
…they’ve realized that this country has gone so flabby that any gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to seem illegal, can grab hold of the entire government and have all the power and applause and salutes, all the money and palaces and willin’ women they want.
– Sinclair Lewis, “It Can’t Happen Here”
As long as there are candidates freely announcing that they are election deniers, I will not vote for them. Right now, that type of candidate belongs to one party: Republicans. I voted Republican my whole life for the presidency, up until you know who. But from the local level to the Secretary of State to the Governor to the Congress to the former President himself, it is remarkable that candidates will tell you they deny any past result or any future result where they lose. They blame the election process itself. “It’s rigged.” Or “There’s fraud.” If they win, amazingly, the elections are pristine. Maybe they should’ve played hockey where you learn to meet at center ice and shake hands after the game.
Their logic is easily debunked. I could list the three local Duluth politicians that filed a frivolous lawsuit to throw out mail-in ballots, even though the number of ballots wouldn’t change the result of their elections. The judge threw it out. I could trot out that my Congressman signed on to a lawsuit to overturn the votes in four states. That lawsuit had so little merit the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear it. I could bring up the 65 lawsuits brought up after the 2020 election where they lost their appeal to overturn votes 64-1. The former President’s Attorney General and his own head of the Department of Homeland security said there was no voter fraud. But that isn’t going to change one voter’s mind. Certainly not the voter who’s rolling coal in his truck with a Let’s Go Brandon flag and hasn’t opened a book since elementary school. Their identity is involved.
The easiest way to debunk all this crap is to recognize it as the same tactic a 5-year-old would use in a board game. They win, the game is great. They lose, the game is bullshit.
I’m going to vote as contrarian as I can to make sure no Republican ever gets near the levers of power at any level anywhere ever again. I will continue that course of action until every election denier in the GOP at every level of government is silenced.
Oh, there goes Shmo again. He’s all Angry Shmo. I can see you rolling your eyes. I can hear the “what about [insert topic]” already. I’m talking about candidates who deny election results, not whatever topic you want to distract me with. We can talk about your topic some other time.
And if you try to “both sides” this issue, save it. This is an issue of our form of government itself being attacked by an American political party: the dictator-fetish wing of the GOP. And “attack” is not hyperbole. Look at January 6th. This is not a “both sides” issue. This is an issue of our American Constitutional form of government being subverted by a political party. There is a cancer growing on the American body politic. When you get cancer, do you demand that you hear the tumor’s point of view so you can hear both sides? No. You don’t have a debate with the tumor. You blast the tumor with chemo or get a scalpel and cut it the fuck out. I think a lot about how the night before Nixon resigned, he had a big meeting with the leaders of his own party. That would never happen today.
During the several months from the election to January 6th, there were just a few people around this country that had a spine at the right moment. A few state-level Secretaries of State. A Vice President, if only for a moment. If not for them, the right wingers would’ve pulled it off and it would’ve “seemed legal” like in that Sinclair Lewis quote. But when that didn’t work they used violence. There has been very little accountability for that political violence, especially considering that it was the first time in over two centuries that the presidency didn’t change hands peacefully. Since nobody in charge has been put in jail, this is the lesson they’ve learned: Let’s try it again. All that bullshit less than two years ago wasn’t a failure. It was training.
That’s why they’re working hard to take over Secretary of State positions in every state. Because those are the people in charge of elections. That’s why they’re fighting to take over state legislatures. So they can rewrite the rules for how elections are even conducted. Voter suppression attempts everywhere under the guise of making sure elections are secure, in the absence of any evidence that they’re insecure. There is a case soon to be heard by the Supreme Court called Moore v. Harper. If the wannabe autocrats get their way, this will grant states, under “independent state legislature” theory, to do just about whatever they want when it comes to elections. In 2020, states tried to send “alternate” electors to Congress. If this case succeeds in the Supreme Court (or even if it doesn’t), they will try that very same tactic again. All it’s got to do is “seem legal.” You watch.
I’d like to think that people are as worked up as I am about what happened during the last national elections and on January 6th. I know they aren’t. People are busy trying to make a living. I get it. They feel like elections don’t matter. In many respects, they’re right. If the people trying to tear down our democracy win during the mid-terms, they will proceed with an agenda that undermines our form of government. They will go after the very cornerstone of this experiment: your vote. And when it’s all said and done, it will seem legal. May even be legal, when the dust clears. But as a last resort, they’ve shown they’ll resort to violence to get their way. Because it almost worked.
After the mid-terms, people will go back to worrying about gas prices. How the regional sports ball team is doing. Whether they get a new promotion. Buying their first house. But if the Republicans gain positions during the mid-terms, they will run their anti-voting gameplans. And then, it won’t just “feel” like your vote doesn’t matter. Your vote won’t matter. Period. It’ll feel kind of like it did before, but the American experiment will be over. It’ll be like that T. S. Eliot poem, “The Hollow Men”:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
So, vote like the act of voting itself is at stake. Because, in my opinion, it is.
Afterword:
Why bother with all this? You’re still here, stubborn reader, so I’ll tell you. I wrote my own poem ten years ago where I confessed something: I’m the kind of guy who says “I told you so.” My family landed on this continent around 392 years ago. I want our American experiment to succeed. I fought for it. I consider this scribbling as a way to continue to fight for it. I hope I can change one mind, but I’m not very optimistic. There’s a reason that every election comes down to a dead heat, it seems. And why no matter how heinous a candidate gets, they don’t pay a price for it. Because political affiliation has become intertwined with identity. Instead of something you only did in a voting booth, now, it’s something you fly on a flagpole outside your house. I want to be able to tell my kids that I fought. And I want to be able to say, “I told you so.”
For those who are really interested in why I bother, it’s because of the imagined future depicted in the George Saunders story called “Love Letter.” He imagines a future that slides into autocracy with a whimper. The protagonist is filled with regret that he didn’t do more to try to stop it. I don’t want to have any regrets. So, yet again, I guess it’s all about how Shmo feels.
In any case, here’s the excerpt from that story that shows what I want to avoid thinking as an old man:
Your grandmother and I (and many others) would have had to be more extreme people than we were, during that critical period, to have done whatever it was we should have been doing. And our lives had not prepared us for extremity, to mobilize or to be as focussed and energized as I can see, in retrospect, we would have needed to be. We were not prepared to drop everything in defense of a system that was, to us, like oxygen: used constantly, never noted. We were spoiled, I think I am trying to say. As were those on the other side: willing to tear it all down because they had been so thoroughly nourished by the vacuous plenty in which we all lived, a bountiful condition that allowed people to thrive and opine and swagger around like kings and queens while remaining ignorant of their own history.
– George Saunders, “Love Letter”