A referendum on liberal democracy
"We need to shut down the polling industry until we figure out what's going on." --Charlie Sykes
Yesterday, America had a referendum on its own founding values. The votes are still being counted, but it appears likely that they will be narrowly ratified.
A handful of states- but mainly Michigan and Pennsylvania- are still out and may not be fully counted until Friday. Even as I write this, Wisconsin has been called for Joe Biden. From all indications, the remaining votes in Nevada, Michigan, and Pennsylvania- most of early and mailed ballots- are overwhelmingly Democratic.
It appears that we will, after all, deny re-election to an obviously incompetent and irrational sociopath with the blood of tens of thousands of us on his hands.
Well, what I am about to say may sound arrogant. Fine. I plead "no contest" to that charge. But it's something I sincerely believe, and I feel compelled to say it: even if Joe Biden ends up winning the White House in a squeaker, America has failed a crucial test.
This should have been the landslide the chattering classes predicted, and it's an indictment of the American people that it wasn't.
Never mind Donald Trump's manifest sociopathy, massive ignorance, emotional immaturity, and utter unfitness for the office he occupies. Never mind the danger he poses to the nation every moment he remains in charge. This is a guy who has summoned up the very worst in us from the depths of our souls. He has inculcated hatred, division, and bigotry. He has contaminated our religion with rank hypocrisy and emptied the term "pro-life" of any and all meaning. He has made America a laughingstock in the eyes of the world and already in his first term has done probably irreparable harm to our interests around the world. He has coddled dictators and alienated our allies. He has sought not to persuade his opponents, but to intimidate them.
He has repeatedly threatened them with imprisonment and sought to intimidate them into silence. He has displayed not merely an incredible ignorance of the Constitution and of our values as a people, but utter contempt for them. He has ridiculed the handicapped, sneered at the weak and the marginalized, and scoffed at tolerance, common courtesy, and basic decency. And not only his mismanagement of the pandemic but his cold-blooded, cynical, and ruthless subversion of the nation's public health experts in the midst of a pandemic has cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans.
Yes, it may well be that when the smoke clears we will have narrowly rejected Donald Trump. But it is to our eternal shame that we did not, after all, do what it appeared only yesterday that we were on the cusp of doing: decisively and clearly rejecting him in favor of common sense and our founding values.
If Donald Trump is in fact re-elected, the world will remain leaderless. The strong nations will continue to prey, willy-nilly, on the weak, and chaos will continue to rule the affairs of nations. We, as a society, would continue to unravel and to be polarized as we have seldom been in our history, rejecting science and objective truth along with evidence and reason and simply believing what we want to believe, whether it is true or not. We would go in living in separate and incompatible realities, unable to converse with or even hear each other. And perhaps worst of all, we would go on knowing all this, but fundamentally not caring.
I do not believe that such will be the case. But if it is- if Trump somehow wins after all- it will not be America alone that will pay the price. It will not even be the short-term world order. Without America to serve as Ronald Reagan's "city on a hill," Old Glory will no longer be, in the words of a seldom-sung verse of The Star-Spanged Banner, "a sign to the free, and a hope for the world." The values our nation was founded on will to a significant degree have departed from the world and ceased to shine a beacon of hope to its hopeless, impoverished, and enslaved people.
We missed a historic opportunity yesterday. Assuming that Joe Biden does, indeed, manage to get to 270 electoral votes and takes office on January 20, we will be better off in that our president will be a decent and non-crazy grownup again. But he will be besieged both from the Ocasio-Cortez left and from the Trumpist right, and we will not have a major political party in contact with reality or with our nation's founding values.
We will need to pray for Joe Biden, to pray for our country- and to have our heads examined.
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