Audio available for those who may be reading on the way to or from the polls. Sorry the quality isn’t great. My recording studio didn’t survive our house recently flooding and has yet to be reconstituted.
There’s a tendency in the aftermath of a big election to try to break down and parse what the outcome says about us as a country. What did it mean in ‘68 when we elected Richard Nixon? Were we pro-war? Anti-war? Anti-segregation? Just anti-Hubert Humphrey? What did it mean that humanitarian Jimmy Carter fell to Hollywood Ron Reagan? Did it make us more macho or just less kind? What did it mean that pro-war George W. Bush beat back war hero and (sort of) Iraq-skeptic John Kerry? What did it mean that Hillary Clinton, the first viable woman to get a major party nomination went down to Donald Trump, an accused sex predator with a history of making misogynistic comments on tape? What will it mean if we elect the first woman of color? What will it mean if we don’t, and we re-elect Donald Trump? And on and on.
It’s all kind of a dubious exercise in my view. People who think enough about politics to spend time reading and writing about it are quite rare. Guys like me tend to carry around a laundry list of complaints about politicians we hate, and a hagiographic CV of accomplishments for politicians we like. But most people don’t do that. Your “normies,” your “low information voters,” your “swing voters,” the folks watching Sportscenter or SVU reruns instead of tuning into MSNBC or CNN or Fox; those people don’t take such a tribal approach to this. And it leads to a disconnect.
When somebody like me sees a Trump voter, for instance, a series of assumptions are made. We conjure Trump’s entire record, from the last eight years and before. We assume the voter must also be doing this, and thus, that they must be looking upon that record favorably. When dyed-in-the-wool Trumpers see a Harris voter, they react similarly. They project approval on behalf of that voter for every awful thing they’ve ever heard or thought about Harris. They assume that everyone voting for Harris must also know about all of those terrible things and be totally okay with them.
You end up with a thought pattern that goes something like this: “I know that [Trump/Harris] is Very Bad. Everyone else must know this too. So everyone supporting [Trump/Harris] must also be Very Bad by virtue of their willingness to excuse the Very Bad things that [Trump/Harris] has done and will do.”
This, in most cases, is wrong. Certainly some candidates are good and some are bad. And sure, some politicians do good things and some do bad things. But mapping your own reasoning and priorities onto other voters is almost always a mistake. So, in the social media age, is assuming that another individual is even operating from the same set of facts.
Back in my acting days, I had the privilege to star in a wonderful play called ‘Same Time Next Year’ (also a movie with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn). It’s about two people conducting an extramarital affair by meeting up only once per year, and it follows this couple from young adulthood through to advanced age. In the most emotionally impactful chapter of their story (*spoilers ahead*) Doris has gone full hippie while George has become a stick-up-the-ass Goldwater voter. They’re butting heads, having an impossible time coming to terms with each other’s new identity. As their fight reaches fever pitch, George reveals to a horrified Doris that his Goldwater vote was a vote to end the Vietnam War at all cost. Because his beloved son had just been killed by a sniper while serving in country as a medic.
The moral is, never presume to know what motivates another person. Never make the mistake of thinking their journey began where yours did or that they arrived at their destination for the reasons you would’ve arrived there. And I’m talking as much to myself here as to anyone else. Because I’ve been guilty as sin in this.
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What follows is not going to be a doom forecast, a late hit, an endorsement, or a plea to vote a certain way tomorrow (today, depending on when and where you read this). It’s going to be a mostly nihilistic rundown of each of the four top-ticket candidates and why, either way, their victories or losses will probably not say and mean what you think they’ll say and mean. Why, whatever happens tomorrow, your thoughts about your friends, your family, your neighbors, and your country should probably stay mostly intact. Finally, it’s going to be a suggestion to come up for air. To cool it on the armageddon rhetoric, and to see your fellow citizens as just that: fellow citizens. Not traitors, infiltrators, or parasites.
