Election Worries 2020
Election Day, November 3, is sixty-three days away. Republican and Democratic voices tell me it will be the most important election in our lifetimes—or the most important in the history of the republic. It’s typical election rhetoric, no more true this year than in the other elections I have witnessed.
Of course, some elections are more important than others, coming at crucial times in history. But without the perspective of time, it’s hard to say which electoral choices are the really important ones. I highly doubt this election will be as important as 1860, when a bitterly divided country elected Abraham Lincoln, an ugly Illinois lawyer who turned out to be the leader the country needed. Again: is our choice this year as momentous as the election of 1932, when we turned away from strict laissez-faire economics to experiment with social security, wage and hour laws, and other government interventions in the marketplace?
(Some people tell me that this election is all about “socialism,” that the Democratic candidate stands for the end of capitalism. Depending on your definition of “socialism,” we became socialist in the 1930s with the New Deal, or in the 1960s with Medicare, or when we adopted national health insurance. It seems to me we ought to debate actual policy proposals without worrying about labels. If it matters, I’m a practicing capitalist.)
I want to tell you what I am worried about this year. There are two narratives, widely believed by many people. Neither of these narratives is true, but because so many people believe them, I fear they will lead to grave trouble. You can hear one story from people who support President Trump, the other from Biden people.
The first narrative goes like this. President Trump is going to win. The polls you read about in the mainstream press, also known as fake news, are all wrong. Remember four years ago, when similar polls predicted that Hilary Clinton would win? They were wrong then, and they are wrong now. President Trump is doing great, and patriotic Americans know it. The only way he could fail to win reelection is through FRAUD. And the Democrats are expert at FRAUD. Their trick this year will be to claim that people need mail-in voting because of COVID-19—and everyone knows that mail-in voting is rife with FRAUD. The pandemic argument is either an excuse or old-fashioned cowardice; after all, what danger is there in going to the polls on just one day?
The competing narrative goes like this. President Trump is a national disgrace. He doesn’t even pretend to be a unifier; he appeals strictly to white voters in rural areas and the suburbs of big cities. Opinion polls of likely voters consistently show that there are not enough of these white voters to reelect Trump. So Vice President Biden is going to win. The problem is that Republicans know this. They know that if the people who support Biden actually vote, Biden will win. That is why Republicans work so hard, in so many ways, to keep people from voting. They want it to be hard to vote, because only by VOTER SUPPRESSION can they win. Trump’s head of the Postal Service (a big donor to Trump’s campaign) is doing what he can to slow down mail-in voting, and that’s just one version of VOTER SUPRESSION. There are lots of other tricks in the Republican VOTER SUPPRESSION toolkit.
Both of these narratives are false. This is important, so I will say it again. Both of these narratives are false.
Each side claims that we know now that their candidate will win. Based on this “knowledge,” each side is preparing its accusatory rationale for how the other side stole the election. I fear that many people, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people on each side, believes their narrative. And I fear that of those hundreds of thousands there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands, who are willing to act on the basis of their “knowledge.”
In America our political discourse is dominated by protest. (As a philosopher, I should acknowledge that Alasdair MacIntyre explained the reasons for the ascendancy of protesting as a political act in After Virtue.) No matter which candidate wins the election, there will be hundreds or thousands who will protest the result. Filled with outrage, but not surprise, they will scream, “We knew it! We warned you about (fraud/voter suppression), and now it’s happened.”
You see what worries me. It is very likely that in the days after November 3, America’s streets will witness protests. It is only a little less likely that those protests will turn violent. Still a bit less likely, protesters will be killed or kill others (or both) in our streets in November.
Dear friend, no matter how you plan to vote in November, please counteract these false stories. You do NOT know who will win the election. You do NOT know that the other side will steal the election. When people make such claims, speak up and tell the truth.
