The Stakes of an Election

It's become a cliche to say that this is the most important election of our lives, because of the likelihood of electoral shenanigans and creeping authoritarianism that a Republican win will signify. This importance can also be a source of exhaustion, both from the relentless onslaught of media and social media that comes from it, as well as it being only the latest election that's being portrayed as a life or death struggle between light and darkness.

I find it interesting, and probably a feature of crisis capitalism, that Trump in 2016, Romney in 2012 and McCain in 2008 all represented off-ramps into America turning shittier and more self-destructive, at least if you got all the same petitions by email that I did. I'm struck by how naive it feels to worry about John McCain or Mitt Romney dismantling democracy had they won, but of course that's how we saw it then - especially given that a win for McCain in 2008 would have represented a continuation of the GOP's policies under George W Bush.

It's also probably why so many people in 2016 thought that not voting for Hillary Clinton would be okay this one time. Donald Trump was so cartoonishly bad a candidate (pace Matt Yglesia's argument on Vox that he ran as a moderate; this may even be true, on economics, but not on anything else) that they probably figured no one in their right mind would elect him and that they could vote Jill Stein or Gary Johnson to their hearts' content - after all, we'd been told how destructive a Romney or McCain presidency would be for the dream of universal healthcare and environmental protections.

But every election I find myself thinking about a conversation that I heard back in 2006 in London, when I'd just started my job at Informa. This would have been before the Democrats captured the House and Senate amid the ongoing chaos of the Iraq War, and over a year since the 2005 general election that returned Labour's third term in office.

The conversation was between two of my coworkers, both gay men, who were talking about the prospects of David Cameron becoming prime minister at some point in the future. The UK press was awash in talk of how he represented a different kind of Tory leader - young, down to earth (insofar as an Oxford-educated aristocrat could be) and in tune with the concerns of the British middle class. He'd successfully replicated Tony Blair's trick of staking out the sensible center, though coming in from the right rather than the left, and indeed in his time as PM he didn't suddenly veer hard right: he maintained his own social liberalism and appreciation for Europe in the face of Euroskepticism within his own party.

The social liberalism is important in this context, because it struck me at the time how both of my coworkers were able to view the prospect of a Tory government without existential dread. There was no talk at that moment of the Tories coming in to take away their rights, the way there always is in America when the Republicans come to power. They were able to evaluate a Tory premiership on its own merits, rather than a threat to their actual lives, which struck me as so alien for a second.

I'd say the effect on my own politics of listening to that was hoping not only for a succession of left-leaning, social democratic governments here in the US, but also for an end to the constant back-and-forth of certain groups' rights being at risk every four years. My social media is full of people talking about how exhausting the past four years have been - a sentiment I agree with - but only a few of them acknowledge how people who are non-white, queer or simply just not male must be exhausted in this way as a matter of course, regardless of who the GOP candidate is.

It seems difficult to envision now, when we're probably headed for a civil war or a Hungarian-style illiberal fake-democracy, but it's worth dreaming of a time when both sides can agree on the basic humanity of the entire electorate. It'll take a consensus to not demonize the other side's views as unpatriotic and leading to the downfall of America, and that consensus isn't going to come as long as Twitter and Facebook are directing the public discourse.

But it's worth remembering that there's another world out there, a different way of doing things than the four-yearly crisis we have here (which is how both the Democrats and Republicans mobilize their respective bases). I hope that world comes here someday.