Longtime readers will be surprised at this. My usual pre-election fare is a klaxon blast, yelling at folks to vote, and vote the way I think they should vote. But in 10 years of writing about politics, I really have to accept that in all that time, I doubt I’ve changed a single ballot. I doubt a single Republican has rocked up to one of my screeds and gone, “Damn. Dave’s right. Go blue!” I assume people like my writing because it either reinforces their thinking, challenges them in an engaging way, or gives voice to ideas they’d already had, but that were more nebulous in their minds. I do not think they enjoy my writing because it’s giving them needed advice. To the extent that I’ve ever actually impacted election day behavior, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had only been to shore up support for the other guy. Not “Dave’s right,” but “Dave’s so damn annoying that I now feel motivated to annoy him.”
So things will be a little different this time around. And off we go, one by one:
Tim Walz
We’re going to start easy, because there’s nothing really scary here. I know Tim Walz. Not really - Walz and I have never met - but I knew a hundred guys like him when I worked in politics.
Walz is your upstanding community member who happened to be charismatic enough, and in the right places often enough, to end up with an accidentally storied career in public service. You really only find these guys in politically homogeneous places (which is why all the ones I knew in Northern Michigan were Republicans). Being in a swing district or state makes your teeth too sharp. Guys like Walz are ambitious but not competitive. They want to win, not to watch the other guy lose. Walz might just have easily ended up head of the PTA, a church deacon, a local chamber of commerce exec, or yes, Vice President of the United States of America.
It’s telling that the best the Republicans could do to smear him was to take a highly uncharitable view of some comments he made about his military service (implying that he lied about having been in combat, though it’s far from clear that that’s what he did), and accusing him of “putting tampons in the boys’ bathroom” which is just not what happened. For the record, here’s what actually happened there:
When Walz was governor of Minnesota, he signed a law - a really damn good one, by the way - that tried to make feminine products available to students of all income backgrounds, free of charge. Some Republicans wanted the law to specify that tampons - which were to be provided in school bathrooms - could only be available in girls’ bathrooms. Walz declined. The result is that some schools have tampons in the boys’, and some don’t. The law is written such that no school is out of compliance, irrespective of the choice they made on boys bathroom tampons.
But really, who gives a s**t?
Boys don't have girlfriends? Their girlfriends don’t have periods? A recent survey of men (this was in the UK, to be fair) found that 52% had never purchased a tampon for their partner, and 42% considered doing so too embarrassing. That’s some weak-ass s**t, guys. If having a dispenser in the boys’ room helps demystify this (admittedly terrifying and intimidating) product, so much the better. That it all got folded into the trans debate doesn’t mean it needed to.
And that’s Walz. He’s not really an ideologue or a policy wonk. Nor is he a political genius or a major asset to the Dem ticket. He’s a Democrat because he leans left, and he came up in a blue state. If you met him, you’d probably like him, and he’d probably like you. He’d seem familiar. He’s a regular guy, so he doesn’t need to pretend to be a regular guy. He’ll be a fine VP (the job famously doesn’t take much) and I’d be surprised if, win or lose, he ever runs for president. If he takes office, the future king will not have been crowned (unlike our next entry).
The point is: Tim Walz is not one of the Four Horsemen. If he becomes VP, for better or worse, you will not notice. He will not bring out the long knives or become the administration’s attack dog. He will also not push the administration in an ideological direction suited to his own whims. His victory will imply nothing substantive about America or the people who voted for him beyond the fact that he seems pretty nice and they’re probably Democrats.
J.D. Vance
Vance is interesting for a few reasons. He’s both the youngest of the big four in this election, and he’s also, quite plainly, the smartest. In that regard, I don’t even think it’s a close call. He may be wrong about a lot of things, but it’s not for lack of thinking them through.
Like Walz, he served in the military, though not in combat. Vance wasn’t a legacy admit to Yale Law, he got there the hard way. While a student, he was encouraged to write his memoirs, which became a bestseller and a movie. His transition into politics - after a stint in venture capital - was about as smooth as it could’ve been, and now, he’s pegged to be one of the youngest Vice Presidents ever (though not the youngest - that was John C. Breckinridge, who started serving under James Buchanan at the age of 36). For those curious, Vance will be 40 on inauguration day, the same age as Nixon when he became Eisenhower’s VP. Bottom line, Vance is an impressive guy, with an impressive CV, and an impressive life story.
