An Election-Eve Meditation
Final polling averages on the night of Nov. 2, 2020. Screenshot from FiveThirtyEight.
Like many of you, I’m holed up at home tonight, a knot in my stomach, sweat beading on my forehead, wondering what the next 24 hours will hold and how I will possibly get through them. Especially in a year when it is forbidden to assemble with friends and acquaintances and strangers to chat and hug, to grieve or rejoice. We all carry scars from four years ago, when we thought we had it in the bag. We’re unwilling to allow ourselves to hope. The phrase “the audacity of hope,” which we found so inspiring in 2008, now sounds laughably naïve to many of us.
But I offer this election-eve meditation as a reason, if not to hope, then at least not to utterly despair.
No, of course I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. But the consensus belief seems to be as follows: Joe Biden will almost certainly win the popular vote, and by a much larger margin than Hillary Clinton did; he has a very good shot at winning the Electoral College; and if he doesn’t, one big reason will probably be Republican-led shenanigans that aim to make voting more difficult, prematurely stop ballots from being counted, etc.
And yes, that is infuriating and anxiety-making! We are in the middle of the worst public health crisis in 100 years, and the political party that has done the most to exacerbate the crisis has also seized on it as a pretext for suppressing the vote! The Electoral College is a relic from slaveholding times! The Democrats need to win by big margins while fighting with one hand tied behind their back!
But then I think how much worse I would feel, how much closer to the brink of despair I would be, if there was no chance at all of a good outcome tomorrow. If, say, Trump were cruising to a popular- and electoral-vote victory on the scale of Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984. If a clear majority of American voters supported him and the Republicans were on track to win states that were considered “safely blue” four years ago.
You see, the thing I feared the most when Trump took office was not that his administration would do terrible things, but that my loved ones and acquaintances and neighbors would support and abet those terrible things. (Insert obligatory disclaimer about how this is a privileged thing to say and I can only say it because I am unlikely to be atop the list of 21st-century fascists’ favorite targets.) I read all those terrifying articles that discussed the history of fascism and sought to draw analogies to the present day. I learned that demagogues are seductive, that people are easily swayed, and that fascism has traditionally been a young people’s movement. These articles made it seem like once a would-be autocrat gains power, there is no stopping him—not just because our institutional safeguards are weak, but because people themselves are weak. I was fully prepared for Trump to gain in popularity, winning new swathes of supporters while throwing his enemies in jail.
But instead… lots of people read the same articles I did. And enough of us seem to have taken their lessons to heart that, even if we have not fully defeated Trumpism, we have stopped it from snowballing in popularity. We have “resisted”, we have “refused to normalize this.” As I said: Joe Biden is likely to win more votes than Hillary Clinton did. A “blue wave” took the House in 2018. More millennials would vote for a socialist than for a Republican.
In another year darkened by the threat of fascist violence, E.M. Forster wrote, “One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. […] If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Well, I say, if I have to choose between being angry with a rigged system and a small cadre of cartoonishly evil villains, or being angry with the majority of my fellow Americans, I will always prefer the former option. And I am grateful that it is the one being offered this year.
Yes, hate the system and its loopholes, hate the Republican ratfuckers, hate Trump’s deliberate incitement of violence and division. Hate that there’s even a chance that this incompetent man will be able to steal a second White House term away from a more broadly popular opponent. But though we cannot trust our government, at least we can trust our friends and neighbors. Though our government has betrayed us, at least we have not betrayed ourselves.