Good morning. It is Saturday, September 21st. This is what happens in Thought.
“Let’s just get this over with,” my 8-year-old son said of this week’s election. In another time, he might have extolled the virtues of shared democracy and all the people who worked so hard for the right to vote, allowing us to resolve political differences at the ballot box instead of on the battlefield.
But now? My third grader expressed the zeitgeist of this election better than any political pundit. From the mouths of babes, as they say.
At least state and local elections still revolve around these issues, demanding more than cursory attention from voters (and the Times editorial board’s approval can help with that). But at the national level, instead of debating our involvement in the Israel-Hamas war or continued aid to Ukraine or the nationwide housing crisis that’s hitting California especially hard, we’re talking about an adult saying, “I hate Taylor Swift!” online and embracing cat memes based on racist lies. Of course, there are some smart analyses of what all this means for the state of American politics — Robin Abkarian’s column on Taylor Swift’s global MAGA backlash is a case in point. The state of the race, 45 days from the election, doesn’t bode well for America.
And this is not a “both sides” problem. Sarah Longwell, the Republican strategist who never was Trump summed things up on CNN He only put a positive spin on it after a pro-Trump apology deep sex comments The former president’s campaign said: “This is the most disgusting, lie-filled campaign I have ever seen.”
Indeed. I wish we could finish this.
Trump’s assassination attempts are just the beginning. Consider that security researchers Jacob Ware and Colin P. Clarke, writing about what will happen after the election, write: “The truth is that the United States remains in the grip of a perfect storm: a highly polarized political climate in which extreme rhetoric is valued more than moderation. In a country with a loaded gun, the United States is vulnerable to disinformation and digital phishing.”
Don’t ignore threats of violence from the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups. Dr. Garen Wintemuth, a violence prevention researcher and professor of emergency medicine, warns that January 6, 2021, may not be the end of the insurgency, but rather the beginning of an era of political violence. The Proud Boys will reform; he worries that this and other right-wing militias will not only resort to violence to influence elections, but that their members could also be appointed as federal marshals if Trump wins a second term.
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Authoritarianism and hatred are incompatible with the politics of love. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes that autocrats instill fear and anger to gain and maintain power, and the Trump movement is succeeding on this front. But resistance based on uplifting the people has defeated authoritarianism elsewhere in the world, and “America is ripe for a heart-centered mass movement… a national campaign promoting solidarity, kindness, tolerance, and compassion as core values of multiracial democracy.”
No one has ever spoken like Trump. He is like no one else before him. Or so it seems.. Author Laurie Weiner notes his increasing reliance on superlatives; for example, she says the economy he oversaw as president was “like no one, no nation, had ever seen.” Under his leadership, “We had the most secure border and the best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world.” Weiner says this is a sign that the Nazi leader is increasingly out of touch with reality.
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