here in New York City.  Whether the White House succeeds in torpedoing the postal service or not, universal mail-in balloting isn’t going to be implemented before the general election in November. By then, a second wave of coronavirus may well be cresting, right in time to coincide with flu season.  Expect fear, waits, confusion; expect a long count and, maybe, an indeterminate outcome. 

We might also anticipate a legitimacy crisis.  Decisions such as Bush vs. Gore have placed an asterisk next to the results of certain general elections.  But I don’t think I have ever seen the country as unready to accept an electoral result as we are right now.  No matter who wins, it’s a lock that millions of people will refuse to believe that the result was reached fairly.  The President is already telling his followers that mail-in voting is some sort of conspiracy against him.  Meanwhile, a not-insubstantial percentage of Democrats are already convinced that Trump is a Russian plant, and that his foreign creditors will intervene and throw the election his way.  If Trump ekes out a narrow victory, those long lines at the polling places will be viewed as indicative of Republican electoral shenanigans, just as Biden’s wins in the primaries were often attributed to voter suppression.  Should Biden prevail, you can expect to hear from the White House about busloads of immigrants, and the crooked media, and deep fakes, and general fraud, and an entire litany of finger-pointing excuses meant to undermine public faith in the system.  If the final count is in question, as it may well be, we’re likely to be rudderless for awhile.  Nobody is going to know for sure who’ll form the next government, so promises and suggestions made by politicians will be effectively meaningless.

It’s tempting to think that there’d be something salutary about this result.  Our politicians haven’t been serving us too well, so there’s no harm in seeing them all discredited, right?  History tells us otherwise. Legitimacy crises tend to consolidate the power of entrenched authorities, who are able to step into the vacuum created in the absence of the public’s imprimatur. Should we convince ourselves that elections are meaningless, and it’s all rigged anyway — and buddy, we’re almost there — we surrender one of the few tools we have. This is why certain unscrupulous politicians won’t take obvious measures to make voting easier, even in the midst of a health emergency that threatens to make it more difficult. They don’t fear a legitimacy crisis, because they believe they can exploit one to their advantage. They’re probably right.

Consider the consequences of the centennial election of 1876. Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York, reasonably believed he’d become the first Democrat to be elected President in two decades. He’d won more than fifty per cent of the popular vote, and, with three states to count, he was within one electoral vote of clinching the victory. All he had to do was win one of three states in the Deep South — states bordered by other states that he’d already won. To put it another way, Rutherford B. Hayes, his opponent, needed every electoral vote in every ambiguous state in order to usher in a Republican successor to the second Grant Administration. The Republicans cried voter suppression, and accused the Redshirts and the Klan of intimidating freedmen voters, which was surely accurate, but not something the Democrats were going to accept. The electoral commission established to examine the votes in disputed areas consisted of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, and in a foreshadowing of the party line machinations of Bush vs. Gore, they voted 8-7, over and over, in favor of Hayes. By a single electoral vote, they named him the nineteenth President of the United States.

This kicked off one of the nastiest legitimacy crises in American history. Democrats felt swindled out of the Presidency and refused to accept Hayes as the winner; they called him “Rutherfraud”, demonstrating that coinage of mean nicknames for politicians is not a 21st Century phenomenon alone. The blood had barely dried on the Civil War battlefields. Republicans had no taste for a renewed insurrection. So the representatives of the kind of interests that always seem to take the lead during a legitimacy crisis worked out a compromise. Hayes and the Republicans would get the White House. In exchange, Reconstruction would end. The remaining Yankee troops would pull out of Dixie and segregationist state governments would be allowed to treat freedmen however they saw fit to treat them: horribly, usually. Many of the discriminatory measures enabled by the Compromise of 1877 would remain in place until the 1960s.

