This seemingly endless election campaign is finally drawing to a close, and for many of us the finale feels dire.
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This seemingly endless election campaign is finally drawing to a close, and for many of us the finale feels dire.
November 5 is likely to be the most important day of our lives, aside from our wedding day, or the days our children were born, or the days our loved ones passed. It is likely to set the course both for the rest of our lives and for the life of our nation.
Life goes on, the more sanguine among us say, as they brace for what might be a Donald Trump victory. But life does not always go on — at least not the one we want to live.
Life did not go on in Germany after Hitler’s ascension. Life was, for most, tortuous and ugly, and for millions of others, over. I’ve previously referenced Victor Klemperer’s diary chronicling his life during the early years of Hitler, I Will Bear Witness, because I thought no book was more relevant to our current situation in which another Hitler loomed.
Read Klemperer. Read what is very possibly in store for us should Trump win: the dissolution of civil society; the treachery from friends and relatives currying favor with the authoritarians; the agony of daily living from one dread to another (former Democratic strategist James Carville only half-jokingly told MSNBC’s Ari Melber, “When the paddy wagon comes, you and I are going to be in the back of it”); the end of an objective, independent media; the craven obeisance to the Führer; the worst cruelties suddenly normalized and even celebrated; the inversion of every single decent value; and the agony of mere survival.
Donald Trump not only promises this future. He assures it.
Dire it is, but it is far, far from hopeless. Indeed, quite the opposite. I know we are inundated by “think pieces” that tell us what Kamala ought to be doing, or how she is blowing it, or the go-to argument about how Democrats just can’t speak the language of populism, which is a criticism so old and brittle it can barely walk. So let me say right now that I think all of that is a crock, and that I do not expect Trump to win.
All signs, I think, point to Kamala Harris entering the White House in January. Forget the polls. Not only have they been wrong since forever; they are tilted for various reasons in Trump’s favor, one of which is that pollsters can be cowed too, just like industrialists — though even the polling suggests a Harris victory.
Harris has, as I have emphasized in past posts, the women’s vote, which is the most important cohort in the election; she has the vote of fully 10 percent of Republicans, which is astounding; she has the youth vote if they actually show up at the polls; and I suspect she has the “hidden” vote that Trump won in both 2016 and 2020. By “hidden,” I mean the vote of those who are reluctant to tell pollsters whom they are voting for, in Trump’s instance because they were ashamed of saying it, in Harris’s instance because they are afraid of saying it.
Finally, I think Kamala will win for the most profound and uplifting reason of all: We are better than that. We are better than electing Donald Trump. We are better, and we know better — at least the majority of us.
The majority of Americans are not about to sacrifice 250 years of freedom and democracy for the declarations of a Hitler wannabe. The majority of Americans are not about to trash our institutions and toss away our values because a former game show host and faux businessman tells them he will be their retribution.
(And may I ask this: Retribution for what? For their having to pay more for eggs? For our fighting for the rights of minorities and women and gay and trans people and asylum seekers? For our believing in science? For our wanting free and fair elections where there is no voter suppression? For our protesting of the Dobbs decision? For our championing of unions? For our support of Ukraine’s fight for independence? For the malarkey that Democrats look down on the white working class, which the party has served faithfully for more than a century? For promoting compassion and empathy and kindness? For our criticizing of Trump? For what?)
No. Americans will not do that. I have more faith in them than that — at least more faith in the majority of them.
This is how much faith I have: I am not even sure that this election will be a nail-biter. And it better not be — because the larger Harris’s margin of victory in the popular vote, the less likely it is that the Supreme Court will intervene on whatever pretext they can conjure, and throw the election to Trump, which is my greatest fear.
This is why it is imperative — even if you live in a non-competitive state, as I do — that you get out to vote and get out the vote.
In California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, Oregon, etc., get out the vote. Give Kamala the 3- or 4- or 5-point victory she needs to keep John Roberts’s, Sam Alito’s, and Clarence Thomas’s dirty fingers off our election. Don’t let the court do in 2024 what it did in 2000.
Lines from William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” have been quoted frequently since Trump’s political appearance:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The last line may well be true. Let us prove the second-to-last line isn’t. It is in our hands. And I strongly believe we will triumph.
What Must Not Ever Be Forgotten
But while we are buoyed by what is likely to be our joy on Election Day, we should never forget what has transpired. We should never forget that even if, when, Kamala Harris becomes our next president, America hasn’t really prevailed.
