Anxiety, democracy, division, reconciliation, repair

Plus: the Protestant pope, survivorship bias, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

On the election: anxiety, democracy, division, reconciliation, repair

(via)

N.B. I’m writing this in bits and pieces on Monday and Tuesday nights, expecting we won’t have a final presidential election result by the time it goes out on Wednesday morning. If the result comes in sooner than I’m guessing, though, I won’t update the post. It all still stands.

I’m supposed to write an election response piece at Christianity Today this week (or soon, after we have a clear result), and I will write it, but as of now, I have no idea what it will say. Partly that’s because I want to work around a handful of other responses I’m editing. But partly it’s because I’ve tried to come up with angles for either outcome in advance and … well, I’m coming up bone dry.

I will have an opinion eventually, I assume. And it’s not really that I lack an opinion now. My opinion, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, is that I do not want Kamala Harris to win, and I do want Donald Trump to lose. Or vice versa? I go back and forth. It amounts to the same thing, or near enough to make no difference.¹

But at present I mostly feel numb to the whole thing. We’ve had a Trump presidency before. Harris has said she’ll govern very much like President Biden. Is there anything new here? I suppose there will be, but likely less than many hope or fear.

I didn’t vote, incidentally. I’m not a principled nonvoter in the consistent, anarchist sense—I’ll pretty much always turn out for a ballot initiative, and I voted last time around in some state and local races. The local ones are important; our borough’s mayoral and town council races have vote totals of around 600 and meaningful influence over issues like property taxes and the fire department. That’s the sort of thing that gets me to the polls.²

If my decision irks you because I live in the all-important state of Pennsylvania, rather be content: I was never gettable for your candidate.³ If you believe I’ve wasted a hard-won right to participate in our democracy, rather be relieved: I participate in our democracy every day, for my job, in ways more meaningful than voting.

On that note, I had a piece about never-Trump, maybe-Vance voters at MSNBC this past weekend (thank you again to everyone who responded to my initial post here!), as well as one at The Dispatch about what to do when the election’s over and America doesn’t depolarize. And beyond my work, here are five things worth your time.

On election anxiety. My friend

Carrie McKean

wrote her final pre-election piece for CT last week. She didn’t think it was anything special, but I disagreed, and so did our readers, who were emailing her in gratitude all weekend. An excerpt:

Last year, I met a left-leaning political organizer who was visiting Midland. At lunch, she confessed that she was surprised by how welcome and comfortable she felt in our town. I found it kind of amusing—even privately scoffed a little at how she’d so easily accepted stereotypes—until I went to California a few months later and found myself similarly taken aback by how normal everyone seemed. Hello pot, meet kettle, I thought, bemused and a little embarrassed by my own stereotyping. 

On the perseverance of democracy, by McKay Coppins at The Atlantic:

We are in a strange and precarious political moment as a country: With four days left in one of the closest presidential races in history, supporters of both campaigns seem convinced that they are going to win—and that if they don’t, the consequences for America will be existential. [ … But the voters I interviewed] seemed to know that, no matter who wins, America will still be a democracy next week, and the week after that. Its preservation depends, in part, on not pegging its fate to the outcome of any one election.

On the nature of our division, by

Matthew Burdette

:

That our political leaders encourage us to engage in a little neighborly surveillance, that they herd us into voting blocs determined by immutable traits, that they insinuate themselves into our intimate relationships and assert the right to set us against our families—all this is their way of saying that they are not politicians but priests serving a terrible god. The toxicity of our political environment is no accident: This is just what it is to be in the grip of demonic forces.

On reconciliation, by

O. Alan Noble

:

Paul commands us in Romans 12:18, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” It seems to me that “if possible” covers a lot more than we like to think. I worry that sometimes we let ourselves off the hook and say, “I tried to live peaceably with these neighbors but they’re just too ______.” (Fill in the blank: woke, MAGA, whatever). When really we could be much more patient.

