Let's Talk About The Elections
No. 29: October 23, 2020
Dear Friends,
I hope you don’t live in the Pacific Northwest because I fear the blast radius may include you. I’m referring to the discovery of the first Asian Murder Hornet nest, which I presume (and kind of hope) they will be nuking from orbit:
It is nice to get some good news in A.D. 2020.
Let’s Talk About The Elections
I can’t put it off forever. And given the state of polarization, I suspect that whatever I say will result in some “cancel my subscriptions.”
It’s pretty exhausting, isn’t it? The large card stock mailers stuffed into your mailbox that you barely glance at because you know who you’re voting for? The hysterical ads every time you want to watch a YouTube video? On cue, once again we are being treated to The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes.
I’m not going to tell you how to vote, since most of you have probably already voted. But I will share some thoughts and perspective that will be sure to irritate all of you.
Our insulated bubbles have grown much thicker over the last four years. If you follow different factions on social media, you might conclude that there are two alternate universes running simultaneously. Biden folks—particularly, I notice, the formerly conservative NeverTrumpers (e.g., Bill Kristol and The Bulwark)—are already measuring the White House drapes. On the other hand, I continue to be in awe at the number of MAGA people who are loudly and emphatically convinced that President Trump is headed for certain reelection by way of landslide. It’s the sheer confidence on both sides that astonishes me. It’s like no one learned a single lesson about humility in 2016. And somebody is going to be devastated.
I have absolutely no idea what is going on. The polls are not gibberish, telling us nothing. I once tried the “polls are lying” and “there’s a silent majority” routine, and thus convinced myself that Bob Dole was going to unseat Slick Willie in 1996. It was pretty disappointing because I was told—and believed, silly me—that it was The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes and that America would turn into a left-wing dystopia if Clinton was reelected.
But neither are the polls something to bet your 401(k) on. This fellow has gambled boldly, charting a contrarian course and predicting a resounding Trump victory. In order to do so he claims to have revolutionized the science of polling, though, so you should probably take it with a few grains of salt. He’ll either be a laughingstock or the most famous pollster in the world. There’s not much of an in-between.
I am inclined to believe that President Trump is not going to win reelection. If you write that on Twitter, you get barraged by people calling you nasty names, as though I’m expressing a wish or something. I actually have no strong wishes (read below), but I’m telling you my gut feeling. Trump has simply made very little effort to appeal to people beyond his wildly enthusiastic base, and, in the process, has alienated a large number of people. Given that he barely eked out an Electoral College victory last time, I just don’t see that his first term has done a lot to first solidify and, second, expand his support.
This is an enthusiasm election. The predictions are that something like 154 million people are going to vote. That is the number of total registered voters in 2016. Conventional wisdom says that larger turnout hurts Trump; but, like I say, conventional wisdom isn’t worth very much these days.
So why do I not appear worried? As a conservative happy with a number of things the President has done, and deeply skeptical (to put it mildly) of the Biden/Harris platform, why am I not out politicking and campaigning and sharing memes and stoking passions and convincing everybody that this is The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes?
Well, first off, because I happen to believe this is The Least Important Election of Our Lifetimes. (I told you I was going to irritate you.) Whichever way this goes, the next four years are likely to be much ado about very little. I promise you: heading into the 2024 election we are going to be arguing and talking about the exact same policy issues of today. Green New Deal. Socialism. Health care. Race. Immigration. I mean, save some energy, folks. Neither President Trump nor a President Biden is able to wave a magic wand to accomplish a tenth of the things they promise to do. We have a governing architecture that makes it very difficult to do really big things, we have a political incentive structure that makes posturing and preening for the cameras and cable news shows more satisfying than, you know, writing bills and passing laws (an ironic silver lining of “Amusing Ourselves To Death”), and we have a highly polarized electorate, if you haven’t noticed.
Everything the next President is likely to do will involve tinkering around the edges of our major policy divides—think of a football game played between the 40 yard lines. Now, it is possible that the Democrats can take both houses of Congress and thus score a few big touchdowns, which is why I think your state Senate race is far more important than the Presidential race—if you’re a donor, that’s where to send your contributions. But if the Republicans can preserve their slim majority in the Senate, no one is going to be scoring touchdowns. At best, they might move the ball a few yards until 2024. Even if the Democrats obtain a slim Senate majority, it is not at all a slam-dunk that they can get their entire caucus to go along with whatever long bombs they want to throw into the end zone. Court-packing? Not very likely. Remember: they’ll have vulnerable Senators up for reelection, too. This country is like the Titanic; it doesn’t turn on a dime.
Second, I do believe that President Trump sucks all of the oxygen out of our body politic in very unhelpful ways and so I will not be emotionally devastated if he exits stage left. I did not support him in 2016, as many of you know. I considered him intellectually, temperamentally, and morally unfit for the job (and I expanded at length on each of those claims). He’s pleasantly surprised me in some ways on the policy front, but hasn’t really convinced me of his basic fitness in those categories (Did you see the first debate?). Really, if you’re shouting at your screen now, “But whattabout….?” this isn’t the time to make the case. What people think about Donald Trump—including me—is, for better or worse, fully baked into the cake.
