Elective

 

            It is possible that you are already aware that there is an election taking place in our country six days hence.  I am reluctant to write about politics in this blog.  I am not a political scientist or even a political groupie.  The category in which I would place myself is “concerned citizen”.  I hope and trust that same category embraces the large majority of my readership.  Because there seems to me to be a lot to be concerned about.  A brief venting on this subject will at least win my promise not to write about the actual election results.

 

            In the state in which I reside and therefore vote there is not a lot of action this year.  The names of neither of our two senators nor of our governor will be on the ballot.  They are all serving in unexpired terms.  Few of the Congressional contests are in serious doubt.  Our own representative, a competent, experienced, popular and well-spoken Democrat, will certainly be re-elected.  Such drama as I can find, and it isn’t much, is in the list of candidates for the Princeton School Board.  But New Jersey is somewhat anomalous in this regard.  Our two largest neighbors are New York and Pennsylvania.  There is enough competition in New York to qualify it as at least a “skirmish state” among the House candidates as a group.  And Pennsylvania is a full-blown “battleground state.”

 

            According to the endlessly repeated bromide attributed to Tip O’Neill (D-MA, d. 1994), “All politics is local.”  If so, I wish that somebody would get that word to the national headquarters of our two major political parties.  Because I am being inundated with importunate begging letters from my friends Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell imploring me to help elect their senatorial candidates in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada, among other places.  According to news reports “money is pouring in” in response to such appeals.  Maybe so, but not mine.  There is not even the pretense that candidates being pushed are meant to represent the electors in the states in which they reside.  They are meant to represent one of two major political parties, alias Good and Bad.

 

            Old age is full of insults and inconveniences, but there are a few advantages to it.  One of them is remembered experience.  When I was a kid the donkey and the elephant could be rather cheerful, even sprightly mascots of a competition that seemed more athletic than belligerent.  One knew lots of people who sometimes voted Democratic and sometimes Republican, depending upon the political circumstances of the moment and the personalities of the candidates.  It seems to me we now have an electorate that is very closely divided in numbers across the country, and very nearly immobile in the fixation of party allegiance.  This is a very bad situation for many mostly obvious reasons.  Our system of primary elections, ostensibly designed to facilitate efficiency, has the practical effect of nominating candidates who are extreme and not infrequently lack the competence needed to serve as democratic political representatives.  Thus among the candidates for whom this New Jersey resident is being importuned to contribute his Social Security shekels are a once-great football player of stunning ignorance and moral hypocrisy in Georgia and a cognitively impaired stroke victim in Pennsylvania.  In somewhat differing ways they exemplify the large problem identified above: a closely divided electorate increasingly fixated upon partisan preference.

 

            The two men to whom I refer represent different political parties.  The partisan problem is wonderfully bipartisan.  In my view it is political malfeasance for either of them to present themselves as senatorial candidates, though for different reasons.  Democracy depends upon the rule of law to be sure, but law alone is not sufficient to sustain it in any vibrant fashion.  It also depends upon a web of common-sense conventions.  One of these is that the electors be presented not merely with a choice of candidates, but with a choice of qualified candidates. 

 

Is someone in an unresolved state of seriously compromised health “qualified”?   I am particularly interested in cerebral vascular accidents (“strokes”) because of personal experience.  There is enough evidence of the occurrence of cerebral blood clots among the males on the paternal side of my family to give me some sleepless moments.  My beloved father died after a series of four strokes over the period of nearly a decade.  If you have ever personally witnessed the effects of a serious stroke on an active, articulate person of energy and intelligence, you have experienced one of life’s true sadnesses.  And if you have watched a video of the debate between John Fetterman and his opponent in the Pennsylvania senatorial race, you have had a glimpse of it.  But neither one’s sympathy for a man’s situation nor admiration for a his pluck can turn an issue of the public good into one of the private rights of disabled people.

 

About halfway through the disastrous sequence of my Dad’s decline in New Mexico, I went with him once to a meeting of his Stroke Club, a support group for sufferers and survivors, whose degree of impairment varied considerably.  I met several brave, indeed inspirational people at this meeting.  One guy, a former long-distance truck driver, pricked up his ears when he heard I was from Princeton.  “Have you ever heard of the Princeton University Press?” he asked.  What a naïve question, thought I, author of several books published by that press, when I finally figured out what he was trying to say and discovered what lay behind it.  This man could barely speak, but he was buying all the volumes of the English translation of Kierkegaard’s works as they were issued by the Bollingen Foundation through the Princeton Press.  A silent, useful rebuke for me and my assumptions: but I still wouldn’t want him as my senator.  Stroke victims sometimes can and do recover.  But they also can and do suffer successive seizures.  The insouciance and prevarication with which candidates, their assembled medical experts, and segments of the press want to avoid an honest discussion of medical realities is in one way astonishing.  In another, it is not.  One of our legendary football coaches is supposed to have said in a pep talk to his team: “Men, winning isn’t everything.  It’s the only thing.”  This guiding principle was passed on by my own coach—approvingly but quite ludicrously, given the material he was dealing with—to a team on which I once played.  This Darwinian exhortation seems now to be political science.  A columnist in the Times just said in so many words that the terminal goal of the senatorial election is selecting a person of the right party.  If that is your view of the ends of American democracy, you can probably relax a little about the problem of misinformation on Twitter.

No. 687 of the continuing series