Dear friends -
At this point, about 100 million Americans have voted. That’s roughly 2/3rds of the total votes we expect to cast this year -- so it is possible that the outcome is already decided, the results resting mutely in stacks of unopened ballots waiting to be counted.
It is hard to make any assumptions this election, but right now it looks to me like either a landslide or a close win for Biden. A close win carries risks of shenanigans that could tear the country apart; indeed, Trump appears to be planning on it. I have obsessed over the qualitative and quantitative data to no end, and this morning I wrote a short post on the state of the presidential race. Election night I recommend my friend Evan Grossman’s superbly detailed guide to track what’s happening. One strange sleeper race I’m keeping an eye on: the governor’s race in Missouri.
But for the sake of the morning after, let’s forget the polls, the fear, the anxiety, the noise. Even if Trump loses, it’s likely more people will have voted for him than voted for Obama in 2008. We’re a deeply divided nation. Are we going to be able to move forward as a country? How are we going to get out of this cul-de-sac of American greed, shame, anxiety, and despair?
Remember Rule 1: it will get crazier. Until we face the unpleasant truths about our country -- and force our leaders to face them -- it will get crazier. Extreme poverty, systemic racism, accelerating climate change, the pandemic and its long consequences -- these are just a few of the issues glaring at America. Trump isn’t going anywhere and win or lose he’ll keep tweeting. The tens of millions of people who voted for him (also known as your neighbors) aren’t going anywhere, either, and he’ll encourage them to carry his grievance as their own. As Garrett Graff wrote in Politico, imaging a post-presidency Trump:
Rather than being able to focus on combating the pandemic and restarting the economy, Biden could find himself consumed on a daily basis by responding and batting away Trump’s latest conspiracies and complaints, and the nation consumed by an unprecedented roiling, low-grade political insurgency unlike anything the country has ever experienced.
During the last debate, Trump went after Biden with an attack that draws blood: “You’ve been in charge for 47 years and done nothing.” Part of this attack is very much directed at African-Americans -- why vote for Biden when he had his chance to confront systemic racism, and didn’t? But it’s also an attack that resonates with all kinds of Americans: if you care about climate change, debt, dignity of work, poverty, cost of health care… on almost every front, things have gotten worse. Why do 187 million Americans spend more than two hours every day on video games? Because reality is broken (as Jane McGonigal wrote a decade ago). Time to face the music. But can we?
Assuming Biden ends up being sworn in, he’ll still have plenty of division within the big tent of the Democratic Party, from AOC to Larry Summers. Before Biden ever sets foot in the White House, the right wing media machine will be working against him, winding up the tens of millions of people who voted for Trump with the Neverending Story. You can almost hear them all -- Fox News to Dan Bongino (the most trafficked “news” page on Facebook) to Trump himself: Socialism! Government overreach! Conspiracy!
In the book Democracy in Chains, Duke University historian Nancy MacLean tells the story of how Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan -- funded by the Koch brothers and friends -- built an entire infrastructure around a toxic mix of racism and greed, dividing America into “makers and takers”. Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch shared much of this world view and spent the last four decades waging a scorched earth media war with the refrain “government is the problem”. The Trump administration’s incompetent handling of the pandemic is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And now social media further addles the brain with toxic conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, the rest of the media (I am reluctant to call them the mainstream media) believes that telling an inspiring story about ways that government actually works might violate some outmoded standard of objective journalism and prefers to focus on pointless petty stuff:
History will record that in the summer and fall of 2020, at the peak of the most unusual and bitterly contested election in modern times, the president and his team made a sport of plucking minor incidents from local news feeds and distorting them into data points of a grand conspiracy to deny him a second term. History will also record that their efforts have been wildly successful.
We need to restore peoples' faith in the American experiment and staunch the flow of people towards craving an autocrat who will fix things. This will require some supreme storytelling and a re-thinking of our media. But mostly it will require a reckoning to face our greed, our racism, and our resistance to today’s complexity.
For the next 48 hours, I will be obsessing over the very complicated case of this election (lotta ins, lottsa outs, lotta what-have-yous, very complicated). Feel free to call, text, or email. I’m not sure I’ll be able to think about anything else. Except, maybe a little, the future.
Lotsa love, nicco
PS. Speaking of autocrats -- a state trooper in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s security detail was mysteriously re-assigned to a remote post near the Canadian border shortly after Cuomo learned the trooper had started dating his daughter… an autocrat that fathers of daughters everywhere can appreciate!