His intelligence though is probably also his biggest liability. Vance isn’t a cookie-cutter conservative. He’s an intellectual (yes, a few of those are still conservatives). He’s a thinker. Before Trump fast-tracked him to political stardom, he was a very free thinker. He said, for example, some very unflattering things about…*checks notes*...Donald Trump!
He also, as we now all know, has said some pretty out-there things about women. Or rather, he’s played on podcasts and social media with a lot of beliefs that are very common on the right but rarely given voice. We parsed “Tampon Tim” so let’s parse Vance’s greatest hit: “childless cat ladies.”
In an appearance on Tucker Carlson, Vance said that the US was controlled by, among other unpleasant groups, "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." He was careful to include Kamala Harris in this framing, as well as other high-profile Dems like AOC and Pete Buttigieg (who, in fact, adopted children right around the time of this hullabaloo). A more disciplined political operator would have known that this isn’t the part you say out loud. Or that if you must, you say it much more carefully.
According to Vance, he was trying to make a pretty banal point about the Democrats being anti-child and anti-family. But he phrased it such that it sounded like he was taking a dig at all women who don’t have kids. Not a great look, especially for a party that’s hysterically underperforming with women.
The real lesson here is that when you give smart guys with active minds an opportunity to talk for long periods of time, they’re going to muse about some weird s**t. On paper, Vance is a pretty doctrinaire conservative. He’s anti-choice. He’s anti illegal immigration, pro law and order, and everything else you’d expect. And the substance of the “cat lady” thing really wasn’t out of normal bounds for conservative discourse. It was just stylistically jarring (he says he was joking, but he’d made enough other critical remarks about single ladies to leave the impression that they really do gross him out). But it’s not like “Democrats are anti-family” is some new sentiment on the right. Vance is no scarier or more threatening than any Republican on this issue, he just talks about it more colorfully.
He also appears to be a sort-of isolationist. Bad news for the Ukraine, but maybe not such bad news overall. And honestly, when this chapter of the history books is written, Democrats allowing Republicans to run to their left on war is going to be seen as the most hilarious reversal and the biggest political blunder of the 21st Century. But that’s for the history books. For now, Vance is a guy whose views on foreign policy are a lot less frightening than the views of guys who came before him. If and when Trump finally leaves the stage, if the choice is between a guy like Vance and a warmonger like Tom Cotton (or, ahem, the Dems’ new favorite Republican: Liz Cheney) that should be a very easy choice.
Put a pin in this idea of style vs. substance, because we’re going to return to it - bigly - with Trump.
Kamala Harris
I could write a book about Harris’s candidacy and probably four about Trump’s. I want to keep this post from becoming novel-length though, so I’ll try to be as brief as I can be. If you’re a Republican, here’s why you shouldn’t be that scared of Kamala Harris: because Democrats shouldn’t be that excited about Kamala Harris.
Unlike J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris is a cookie-cutter partisan. Her position, issue to issue, is whatever she thinks will be the most popular. At times, and when it’s been helpful (like as a California senator) this has placed her to the left of her party. At other times, when it’s been helpful (like when she was California AG) it’s placed her to the right. There’s very little evidence that she’s a policy wonk, an ideologue, or that she’ll be some kind of activist president. Should she win, she’s much more likely to govern according to where she thinks the nation is, rather than according to where she thinks it should be. That should pacify her conservative opponents (but it won’t).
She’s not dumb. This is a favorite talking point on the right; “dumb,” “low-IQ,” “unimpressive.” Nobody who’s actually worked with her appears to have come away with the impression that she’s unintelligent though, so why do so many think she is? The trope has a few likely causes:
First, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton set the bar extremely high with regard to intellect. Think what you want about those two, but they both pretty obviously have bank-breaking IQs. Both were policy wonks, both were good on-script and off-the-cuff, and both did evidence a strong command of and interest in issue details. And it’s not just them. Bernie Sanders could talk policy all day, so could Elizabeth Warren. Al Gore’s whole campaign was centered around his not being an idiot like Bush (not that that turned out well) and John Kerry may have been an effete toff, but he was certainly a bright one. That Harris doesn’t quite measure up to this - and I’ll cede that she doesn’t appear to - isn’t an indication that she’s stupid. And since the people who most earnestly believe she is also believe that Donald Trump is some kind of giga-genius, I think we can safely discount most of the “low-IQ” talk as partisan hackery.
