Dear Friends -
Taxes. Supreme Court Vacancy. No justice for Breanna Taylor. Coronavirus fatalities top 200,000 while Friday showed the largest spike we’ve seen in months. May you live in interesting times, indeed.
Many of you shared with me Barton Gellman’s Atlantic essay about the ways Trump might refuse to concede the election and lead us into a constitutional crisis. We have ample evidence from Trump and the entire elected corpus of the Republican Party that they might try something like this. Reading his essay is enough to give you a severe panic attack.
The country is asking something of us: believe in the promise of America, and come to it in this moment with personal courage, sound nerves, and stark beauty.** To quote my friend Eli Pariser, “confidence is essential to winning”. Here’s what he wrote on Facebook:
I've spent a lot of time over the last two months listening to experts on disputed elections and folks involved in democratic movements against autocrats all around the world. One thing that comes through very clearly in case after case: as a movement posture, confidence is essential to winning.
This isn't just for tactical reasons -- as a hedge against hopelessness and despair. It's actually critical to the strategy, because fights against autocrats are fights for "defectors."
Ultimately what determines whether autocrats maintain a hold on power is the behavior of a bunch of feckless bureaucrats, who are constantly assessing which way the wind is blowing. The more it looks and feels like they're on the wrong side of history, the more likely they are to support the rule of law. Conversely, a posture of fear ("oh no, he's going to steal the election!!") is for this reason a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Remember: personal courage, sound nerves, stark beauty. If you’re in need of stark beauty, watch this reading of Amanda Gorman’s In This Place: An American Lyric. She graduated from Harvard this past May and is probably the most exceptional American poet to emerge in my lifetime. She writes that America is a place with “a history written that need not be repeated / a nation composed but not yet completed”. We have the power to shape this nation, and we will prevail. But it is going to get crazier, and you will need personal courage, sound nerves, and stark beauty.
And vote. Don’t forget to vote. It’s not just about you voting: it’s about everybody voting. In fact, statistically speaking, about half of you -- yes, you, dear readers -- don’t vote. I can personally guarantee that you have friends and family who don’t vote even though they could. Register them to vote. And if you need some inspiration, my former student Joe Garvey made this TikTok video about getting his 91-year old grandmother to vote for the first time.
So where are we right now? Let’s see:
Ignore the polls. That’s from my first email to you weeks ago, and it is still true: this is an unprecedented election, and it is very hard to figure out what is actually going on. Who is going to vote? How does the pandemic impact voting behavior? Are swing states ready for a giant volume of mail-in ballots? We don’t know. Nate Cohen sums it up - thanks to the electoral college, it’s just all very crazy:
If Mr. Biden outperformed today’s polls by just two points, he would be declared the winner early on election night… He’d have a good shot at the largest electoral vote landslide since 1988… But if Mr. Trump outperformed the polls by the same margin, suddenly we’d have an extraordinarily close race on our hands, potentially waiting days or weeks while mail-in votes were counted in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
One of the most remarkable things about this race is that with all the chaos in the day-to-day (remember that a few months ago we impeached the President?) the polls have been consistent and even boring. Trump is exactly where he was a year ago. Nothing -- not even new terrible revelations about his taxes -- are going to change that.
Speaking of Trump’s taxes: yes, it’s the big story of the day, dropping right before the debate so we’ll forget about it by Wednesday morning -- Trump will make sure of that. (Thank you, New York Times, for your impeccable sense of timing.) And yes, it is full of outrage and raises even more questions. But are you surprised? America knew everything it needed to know about Donald Trump in October of 2016, and still voted for him. We have learned very little that is new about him, but we have learned a lot about the Republican leadership and ourselves.
And speaking of the debate: My wife and I met in politics when we were sworn enemies (I worked for Howard Dean and she worked for John Kerry during the 2003 Democratic primaries). So in our house, Debate Night is Date Night. Trump has set a low bar for “Sleepy Joe”. Biden needs to look sane, reasonably cogent, and: sound nerves. As Joe Trippi says, this election is about chaos versus stability -- as long as Biden looks low-risk, we’re good. I’ll be drinking a martini out of my Hillary Clinton cocktail tumbler -- “made with 100% shattered glass ceiling” -- a bitter reminder of 2016. (Yes, the campaign sold them, and no, you can’t find them on ebay, and yes, my children broke one of them, so now I just have a single one left.)
Trump understands television - it’s almost as if he’s read Neil Postman: "The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” I’ll be listening for the QAnon dogwhistles. Biden can expect an attack on his boys -- both the dead veteran and the surviving Hunter. Trump will try to goad Biden into losing his temper (a known weakness). Biden will need personal courage and sound nerves. He’s got to turn it around and make it about everyday Americans: “Instead of attacking my family, let’s talk about the families across this country…”
And speaking of American families: they’re suffering. One telling anecdote: the Wisconsin State unemployment office had 41 million calls between March and June, and just 0.5% of those calls were answered. (Maybe they should NCoC’s study of how to fix the process of applying for unemployment.) As the Republican-controlled Senate races to confirm a new Supreme Court Justice, there is no chance of any action for the millions of families suffering in this pandemic economy.
Speaking of hammering away on the economic message: Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Comey Barrett made a good speech yesterday. She’s likable. It’s a big mistake to attack her faith, even in dog whistle way. The most damning way to go after her and the GOP is to attack big business: she always rules against workers, consumers, and for big corporations. It’s not just about the ACA, in other words -- although that’s a good start. Let’s hope that Kamala Harris takes that route -- her role on the Senate Judiciary Committee means she’ll have a lot of air time to make the case for the Democratic ticket.
There is a lot left to say. The big tech companies ruining the internet continue to terrify; you may have missed the Congressional testimony, under oath, of Facebook’s former director of monetization: "We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook.” Defense contractors managed to use $1B earmarked for coronavirus to buy spare jet engine parts. Trump continues to make racism his message (as I wrote about weeks ago). And conspiracy theories continued to metastasize, the latest being Sen. Tom Tillis (an embattled Republican in North Carolina) embracing part of the QAnon narrative by claiming that the coronavirus death tolls are false, inflated for various nefarious reasons.
Take a deep breath. Remember rule 1: it will get crazier. Stock up on personal courage, sound nerves, and stark beauty. Let’s get this Monday started.
Lots of love, nicco
** For new readers, or just those of you with weak memories and poor attention spans, a relevant re-publication from one of my prior emails:
My favorite novel is H.G. Well’s Tono-Bungay. Although now forgotten, Wells thought it was his best novel; Gilbert Murray compared Wells’ novel to Tolstoy. And even thought it was published in 1909, it is prescient:
But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor's eye, there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, and we find ourselves by accident... Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost anyone can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities of life the sweat of your deathbed.
Go on, then. Join the struggle. Ignore the polls. And remember what we need is here: personal courage, sound nerves and stark beauty.