It’s exciting out there but enervating. People are spun up, nerves at a breaking point, and there’s an undercurrent.
Whatever the outcome of the election, at least half the country will feel crushed. Voters feel they are faced with a bad choice, and many millions will vote against, not for. Everyone is afraid the other side will destroy the country. If it turns out as close as the polls say, we fear a harrowing postelection time marked by accusations and aggression, with nothing clear and everything bitter.
My mind goes to something that I hope doesn’t sound facile because I don’t mean it in a rote, small way. But this country has gotten through a lot. It can take a lot of tension. It was born in it and is used to it. We made it through Shay’s Rebellion and Vietnam, the McCarthy era and the 1960s. We made it through the Civil War, and we will make it through this. We are practiced at withstanding trials. We have a way of forging through. We should take inspiration from this.
I reached for wisdom to the author Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute. He reached back to the 1830s, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” “He wrote that every presidential election is a kind of national crisis that drives people crazy, but that the madness dissipates when the election ends,” Mr. Levin says.
That last part seems less true in our times, but it’s still important to remember. “A second point is that while close elections drive us more crazy and feel more intense, close elections actually tend to be less consequential than landslides. They produce presidents with narrow congressional majorities at most, and without much of a mandate, and our system is built to restrain narrow majorities. So whoever wins is probably going to spend the next four years pretty frustrated, as our last few presidents have.” If you’re worried that the other party will transform the country in ways you hate, “you’re very likely wrong.”
He added: “America has real problems now, as always. But it still works. It’s an amazing society. And one of the reasons it works is that who our president is at any given time is generally not the most important thing to know about us. There are exceptions: We could find ourselves in a world-historical crisis, or one of these candidates really could try to break the system. But we need to see that that’s not the likeliest outcome by any stretch. This is an election between the sitting vice president and a guy who already served a full term as president. Most elections actually involve much more of the unknown than that.”
A note on something that I find ironically reassuring. We rightly decry our polarization—the distance between the edges of both parties is considerable. But this close election puts sharp focus on the fact that while we’re split, we’re split in two. It speaks of some rough health that we mostly all can still, in the end, support one party or the other, that we’re not a nation of four or seven parties, that we’re split but not shattered. Neither of these parties is worthy of us; both this year failed us. Yet their existence speaks of a continuing ability within each to be flexible, to build coalitions, to govern, however imperfectly. This suggests a stability we don’t much note.
When I speak to the young, my mind goes to basics. If your side loses, recommit to it and see that it wins next time. There’s comfort in knowing not everything’s “right now,” that the most meaningful struggles are long-term.
This intense season will pass, and when it does you might, as an individual, take your eye somewhat away from outer events and train it more toward inner events and what you can do to make your own life better.
Americans do a lot of displacement. We always have. We love to talk about outer things in part so we can ignore inner things. That’s how we got through life in desolate wilderness towns, standing on the tree stump that functioned as the town square to argue about the state legislature’s latest sins, so we didn’t have to go home and fix the lonely cabin’s roof. Americans uniquely and from the beginning used politics to avoid loneliness, and to be part of something: “I hold with the Whig faction.” Lonely Abe Lincoln did that as a young man. We use politics to solve not only public dilemmas but personal ones.
When Lincoln first ran for local office he passionately supported “internal improvements”—state and national efforts to build roads, rail lines and canals. This would increase commerce, advance the spread of knowledge, help the country know itself. But a lifetime reading his life tells me Lincoln was pushed forward, also, by something else. Those roads, those canals—they would get Lincoln out of the wilderness and to a town, a city, where what he had a feeling was his genius might be recognized. As it was.
Americans and politics—we work out a lot on that field. It’s good to remember this.
I end with a thought from Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School and author of “The Righteous Mind”:
“It’s always been wrong to bet against America, and it’s probably wrong now,” he says by phone. But it would benefit our politics if we would start to fear each other less. “What I’ve observed in studying our culture is that the great majority of people are sane and decent. What has changed is that technology has amplified extremists on left and right. They have become louder, and intimidate moderates.” But they are making the statements of the fringe, they don’t represent “the other side,” which hasn’t endorsed them, and they have been sent to you by algorithms which chose them for their offensiveness. All this has created “a political optical illusion.” We are better and steadier than we think.
I close with my immediate hope, that the outcome of the election, however close, is also clear. That the battleground states won’t be won with 0.008 margins but a few points this direction or that. I hope whoever wins the presidency, at least one house of Congress is of the other party. A Democratic House or Senate will tamp down Trumpian excitements and hem in enthusiasms. A Republican House or Senate will be a coolant on Democratic attempts at court packing or doing away with the filibuster.
You say this is a recipe for “nothing gets done.” Those three words are, occasionally, balm to the conservative soul. A situation in which neither Matt Gaetz nor AOC can destabilize anything isn’t a bad situation. But also, no: Divided government will mean anything that gets done will involve winning over the opposition. Good. We’ve got to get back to persuasion, to politics as the art of the possible. That’s an old tradition too.
Meantime onward, do what you think right, feel appropriate anxiety but no crippling fear. Shoulders back. We’re the U.S.-blinkin’-A., baby, and we make our way through.