A terrible irony of this: Rutherford B. Hayes was a decent person. He made his name in Cincinnati as an abolitionist lawyer who defended runaway slaves in court. During the Civil War, he served as a field officer, and he took a Confederate bullet at South Mountain during the invasion of Maryland that culminated in the Battle of Antietam. Grant commended him for his gallantry and bravery, and he was brevetted to the rank of major general. He campaigned for equal rights at a time when it wasn’t always easy to do so, and in a place (Southern Ohio) where the Copperhead movement was strong. It’s a shame that he’s associated with the rollback of Reconstruction measures meant to integrate America, but then Hayes wasn’t driving the train. He came to office at a moment when trust in government was in the gutter, and that severely compromised his latitude for action. He wasn’t an expression of public will, or the people’s voice, because he couldn’t be. He lacked the democratic authority that comes from the result of a true plebiscite. All he could do was stand by while powerful people — institutional party leaders, industrialists, white supremacists, etcetera — struck a noxious private deal on behalf of their own interests. That deal was ostensibly made on his behalf, but really, it cut him out. That’s what happens during a legitimacy crisis, and it’s what I expect will happen in November unless we can recover some of our faith in the systems we’ve designed to divine popular sentiment. The lesson is the same as it was in 1876: when we don’t believe our elections are on the level, that benefits those who’d prefer that we didn’t have elections at all.

We started getting reports from China in early January. They were sketchy, but we knew something was going on. Then there were the cruise ships, at least one of which regularly docked in Bayonne. Close to home, quite literally, but the news didn’t clarify much. By late February, the doors to the Life Care Center in Kirkland were shut. Shortly after that, life in Seattle changed, and it has yet to change back. The Seattle Times was all over this; they lifted the paywall and shared their coronavirus stories with anybody who wanted to read them. I read them.

Ordinary dispatches from Seattle reached us, too. One independent journalist laid it all out for us in blunt language. What we’re experiencing now, she told us, you’re all about to experience. It’s all coming to your town: lockdowns, shortages, store closings, park closings, government warnings, constant fear of contracting and transmitting a communicable disease. If you think you’re going to dodge this, you’re wrong. I read it. In mid-March, people in Bergamo posted videos from isolation and sent love across the Atlantic in anticipation of our coming hardship. Soon you must suffer like we suffered. I watched those videos.

Yet there was a part of me that simply refused to believe it. It was completely irrational, but it was there. I didn’t want to stockpile food. I didn’t want to stay inside. Maybe I wouldn’t have to. Maybe the virus would burn out before it reached us. If you’d sat me down during the second week of March and forced me to have a reasonable conversation, I think I would’ve conceded that the whole world was about to go sideways. But I was not open to reasonable conversation; not entirely, anyway. There were already too many voices in my brain — too many anxieties, too many competing claims, too much noise in an overtaxed system.

While the certainty of the denialists isn’t something I have the capacity to understand, I do think I get where they’re coming from. I experienced a version of it myself. Because visible worry is a bad negotiating tactic, and we value strategic acumen above all other mental traits, Americans are taught never to admit weakness. Americans are trained to downplay threats. We refuse to behave like we’re rattled, even when circumstances might forgive us a little panic. If somebody rushes into town with the news that the neighboring village is on fire, we’re supposed to remain cool, act nonchalant, and lead with our skepticism. So it doesn’t matter what I say to a doubting Arizonan or Floridian about my experience in Jersey City in April and May. He might not dismiss me outright. Intellectually, he might understand that community spread is accelerating in his state, and an intervention might need to be made. But he’s probably not going to change what he’s doing. He’s more likely to dig in.

The global health crisis has magnified the country’s least appealing traits. Among other things, we’ve been exposed as atrocious risk assessors. Our tendency to minimize has never served us well; lately, the consequences of our national complacency have been pretty lethal. They’re reminders that the coronavirus is hardly the only crisis we’re facing. People have been warning about our ecological recklessness, our unequal distribution of power, and our staggering debts for decades. Sometimes, we’ll even agree that these are crises. Nevertheless, we won’t act. We treat them like television shows that will inevitably wrap up with tidy endings, and all we’ll have to do is kick back and watch. We’re not going to be the ones running around with our heads on fire, because those people look silly, and silly is the one way that Americans cannot bear to look.