But if you want one example—just one out of many I could choose—of what I’m talking about, read this article by Jay Nordlinger. Trump responds to flattery, and he responds in kind, with flattery. And when that flattery is routinely directed at some of the most evil people in the world, it’s disqualifying somewhere deep in the marrow of my bones. And that’s not “I don’t like his style.” That’s an “I don’t like his substance.” As a Christian, along with having grown up in the bygone days and moral clarity of the Reagan era, I believe as a matter of passionate conviction in speaking on behalf of people suffering in the Gulag, not flattering their oppressors.
So I won’t be particularly anxious if he doesn’t get reelected. There will be room for our elected representatives and Senators to think and breathe and strategize without reference to Donald J. Trump’s Ego. That’s not the end of the world; it’s the beginning of something I think might in the long run prove healthier both for the conservative movement and our country.
On the other hand, his opponent isn’t any more fit, no matter how many ridiculous contortions the former conservative, now fully TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) folks undertake. I will not bother to walk you through Joe Biden’s 47 years of political life. On the whole, his is a more charming sort of demagoguery, but it is demagoguery just the same. Telling a black audience that Mitt Romney—Mitt Romney!—is “gonna put y’all back in chains” is pretty gross, particularly if you then contrast that rhetoric with the fact that he led Clarence Thomas’s “high-tech lynching.” I’m sorry. No vote for Joe.
That’s not even to mention the Democrat party’s platform on abortion. It’s so fashionable nowadays to wave that off with, “Abortion isn’t the only issue, you know.” Sure. But you know what else? Abortion is a life-and-death issue. This is not a question of hurt feelings, micro-aggressions, minorities having fewer opportunities, or someone experiencing social mistreatment. Those things can be reformed; this surgical procedure cannot be reformed. This is dead or alive. It has a finality that all of those “other” issues lack. We are talking about the protection of the law for the most vulnerable and helpless class of human beings: babies in their mother’s womb.
So, let’s say you’re into “social justice” and Black Lives Matter or other progressive causes. Let’s say you think that marching and voting against, say, disproportionate ill-treatment of African-Americans at the hands of the criminal justice system is at the same level of moral urgency as babies (disproportionately black, by the way) being dismembered by the millions—no, even worse: it’s at a level of a moral urgency that you march and vote for those issues at the expense of standing for the unborn. I believe that thinking is morally malformed. And that is what I believe a vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris represents.
It is true that, given what I’ve said above, Presidents and other elected officials have very little they can do about the abortion regime in America (I mean, President Trump couldn’t even defund, much less abolish Planned Parenthood). So does it really matter? It does to me. When someone tells me that if they had their druthers—in their perfect world—they’ll defend the right of any woman, any time, up to the moment of birth, with zero laws and restrictions, to snuff out the life of the child in her womb (the Platform of the Democrat Party) it tells me all I really need to know. I literally don’t care what they think about tax rates or government spending or greenhouse gasses or systemic racism or police brutality or anything else under the sun. I know what kind of person I’m dealing with, and it’s not the kind of person that will receive a vote from me. It’s the person who thinks they can confidently read the tiny little letters at the bottom of the screen at the Optometrist’s office, but can’t for the life of them read the giant “E" at the top.
At the end of the day, America is the loser in this election. These are two incredibly flawed candidates. Neither is the cause of our cultural problems; both are symptoms of our cultural problems. We get the leaders we deserve. God help us.
The final practical reason I’m not anxious is that it has been a pretty good run, in God’s providence. If you were to tell me that all we would have to show after four years of constant, frenzied drama and frayed nerves is Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, I would’ve said that’s a wildly successful Presidential term. And in terms of the abortion question, the most effective in the long term since the courts have taken the issue out of the realm of public debate.
So his term can end now, and I’ll feel just fine. Or it might not end, and I’ll feel just fine. We are going to be fine. God is sovereign.
But hold the Senate, please.
Miscellany
John Piper raised a big stir with his election essay. It’s worth reading, and I appreciate much of it. The sins he mentions are toxic and ought to be taken way more seriously, especially by his evangelical supporters. However, on the whole it strikes me as not compelling. It’s more of an “aesthetic” argument than a moral one. After all, every sin leads to eventual ruin. How he is weighting them in his essay seems fairly arbitrary, and I don’t see why somebody can’t perform a different sort of moral triage. In other words, if I’m reading him right, Piper seems to believe it to be sinful to vote for Donald Trump. I don’t think that’s a sound conclusion at all.
Here in Big Sky Country we’ve already received 16 inches of snow. That is not a welcome harbinger for how our winter is going to go.
I’m late getting this newsletter out today, so I’ll let Kate Rusby and family take us home with her beautiful cover of “Friday, I’m In Love.” Enjoy!