The lessons of 2024 should be burned into our memories. Goose-stepping up to the brink of Nazism, which is where Trump has proudly proclaimed he wants to lead us, but not quite crossing the line is no victory. Narrow escapes do not provide confidence. We should never forget how the Republican Party, which once so sanctimoniously touted its adherence to traditional values, fell, almost to a person, meekly in line behind a fiend who is a convicted felon and a molester of women.
We should never forget how pusillanimously the media behaved in normalizing Trump, sane-washing Trump, refusing to call out Trump’s misdeeds and meanness while demanding that Kamala Harris be perfect.
We should never forget how the business community forsook their country in the hope of cadging a few extra dollars from a Trump presidency, should he win. (History, I suspect, will judge Elon Musk as it has judged those industrialists who couldn’t wait to boost Hitler. He is the worst of villains.) Or how Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, one of the richest men in the world, and the owner of The Washington Post, scotched a Post editorial endorsing Harris, either because he wanted government largesse should Trump win or because he feared Trump’s retribution.
Bezos is now a pipsqueak cowering before Trump. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” reads the Post’s masthead. But it actually dies in selfishness and spinelessness. Ditto Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire tech owner of the Los Angeles Times, which also shrank from an editorial endorsing Harris.
We should never forget how social media — specifically, Musk again — spread misinformation and disinformation in support of Trump because there was profit in exploiting fools who would believe the most outrageous lies.
And, above all, we must never forget how many of our ordinary fellow citizens cheered on Trump, how many indulged in his fantasies of revenge, how many shared his desire for blood.
Trump, after all, is just an instrument, albeit a pernicious one, to channel hatreds. Knowing that 48 percent of our fellow Americans will vote for a man who says “Hitler did some good things” — or for a man who boasts he will prosecute his opponents, or for a man who refuses to say he will accept election results should he lose and has already incited a coup, or for a man who says he will hand Ukraine over to Vladimir Putin, or for a man who says openly that he will be a dictator on day one, or for a man who asserts that he will demand loyalty to him but not to the Constitution from every government employee — is no victory.
As I have said many times here, but must repeat before we vote, while the commentariat will always excuse The 48 Percent, we cannot. We should not.
They are economically distressed, we hear constantly, when nearly every survey shows that they are no such thing.
They are lonely and discontented and angry, we hear, not necessarily because they are racists or homophobes or nativists or antisemites, but because they think Blacks and Hispanics and gays and immigrants and Jews have gotten most of the rewards from America and they have not. It is injustice — alleged injustice against them — that they are protesting by demanding retribution from Trump. (Believe me, they are racists and homophobes and nativists and antisemites.)
They are ignorant, we hear, trapped in an informational silo where they never hear the truth but only right-wing propaganda — which is certainly true, but ignorance is no excuse either. They choose to live in that silo. They choose to hear only those things that fortify their own biases and prejudices. They choose to deny fact and hug falsehood close.
We should not indulge them. The results of this election should rebuff them, and the results should shame them. Because while they may be ignorant, they are also malignant.
This election is like no other since 1860, not only because the very fate of the nation — our fate and that of our children and grandchildren — is at stake, but also because no previous campaign has ever been so hate-filled, so dedicated to the proposition that the other side is evil (which, unfortunately, in one case is true).
The pundits can make all the excuses they want as they try to curry favor with our very own Republicans cum neo-Nazis, but the real bottom line is that Trump’s supporters love him because we, you and I, fear him. They love him because they know he embodies everything we decent Americans detest. They love him because they love how much he rankles us. They love him because he promises to “own” us and promises to incarcerate us and even to eliminate us. They love him because they are weak, and they think he is strong. They love him because he is the great destroyer.
That is what has made this election so terrifying: We know that they love him because he hates us with a murderous hate; and we know there is no positive attachment to him, not a single one, only the threats of blood and deportation and vengeance and cruelty.
Four years ago, I saw a bumper sticker that I thought encapsulated the MAGA movement in both its sentiment and its vulgarity: It was a cartoon of Trump peeing on a toilet labeled “liberal.” This year, I saw a banner that encapsulated the bolder, meaner, tougher, more dangerous MAGA movement. It read: “Trump 2024. Fuck your feelings.”
Exactly.