People in other countries don’t share our vanity. They don’t have to pose with their chests puffed out and pretend that they aren’t afraid of fearsome things. They’ve cultivated other modes of sociability and other ways of being, and hard as it might be for us to hear, we might want to follow their lead. As an American myself, I hate to be shown up, but as a person with eyes and ears, I can acknowledge that that’s exactly what has happened. Hong Kong has shown us up. Austria and Germany have shown us up. New Zealand has shown us up. Taipei has shown us up. Vietnam, a country we actively tried to destroy not so long ago, has certainly shown us up. People did not have to watch their immediate neighbors die before they admitted that the virus was real. They didn’t wait until the house was on fire before they turned on the pumps. They took the word of the epidemiologists and acted accordingly. America prides itself on its initiative and its productivity, but our individualism isn’t worth much if individuals can’t muster the will, or the wisdom, to put aside their differences and work together when we absolutely have to. The whole world has watched us mess this up. Admirers overseas are now going to turn to other models, other leaders, and other systems to emulate. It’s hard to blame them.

The five-day rolling averages continue to alarm me. Cases and hospitalizations are up, sharply, in Florida, Texas, Nevada, Alabama, the Carolinas, Arizona, and other sunny states where the warm weather was supposed to make it difficult for the coronavirus to reproduce. We all knew that reopenings were likely to assist the transmission of the pathogen, but some of these places never exactly closed. Nowhere is the virus spreading as aggressively as it did in New York and New Jersey in April. Numbers are climbing nevertheless, and if they continue, it’s likely that governments will intervene again.

On the other side of the globe, China is locking Beijing back down after an outbreak traced to a wholesale food market. The Chinese authorities have been loud about their response to the coronavirus — how decisively they’ve moved, and how well they’ve been able to put out fires — but I get a sense that they speak with fingers crossed behind their backs. They clearly expect to be slapped by a second wave.

Regardless of the direction of the lines on the state graphs, America ought to be ready, too. Some epidemiologists predict a spike during flu season, but that’s just a guess based on older models that may not apply to the threat we face. Here in the Jerz, some of my neighbors proceed as if they’ve been through the storm and made it to the other side, and this pandemic is now the Sun Belt’s problem to deal with. Restaurants in Asbury Park opened their doors and invited patrons inside. Through court order, the state government put the kibosh on that. Nevertheless, businesspeople on the Shore are getting restless. They don’t want to lose their livelihoods. They want to get the summer rolling.

Meanwhile, street protests continue. In Atlanta, where coronavirus remains steadily problematic, a white cop killed a black man named Rayshard Brooks. This shooting, which happened on Friday night, was more kerosene tossed on a blaze that is burning from coast to coast. Even before it was ruled a homicide, it prompted justifiable public outcry. That’s going to mean more people congregated in public, and more opportunities for the virus to spread, and I imagine some unscrupulous politicians are readying their excuses and gathering their talking points even as I type.

Can the acceleration of cases be attributed to the protests? Not too cleanly, it turns out. Many of the hottest zones are located in places where people haven’t been marching. But let’s be fair here: unless the germ-theory is somehow inaccurate or inapplicable in this case (no evidence for that), mass actions and mass gatherings will necessarily lead to more coronavirus. It would be nice to think that structural change and public awakening might happen in a manner that didn’t further the spread of a deadly disease, but I doubt it can. We may not know whether street actions will prompt municipal governments to reform their police departments, but we can be pretty certain that nothing positive is going to happen unless there’s public pressure.

So that’s the state of the nation on the ides of June, and it’s an ugly one. In order to stare down one threat, we need to run the risk of amplifying another. To make matters worse, there’s no guarantee that our efforts to address either problem will amount to much, and more than a little reason to believe that they won’t.

But we’ve got to try, because inaction would be downright suicidal. There are many who say that we’re all bound to be infected with the coronavirus eventually, just as there are many who’ll say about institutional racism and police brutality that that’s just the way it is/some things will never change. Don’t you believe them. Other countries have demonstrated that the pathogen can be stopped in its tracks, or at least kept at bay, through a combination of tracing, isolation, mask-wearing, and good hygiene. In America, our government is going to be whatever we will it to be. For quite some time, it’s been terrible because we’ve been terrible; it’s been a frighteningly accurate expression of our national priorities. We can realign those priorities, and we can get healthy. It’s not going to be easy, and we’re not all going to make it. But all the airborne particles and all the smoke from the burning Wendy’s can’t obscure the way forward. It’s pretty damned visible.