Her race is part of this equation too, but not (just) for the reasons folks on the left think; “Republicans are just SO racist!” Joe Biden did Kamala Harris (and later, Ketanji Brown Jackson) absolutely no favors by announcing in advance of picking them that he would be using their identities as deciding factors in their selection. I get why he did it. It was 2020, it felt like identity politics would live forever, and he thought he was taking steps to pacify butthurt progressives who’d just been shunted aside for the second primary cycle in a row. It had some unfortunate downstream effects though.
When “DEI” became an albatross for Democrats, Biden had already hung the mantle right around his VP’s neck. “I’ll pick a woman” was now understood to have meant, “I won’t be picking based on merit.” And when he tapped Ketanji Brown Jackson for SCOTUS, having upped the ante by pre-announcing he would be nominating a woman of color, it further solidified the idea that these women didn’t get where they got fairly, or by virtue of their talents.
If you’re a Democrat, that really sucks. And you should be really pissed off at Joe Biden right now. Kamala Harris actually does have an impressive political CV (certainly more so than Donald Trump did the first time around). And…it doesn’t matter. She’s still the affirmative action pick. Because the idiot who picked her told everyone in advance that that’s what she was going to be!
But here’s the thing: even the most conservative conservative out there has little to fear from four years of Kamala Harris. Because even actual visionary presidents have a notoriously hard time using the office to effect real change. The American system just isn’t set up to allow for it. And the Democrats’ instinct has always been to preserve that system. You might not love her rhetoric. You might not love her legislative initiatives (most of which will likely fail, because that’s just how Washington works nowadays), and you may not like the people she nominates. But Kamala Harris is not going to be some kind of game changer. She doesn’t even appear to want to be.
Even the supposedly existential threat of mass immigration shouldn’t be a big point of concern. When Democrats like Harris take the rudder, they don’t tack left, they tack center. Deportations skyrocketed under Obama. Harris will crack down too, even if she didn’t as VP (when she was in little danger of being stuck with the bill and also couldn’t). In any event, Democrats scare easily. So if she wins, and you find yourself a distraught conservative on November 6th, be assured that with very minimal political organizing, you’ll be able to have a big influence on her administration.
Donald Trump
Saved the best for last. The one that will get me in the most trouble with my liberal friends and family.
Look, I think Donald Trump sucks. I won’t pretend otherwise or imply that I’m somehow *above the fray*. He sucks. I can’t stand the guy. But…I no longer really fear him. And if you’re a worried liberal, I don’t think you should either. He’s not worth the energy.
To convince you of this, I’d like to run a quick thought experiment. I want you to imagine a parallel reality in which Donald Trump never entered politics. (Nice, right?) I want you to imagine who the Republican nominee for president might be in this reality. What positions would they hold? What priorities would they espouse? What would four years of them as president look like? What would happen?
Now, I want you to snap back to our reality. I want you to compare the hypothetical Republican nominee you just imagined with the real Donald Trump. Look at them side by side. Probably, this means adding a whole bunch of ugly baggage to the Trump side. But the final thing I want you to do is, piece-by-piece, strip away any of that baggage that can be reasonably placed under one of the following umbrellas: temperament, rhetoric, style, or personal corruption.
If you’ve done this, and if you’re honest, I think you’ll find that you’ve come full circle, and arrived right back at the hypothetical Republican nominee from the parallel, Trump-less universe. Or at least, something pretty close to it. Because when you do that - when you forget about the insults, the circus, the grift, the embarrassment of seeing your country represented by a maladapted sex pest with a poor command of policy, you really just have…a Republican. One not much better or worse than any Republican.