A Carnival of Twisted Hate
But if you need a more dramatic demonstration of how hate-driven this campaign has been, you need look no further than Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday, which was explicitly modeled after a notorious Nazi Bund Rally at the Garden in February 1939.
Trump’s was a spew of hate, a festival of hate, a convention of hate-mongers that revealed what the MAGA movement really is: a howitzer manned by creeps and aimed at both the most vulnerable and the most compassionate among us.
This is not just the appeal of disinhibition, as Ezra Klein argued in The New York Times — the appeal of a rotten man who eschews civility and politesse and gives vicarious license to threatening the political, moral, and social order. This is an ugly lust that we must acknowledge and defeat. And this is a stain on our history we can never erase or forget, even after we defeat it.
And, more personally, please don’t forget your sleepless nights as you pondered a Trump presidency. Don’t forget your nightmarish concerns for your children or your grandchildren should he return to power, and your fears over the kind of world they would inherit. Don’t forget the jolts you felt every time you heard one of Trump’s latest insults or diktats or his denigration of the country you love. Don’t forget the howls of ecstasy from his supporters when he used vulgarities to describe Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or when he called immigrants “vermin” or when he vowed to rid the nation of you and people like you.
Don’t forget that. Don’t ever forget.
Now It’s All Up to All of Us
What prompted these fulminations of mine in the last week of the campaign is actually not my typical pessimism, but, as I wrote earlier, my atypical hopefulness that despite all this, we will win if we rouse ourselves to win. We will win — we, all of us, working together, facing down hate, facing down evil, facing down those who would destroy America.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the authors of How Democracies Die, wrote an opinion piece for the Times this week in which they laid out the “pathways” that Americans failed to take in halting Trump’s rise to power — pathways that had worked to stop authoritarianism in other countries.
Briefly, they are: restricting anti-democratic parties, as Germany has done; having parties themselves keep authoritarians from gaining power within their organizations, which is why Franklin Roosevelt and not Huey Long was the Democratic standard bearer in the 1930s; forging intra-party coalitions, as France recently did, to keep the National Rally authoritarians from gaining power; and mobilizing groups and institutions — religious, business, unions, and other civic organizations — to demonstrate against and denounce authoritarian threats, as Germany recently did with a coalition called “Hand in Hand,” uniting against the proto-Nazi AfD party.
For a host of reasons, the most telling of which is that there are simply too many pro-fascists in America for them to be contained, these steps haven’t worked here. Which leaves one last, and, as we learned in 2016, not entirely effective pathway, because the majority does not necessarily rule. That pathway is the vote itself.
And this is my message: Only we can save ourselves and our nation and our world. We must be our own heroes. We are Lincoln’s “last best hope.”
On November 5, Americans have their final opportunity to defeat dictatorship.
As I have written previously, you can do it with your ballots.
You can do it by encouraging friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors, and others to vote, and reminding them of what is at stake.
You can make sure everyone you know is voting for Harris. You can take them to the polling place if they need a ride.
You can do it by manning phone banks, as I have been doing, and canvassing. (Remember: The bigger the margin, the better the chance that the result will be unimpeachable.)
You can do it by wearing Harris buttons and planting yard signs, which boosts the confidence of fellow Harris supporters.
You can do it by informing others of Trump’s heinousness — you would be surprised how many people have never heard the “suckers” and “losers” comment by Trump about our veterans.
You can do it by challenging falsehoods when you hear them. No, Haitians are not eating cats and dogs.
And you can do it by maintaining the right attitude. Yes, that too.
Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway: Trump notwithstanding, hate is never a good place from which to conduct a campaign. Neither is despondency.
It is understandable if your energy has flagged from the giddy highs of July when Kamala entered the race. It is understandable that the polling gets you down, even if the polling is largely fictitious. It is understandable that you tell yourself you have done everything you can do, and that now it is up to fate. All that is understandable.
But as we head into this last week, I recommend we all work hard and exude positivity. There is no reason to feel otherwise. Harris should win. And we know she must win. If that doesn’t put wind in your sails, nothing will.
Lead with hope. Lead with joy. Lead with purpose. Lead with confidence and optimism. These are contagious.
I believe the center will hold. I believe the best of us do not lack conviction.
Now we just have to demonstrate it on November 5.
Adapted, with permission, from Neal Gabler’s substack, Farewell, America.
