Amor Mundi

Voting, Again, With Everything Seemingly On the Line

Roger Berkowitz

11-02-2024

Honestly, I am exhausted by this election. I’ve written so much about the danger posed by Donald Trump over the last 8 years that I don’t have much more to say. And I have written so much about the failure of the elites and the mandarins in both the Democratic and Republican parties who enabled Trump because they have alienated so many working-class Americans, that again, I don’t have much more to say. On one side there is anger and resentment at a governing, intellectual, and corporate class that has built institutions for themselves and ensconced themselves as an intermarrying elite, having pulled up the ladder to protect what they have in one of the most unequal and ossified societies in history. On the other hand there is terror at the prospects of rule by a resentful, childish, vengeful, and mean-spirited man-child who leads a movement loyal to him rather than to the Constitution or the country. Is there no way to walk ourselves back from the brink? Somehow, whichever side wins, I fear that the hatred is too extreme and neither side will try to meet the other in an effort to build upon those values that they actually share. There is simply no interest in learning from those whom one disdains. One side sees the other as oceanic flotsam, the other as landfill. Both sides are so ensconced in their bubbles as to be hateful and disdainful to the other.

That said, life is about picking sides. There is no doubt that a President Trump in a second term—without any grown-ups in his administration and with most of the moderates in his party out of power—is more unpredictable, corrosive, and dangerous to the continued vitality and ideals of the United States than a President Harris. His refusal of reality and his nihilistic insistence that winning justifies the most outrageous lies, means that he simply cannot be entrusted with power a second time in a liberal, constitutional republic. I outlined my reasons for believing this last week, and you can read them here. Yascha Mounk makes a similar case here. My friend Jeffrey C. Isaac understands both sides are potentially violent, but rightly points out that the real threats of violence lies with former President Trump and his election-denying minions. Isaac writes:

"There may be some symmetry in the way “extremists” on both sides of our polarized politics poll as “sympathetic to violence.” But as serious political scientists have long known, filling out questionnaires is one thing, and politics is another. Only on the Trumpist right is there an organized campaign to demonize opponents and to incite and justify violence, and only on the Trumpist right are there many thousands of armed individuals—some organized as “patriot” paramilitary groups, some as lone wolves—who have acted on the incitement to violence. Is there a single election official, anywhere, who fears that there are leftist activists who threaten them because they believe that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, liberals, progressives and Marxists, and that “we need to take our country back” from the “lunatic communists?”

My friend and colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams writes about his exasperation with heterodox thinkers who have embraced heterodoxy to such an extent that many of the better known members of the Heterodox movement say they refuse either side and will not vote: Williams writes:

“this election cycle has repeatedly shown that a reflex to be independent, to reject gatekeeping, to punch at “elites”—or, more simply, representatives of the status quo—can also leave people numb to existential threats that reasonable-consensus positions were developed to oppose. Our values can be turned against us. When heterodoxy is raised above all other priorities, it risks collapsing in on itself."

Whatever happens on Tuesday, we all have a lot of work to do, both questioning ourselves, as well as reaching out to others who see the world differently than we do. Above all, we need to engage in the kinds of public action that Arendt saw as essential to politics. But first, it is important to stand and be counted.