Now I get that that’s a lot to excuse. Personal corruption, (constant!) off-color remarks, sexual misconduct - these are big f*****g deals. They are big f*****g deals that you are under no obligation whatsoever to overlook. But what they are not are things that will have a direct, material impact on the lives of most Americans. If the US were a kingdom, and Trump were its king, you wouldn’t even be aware of most of these things. They’re style, not substance. They’re character, not policy. The reason Trump so outrages Democrats is not that his governing was any worse than other recent Republicans, it’s that they couldn’t tolerate (understandably, to me) the manner in which he governed. He offended every one of their sensibilities. His very existence is a thorn between the ribs. And you’re not ever going to hear me argue that style, character, and conduct aren’t important. But…
Let’s compare Trump to the Republican who preceded him: George W. Bush. Round up all of Trump’s biggest scandals; pussy-gate, the two impeachments, even January 6th. Even with his lesser scandals peppered in for flavor, and as bad as those things all were, they don’t add up to a fraction of the own-goal catastrophe that was the Iraq War. Sure, Trump’s Covid response was abysmal. It was his 9/11. But to claim that another president would have handled it better is to run an unfalsifiable counterfactual. The US had mask mandates. It had school closures, and vaccines, and curfews. And we still got nailed. Other than Trump sounding off unhelpfully throughout it (which, to be clear, was a real problem) Trump didn’t make many moves that you wouldn’t have expected from another president, maybe even a Democratic one.
As to the belief that he’s going to usher in some new, fascist dawn if reelected, a question for believers: when have you ever seen Donald Trump take enough of an interest in something (other than himself) to pull that off? When has Trump indicated, ever, that he works hard enough to execute a full, authoritarian takeover of the world’s most powerful democracy? And if he really wants to, why didn’t he do it last time?
January 6th did not “almost succeed.” It was horrible, and a huge scandal for which Trump was appropriately impeached. But even if the insurrectionists had taken hostages, even if they’d camped out in the Capitol for months, there was just no way this was ever going to result in Trump getting to stay president.
One other question: if your concern is that Trump is uniquely dangerous because he’s a right winger with authoritarian tendencies…forgive me, but have you met the Republican party? Were you just not around in the 90s and 00s? The Republicans are not the Libertarians, and never have been. Right wing authoritarianism has been their thing for a really, really long time. Trump may talk about it differently, he may do a lot of saying the quiet part out loud, but his predecessors really just had better polish. Thicker veneer. Put Trump next to any 9 of the last 10 GOPers to seek the nomination, and the only real difference you’ll find is that Trump doesn’t gloss over what he thinks and wants.
The Calculus On A Woman’s Right To Choose
Since there’s such a stark gender divide in this election, we should touch on a woman’s right to choose - one of the most powerfully animating issues for Democrats in this season. Trump is very bad on this issue. But is he worse than any other Republican would be?
The overturning of Roe was not the result of some genius feat of political engineering by Donald Trump. He just got lucky. Barack Obama, in bending over for Mitch McConnell without so much as saying “boo” shoulders more responsibility for this than Trump does.
So, I am sorry to say, does Ruth Bader Ginsburg, may she rest in peace. Ginsburg died at the age of 87 after having been a cancer patient for 21 years. She’d had pancreatic cancer since 2009 - early in Obama’s first term - and was well into her 80s by the time Obama was leaving office. Gambling on a subsequent Clinton term, and not voluntarily retiring under a Democratic administration, was a legacy-destroying miscalculation for which Donald Trump bears zero blame and deserves zero credit from his party.
Obama eating McConnel’s s**t gave the Republicans Neil Gorsuch. Ginsburg making a bad dice roll gave them Amy Coney Barrett. Hell, even Anthony Kennedy - a supposed moderate/independent - gave Trump and the GOP an unlikely gift by retiring and allowing Trump to install Brett Kavanaugh. Somebody, please, point out to me the part where Trump is some kind of political savant who orchestrated a SCOTUS takeover and the end of Roe. Explain to me how he’s some anti-choice Machiavelli and not just a lucky ducky who had this all dropped in his lap.
Being concerned about reproductive freedom is entirely valid, and being more concerned about it in the post-Roe era makes perfect sense. What does not make sense is crediting Trump’s personal savvy with any of what’s happened over the last 8 years.