On repair, by Tish Harrison Warren at Christianity Today:

The first social task of the church, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas often reminds us, is to be the church—an alternative community formed by Jesus that embodies a different sort of kingdom. Allegiance to that kingdom is our truest political and social responsibility. Taking up the radical calls of the Sermon on the Mount to meekness, mourning, forgiveness, and love for our enemies will feel small and ineffective in the face of a convulsive world. But this, Jesus shows us, is the way of repair and renewal.

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Intake

• Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, by James Chappel. To be my last review of 2024.

• “How Donald Trump replaced ‘the Protestant pope,’” by Ruth Graham for The New York Times

• “Walking Phnom Penh,” by

  Chris Arnade

[A]s we talked more I realized they couldn’t conceive that their new daughter could bring anything into their lives but good. The monthly twenty hour round trip bus ride, the two days camping in Phnom Penh, the new mouth to feed, the additional expense, all of that was simply what you did when you had a baby and it wasn’t mentally being recorded in a ledger as a negative thing to tally up against the positives, because having a baby wasn’t a decision you thought about that way.

• “If the choice were so obvious, the election wouldn’t be so close,” by Ross Douthat for The New York Times

• This helpful X thread from

  Nancy Rommelmann
  on whether there will be post-election violence. It aligns with my instincts but is better informed thanks to her experience with on-the-ground reporting at the height of the chaos in 2020.

• “These progressive ideas flopped. They’re still dangerous,” by Oren Cass for The New York Times. (Don’t let the aggro headline put you off—it’s a good piece about survivorship bias with policy ideas.)

• “I have a good story for you,” by

  Yi Ning Chiu

There were several moments where I felt conflicted about the terminology we were using, particularly when it came to preferences that differed by age group and political affiliation. A few years ago I would have wanted to litigate our word choices, but I think being constantly directed to consider the practical application of our ideas stopped me—given a choice between curating a perfect group vocabulary and listening to a grandparent who has served in Chinatown community centers for three decades, I have a greater likelihood of doing something worthwhile if I choose the latter.

• “Would it be better to take a pay cut than a church cut?” by Tim Challies

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Output

New work:

• Where Harris and Trump agree | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

• After this election, how do we live with one another? | The Dispatch

• Meet the voters who despise Trump but really like JD Vance | MSNBC

Did a little video about my article from January, “The Trump debate is dead.”

ct_mag

A post shared by @ct_mag

Newly relevant work:

I realized this week that I literally can’t remember Election Day 2020. I remember 2000 (my first guinea pig died), 2008 (I threw a party at college: ArgueFest ‘08!), 2010 (I had chickenpox), and 2016 (went to bed early), but 2020 is a blank. I looked up what I wrote at The Week at the time and found three pieces from the first half of that November. Two of them hold up well! The third, alas …

• How ‘unstable majorities’ fool us into electoral fantasies | The Week, November 2020

• Americans have lost their political theory of mind | The Week, November 2020

• Donald Trump’s future is a Prairie Home Companion | The Week, November 2020

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1. On foreign policy, two of my Defense Priorities colleagues have argued that the main distinctive is Ukraine, and insofar as Trump’s rhetoric is a reliable guide to what he’ll do in office (big if), I think his pro-diplomacy stance better accounts for the ugly realities on the ground. On the other hand, Trump’s first term foreign policy was terrible—may I remind you about Yemen?—and I admit I’m intrigued by Philip Gordon, Harris’s chief natsec adviser, who wrote a book about the failures of American regime change efforts. Gordon’s deputy, Rebecca Lissner, sounds promising, too.

On partisan alignment, I find more merit in the argument that a Trump presidency will cause the left to lose its mind (c. 17 min here) than in the argument that a Trump loss will cause the right to repent. But even the better of the two isn’t enough to get Harris my vote.

And on other issues … I’m a libertarian. I’m still a libertarian. I don’t want either of these people to be president, and I’m not going to go in a voting booth and say that I do.

2. George Will gets it: “Regarding the supposed duty to vote, the right and ability to ignore politics are attributes of a good society. (Totalitarian societies forbid not participating in the enveloping politics.)” And, historically, “[h]igh turnout is a more reliable indicator of national dyspepsia than of civic health.”

3. Certainly not your major-party candidate; see footnote 1. But also not your third-party candidate, as I understand how the American electoral system functions.