This essay has been constructed on a quiet, beautiful, Sunday morning. It is seasonably chilly, and the sun is higher today than yesterday at this time as a result of our ridiculous practice of changing clocks twice annually. I personally like the period we just left, with late sunrises and a bit of afternoon sun. Because I am uninformed and without any desire to become so, I know not what the name of that “time” is or the one into which we’ve transitioned.
On Tuesday, we will begin the process of electing a President, a process I have come to revile. In 2012, I had considerable personal and professional skin in the game, and I allowed myself to believe my candidate would win, as we had late momentum. The fact that there were no major polls to back up our confidence mattered not. I began that election day joyfully and went to bed disappointed, so disappointed that I told my inamorata that I would be no good to her for a few days, and slipped off to the Hyatt in Cambridge to cool down with cigars and massages.
In 2016, having been so disappointed in 2012 and embarrassed that our country could only summon up the two clowns it had as major candidates, I had a nice dinner with Catherine, lit a fire in the bedroom fireplace, read a great biography of Lincoln, and went to bed early without watching a second of election coverage. Like much of the country, I thought Hillary would win, and when I took to the treadmill early the next morning and put on the TV, was shocked to see the actual victor. Shocked and mortified.
In 2020, I repeated my studied disinterest in election night hype, heading to bed early with moderate confidence that the source of my mortification would be voted out of office. Late that night/early that morning, I was awakened by Catherine who seemed angry with me for believing in the outcome I desired, only to have it hanging in the balance. I stayed up with her for two hours or so, watched the coverage, and made the determination that there was no real path for the President’s re-election. I reported this to her and went back to bed. Several days later, things played out as I’d assumed, and we had the prospect of a new President, without any real knowledge of how dedicated the occupant of the office was to keeping it.
It is now 2024. I have already voted, and my Tuesday is a busy one, with business to conduct “on the Western Shore” (as we Eastern Shore denizens put it). I’ll likely suggest to Catherine picking up sushi on my way home, and we’ll eat it by candlelight in the early evening darkness. I will again take to the bedroom early, without screens or news, to my book (Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, a spectacular work of history tick-tocking the months leading up to the firing on Fort Sumter, civil war reading being a passion of mine with no imagined connection to current events, I promise), my fire, and Hazel the cat. I will go to bed without knowing who won, but here will be my final conscious thoughts of that night:
I am bitterly disappointed in the Republican Party.
That half the country will vote for a terrible human being says more about voters than it does him. He is who he is. No one is forced to vote for him. Many will do it joyfully (there’s that word again). There is something wrong, very wrong, with a country whose political process leads to this man atop one of its parties for three straight elections. I hope we are able eventually to figure this out. I am not confident. Watching psychological pathology play out across a country as large as this has been eye-opening. The degree to which modern Republicans have engaged in cognitive dissonance reduction in order to gleefully support a misogynistic, thrice married, serial adultery practicing, neo-isolationist, protectionist, pro-choice, big government, insurrectionist is breathtaking. Voters who voted for Trump before resort to Cognitive Dissonance Reduction because the rational act of realizing that he is a monster would imply that their first act of voting for him is inconsistent with their internal need to believe that they always support the “right” “best” “smart” “good” candidates. If Trump is a monster now, he was a monster then, and thus there exists a dissonance between their action in originally voting for him and who they think they are as good voters and good people. A good person would never vote for a monster, therefore they MUST vote for him a again to be consistent in proving who they are and how they think about themselves.
I am bitterly disappointed in the Democratic Party.
They had one job—to see that a demonstrated threat to our national security did not win the election. They have done poorly in this pursuit. The aged current occupant of the White House gained the office with a wink and a “I’ll be a transition” President, then assumed the office and decided he wanted to keep it, his supporters attempting to hide his obvious and deepening age-related infirmities in what can only be described as the “Weekend at Bernie’s” campaign. We were lied to with straight faces, but to our credit (our meaning most coherent Americans), we didn’t believe it, and the incumbent President was losing to the aforementioned ex-President. Then came the debate in which the lie became even too much for Democratic grandees to stomach, and the Party did what parities are supposed to do; it selected another candidate, but it half-assed the job. There was time for a contested convention, there was time for the Party to do its job. Instead, the Party took a knee and settled on the Vice President, a woman of accomplishment whose position was nevertheless gained by accidents of her birth. Her previous run for national office ended before the first primary in 2020, and she was not a popular Vice President. There was however, great hope and “joy” at her ascension on the ticket, mostly driven by the sense that the national drubbing in store for the President had been averted. Her lack of self-confidence and her misplaced desire to please extreme elements of her own party led to the selection of a mediocrity as her running mate, a standard, lefty product of the nation’s education commissariat. Left unselected was the popular Governor of must-have Pennsylvania, an act that may have serious consequences when the votes are counted.
I have no idea how things will turn out. I only know that I am sick of it, sick of the mendacity and the mediocrity.
On Tuesday night, I will take to my couch in front of the fire with my trusty cat Hazel and read about another time in our nation’s history in which we faced great crisis. I will wake Wednesday morning, quite possibly to an undecided contest. Should one candidate win, I will pray for the country and for its political processes to yield sound policy in spite of its President. Should the other candidate win, I will pray for the country and for the durability of its system of government against its President. This is an awful place to be, but it is where we are.
Worst of all, it is what we deserve.