And unfortunately, what also does not make sense is expecting the next Democratic president - even a staunchly pro-choice one - to be able to fix this. To get abortion access codified nationally would now take an act of Congress or an unrealistically large shift in the composition of SCOTUS. Kamala Harris has promised to support the right to choose. Great. But does she have a plan to get a bill to her desk? Did she try for one as VP? Is she going to push to end the filibuster? Pack the court? Because that’s what it’ll take.
The hard truth here is that Kamala Harris, like most professional Democrats, does not care about this issue the way voters do. Abortion access is not an urgent problem for people with as much money as she (and virtually every member of Congress) has. She’ll say all the right things about it. Should she get as politically lucky as Trump did, she’ll reinstate access, for sure. But if the calculus for Democrats is that a Harris vote restores reproductive freedom and a Trump vote uniquely threatens it, I just don’t think either of those things is true.
This doesn’t mean don’t vote, or don’t vote for Harris, or don’t vote for other candidates pushing for access and freedom. It means be realistic. And don’t mistake a rhetorically useful talking point: “Donald Trump is a singular threat to abortion access” for reality: Donald Trump is no better or worse on this issue than the rest of the GOP, and actually showed some restraint by nominating real jurists to the Supreme Court instead of Ted Nugent, Maria Bartiromo, and Kid Rock.
For my Dem friends, I’m not finger-wagging here, and I’m not trying to both-sides this. If you’re pro-choice, Trump is a terrible pick. But there has been material harm done by failing to understand how Roe was actually overturned, and by utterly failing to understand what it’s possible to do about it now. With Roe gone, abortion is a state issue for the foreseeable future. That’s bad for red states. But it also leaves Democrats a lot of room to work, even in the event of a second Trump term.
Putting all the eggs - really, putting any eggs - in the Dem nominee’s basket is foolhardy. On this issue, the most realistic thing to expect from a Kamala Harris administration is that if another SCOTUS seat opens up, she’ll nominate a Democrat. That’s good. But how likely is it to change the court’s makeup? Clarence Thomas is the oldest serving justice, but he’s only 76, and could easily last another one or two presidential terms. Next is Samuel Alito, for whom the same is even more true. After that, and probably the unhealthiest justice (Type 1 diabetes) is Sonia Sotomayor, who is 70, and by remaining in office this long, has fairly well missed this chance to guarantee replacement by another Democrat.
So however much you think that reproductive freedom is a game-changing issue (and as an ardent pro-choicer, I 100% agree that it is) there is just no reasonable construction, and no survey of the landscape that places it on the ballot in this election. That ship has sailed. If it hadn’t, Joe Biden would’ve solved this problem in the four years he’s been president. With the exception of SCOTUS seats, most of the useful action that will be possible under President Harris will be possible under President Trump, and - crucially - is possible now.
Final Thoughts
I hope my overall point is clear here, despite this post including at least 18 things guaranteed to piss off every conceivable reader. We’ve all fallen into a terrible habit of regarding every election cycle as Maybe The Last One Ever. SNL just brilliantly skewered this sentiment in an uncommonly funny sketch. Elon Musk just repeated the same thing to a credulous Joe Rogan. All three major cable news channels have been screeching it at each other for two years, alternative media is also neck deep, and this zombie meme has turned our entire body politic into a deranged Rapture cult that keeps seeing the world fail to end, but keeps predicting its end anyway, with greater confidence each time.
Nostalgia for an imagined past plays a huge role in most of our lives. Our politics too. Conservatives tend to want a return to Camelot. To restore a golden age of men in hats and collared shirts, women in day dresses and aprons, of carefully mowed lawns, respectable television programming, and church every Sunday. Liberals want to time travel too, but not quite so far back. Mostly, they want to go back to a time when Republicans scared them less - usually, just to the last guy. In Trump’s shadow, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush don’t seem so bad. Relative to Bush Junior, Daddy was a cakewalk. Reagan may have been a bit dim, but he wasn’t intolerable, and at least he was going to protect everyone from the commies. Ford was actually sane, and Nixon, if you can get past Vietnam and his (considerable) personal baggage governed domestically as what we’d call a progressive now. And before that…all good.
