If he wins we will have to give up our hysterics about his awfulness and work twice as hard to bring local concern and anti-theocratic energy to whatever time remains for American democracy.
If she wins, we will have to work twice as hard not to gloat, to replace identity politics with class concerns, and to embrace the common sense the left has lacked over the last decade or two.
America is not great. The system is rigged. Mr. Trump has been right about that. That he would make it great again or not rig the system all the more for himself are both laughable ideas proven in his every remark, his first term, and on January 6th. Like most people of my stripe, I remain amazed at the mental gymnastics folks are willing to go through not to vote against him with as much force as possible, which in this case means voting for her, even if you detest what she stands for.
But to grow stronger, the burble of life still audible in America will need much more than a sane vote tomorrow. It will require people to do what they always struggle to do: sacrifice, learn from their critics rather than demonize them, take responsibility, get humble, etc. It will require a leader or two to say: “This is a twenty-year endeavor and we are just at the start of it.” It will require a full transformation of education, transportation, and the use of technology.
Yet, oddly, in my view, I see our biggest challenge as how we interface with each other and the world.
Of course, this would be better without a cretin in charge, if school were about curiosity, not status, you could easily catch a bus and so on. Rhetoric and policy matter.
But in the warp and woof of the day are now interchanges that once came with potential generativity and now come only with frustration and protocol, with reasons to retreat or become suspicious. Maybe this happened when we stopped going to church, when Walmart crushed Main Street, when Amazon took over, when phones became ubiquitous, or at some other moment. But now we stay in our bubbles and resist, rather than seek, the stickiness interaction with another human being requires. This is our biggest challenge.
We need a “No-Phone Cafe” and to keep phones out of schools.
We need to be able to shop and pay the cashier, not interact with a screen.
We need case workers who know our name rather than call centers where the person you speak to can only read from a script.
Maybe we need a day where everyone has to play Cribbage or Gin Rummy or Dominoes with a stranger and no one gets to talk faith or politics.
We need a shift in culture at the micro level. And that is not easy.
Below is a clip of Yuval Noah Harari talking about the difference between democracy and dictatorship. My friends will assume he is talking about Trump. But a Trump supporter could easily see him talking about the left. More or less, the real culprit he is pointing to is tech.
In the everyday behaviors—now lost—that made me neighborly with people whether I agreed with them or not was the stitching of democracy. Until we insist on those again and measure days by how many people we interface with rather than by an algorithm or the demon of efficiency, even the best political results will not matter.
Regardless of who is in office, the terror we face is that we do not face one another as we could and might. It is that with which we must reckon.
Politics is theology, east and west, so you will always have theocrats. All the things you identify as the big problems and challenges really are not, nor are they within the scope of state power to be changed by politics. They are theological, or more deeply, spiritual problems. The state has much simpler duties, well laid out by Machiavelli. The theological sermons placed in front of the real-politik exists to keep your head from melting down — the heads of all people who have not been bred to understand and use power for what it is. (This explains Trump's appeal and gains with "minorities" the white corporte Dem establishment likes to enfeeble as a perpetually passive victim class.)
You are among Nietzsche's resentful sheep, upset the weaker wolf lost, who you mistook for a more sheeplike creature. A powerful state is an apex predator, and it will never lay down power without being forced to do so. Fortunately Mr. Trump's ideas of power may lead him away from exercising it as much and so far abroad as the Clintons and Bushes did. De-escalating in (and maybe eventually getting out of) Europe, China's coastal waters, etc. should be seen as existentially good moves. far more valuable than the tepid promises to restore this or that type of care or kickback at home by Democrats who are now the last vanguard of crusader neoconservatism, well to the right of Nixon on most things. Such a terribly unself-aware party leadership with no bench, thanks to their killing off of any challengers to their out of touch, out of date zombies. Remember it was the Clintons with Bush assists who created bin Laden, Putin, and the forever wars — sold out the productive economy, deregulated the banks, and caused a major global depression. Why should anyone trust them with power?
From outside the US, the reactions of many white northern hemisphere folks are instructive — those still addicted to the fumes of the old order are upset only about the loss of the optics. In the old old days, monopolization of violence defined state legitimacy. Now it must also be masked from view and deniable. The president should be a clean white doily — one that magically allows us not to see the blood soaking through as we catch our compounded interest, cheap energy, plasticine loot, daily caloric intake, etc. Trump doesn't give a shit about that. He makes it obvious we're living in a bloody empire, but good grief look to any era in the past to see how much worse it has been for naked power grabs, breaches of "democratic norms," and crass bigotry, racism, etc.