The fear is the same on both sides though: entropy. A sense that things are falling apart. That the country is being lost. And when I say “the same” here, I mean it. The same. Not similar, not roughly equivalent. Identical. The hardest core supporters of Kamala Harris think that Trump, if he wins, will destroy America as they know it. The MAGA set thinks that if Harris wins, she will…*checks notes again*...destroy America as they know it. In a slightly saner world, this shared fear would bring people together. “Hey, if you don’t want to destroy America and I don’t want to destroy America, maybe we should hold hands and…not destroy America!”
But returning to the beginning of this piece, that’s not how it works. Because Trump isn’t just Trump. He’s a slate - a preset menu - of terrible things. He’s authoritarianism, police brutality, the end to a woman’s right to choose. He’s mass deportation, he’s tax relief for billionaires, he’s personal grift and corruption. He’s vulgar, humiliating comments, day out and day in until you want to puke and cry and tear your hair out. And you better believe, for MAGAs, Harris sits on the same throne of evil. She’ll jack up your taxes, bankrupt your small business with regulation, flood your neighborhood with violent immigrants and fentanyl zombies. She’ll trans your kids, kill your pet squirrel, and DEI white people into oblivion.
What a choice, man. You can have soft on crime or soft on dictators. You can have a fascist or a commie. Hitler or Stalin. Whichever side you’re on, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed. The best lack all conviction. The worst are full of passionate intensity. What ever to do?
Not to be *that guy* but my prescription: mirror the world. The adage “be the change you want to see in the world,” which all will have heard, is often misunderstood, and often attributed to Mohandas Gandhi. But that’s not what Gandhi actually said. What he said was much clearer, and much more sensible. Here’s the real quote:
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
See how that’s different? “Be the change…” sounds like, “go out and effect change.” It sounds like “picket,” “protest,” “disrupt.” It sounds like “go fix the world,” which, while not the worst impulse, is a mostly impossible task for an individual. It’s an undertaking that leads to a sense of failure, of foreboding, of despondency, and of hopelessness. But changing oneself is possible. It’s also very useful.
If we recognize that both left and right fear the same thing: destruction of their way of life, we might also take note that both sides harken for the same thing. Political nostalgia is really about a desire to resurrect a time when life was less bitter. When you didn’t have to hate your next door neighbor because of a yard sign he put up. When he didn’t hate you for your bumper sticker. When you could sit next to him at church, take him to a ballgame, chat with him at a barbecue, wave to him at the grocery store, and none of it felt like Consorting With The Enemy.
And that’s something we can do. We can bring that back. I can do it, you can do it, and, as per Gandhi, it’s not a thing that requires waiting for somebody else to act first. You want a kinder world? Be kinder. You want a safer world? Be safer. You want a just world? Be just. You may not get it overnight. You may not get it at all. But you’ll have lived well, lived better, and you’ll have modeled decency and dignity for anyone in your orbit who might be paying attention. And that…ain’t nothing.
You’ll hear a lot of people admonishing you to make a plan for election day. A plan to vote, to volunteer, to phonebank, to knock on doors. And by all means, do those things if you have the will and conviction. I’m going to make a different admonishment though: make a plan for the day after election day.
Make a plan that includes doing something you enjoy and being grateful for it. Make a plan that includes being kind to someone without wondering who they voted for. Make a plan that allows you to be generous. To be decent. To be dignified. Make a plan to worry without letting the worry consume you. Make a plan to grieve without letting the grief consume you. Make a plan to celebrate without gloating, to walk tall without strutting, and to cheer without sneering.
Because the cool thing is, if you do that, you will have made it matter a lot less who won the election. You will have helped cast a shade of unimportance over a process that should be vastly less important than we consider it to be. And hey, if, like me, you’re in too deep to simply shut off all concern, or to change the channel away from cable news, think of it this way: by taking a little breather, you’ll be keeping some in the tank for when you really need it. The outrage roller coaster will still be running on Thursday. The bottom isn’t going to fall out if you take a day off to make things around you a little nicer.
You never know. It could end up being the most consequential piece of activism you ever undertake. You could, if only in your little corner of it, get your country back.
