Though loathe to enter the overcrowded field of political commentary, of which there is no scarcity from others more sapient than I, election day is approaching with insistence, and I fear I am in any event running short of amusing or even light-hearted subjects. So I had best face up to my fears. These fears are not entirely or perhaps even primarily concerned with the identity of the winner of the presidential race. With two weeks to go, the race seems extraordinarily close, and the eventuality of an outcome of impressive decisiveness seems remote. Remote, but of course much to be desired, for the simple truth is that the less contestable the results are perceived to be, the less threatening the contestation.
There is in my opinion not a lot of room in which to debate one’s voting choice. In saying this, however, I am obliged to acknowledge that many fellow citizens whose vote will differ from mine doubtless feel the same. There is, however, a great deal more room for more realism and honesty in facing our dilemma than is being displayed in most of the news stories. Of the very few commentaries I have seen that seem to me offensively accurate is that of Lee Siegel. “Not in recent memory has the country been offered a choice between, in Harris, a vapid mediocrity, and in Trump, an unbalanced malignity. And not in recent memory have the running mates of the two presidential candidates been clearly more qualified than the latter — though barely so — to sit in the White House.” It is my opinion that mediocrity ought to be able to trump malignity any day. But this truth cannot redeem the disservice of our current party system or transform pigs’ ears into silk purses.
There seems to be no such thing as impartial or non-partisan news these days, but our son Luke put me on to something reasonably close, a web program called “Two Way” directed by the political journalist Mark Halperin. The “two way” part refers to our two-party set-up. The Sphinx-like Halperin, who convincingly never shows the slightest hint of his own political preferences, is joined by highly knowledgeable representatives of our two major parties, both of them partisans but also honest brokers, and an audience of some dozens of “ordinary” voters. The only slightly light-hearted stated goals of the conversations are “peace, love, and understanding”—and these standards are in the main observed—at least the first and, to a less extent, the third are. There are frequent invited interventions from professionally credentialled Democratic and Republican partisan experts.
In many recent presidential elections the distribution of the popular vote has been relatively even in its totality and reasonably constant in its geographical distribution. Due to the peculiarities of the system of election not by absolute majority in the popular vote but rather by majority in the block distribution of the individual states’ electoral vote, it has several times happened in recent elections that the winner was not the overall winner of the popular vote. A popular vote within a state with a ratio of, say, twenty to one, is thus no more powerful that a vote of the same total number but distributed in a ratio of eleven to ten. Many of the architects of the Constitution were fearful of what they called “the tyranny of the majority.” Madison and Hamilton dealt at some length with this anticipated problem, as have several other classical political theorists. This aspect of the American system, which some foreign observers find to be somewhere between puzzling and shocking, reflects the strong sense of what in my youth in the South were called “states’ rights”, a concept that though it survived even our Civil War has given much ground to the superlative powers of the federal government during my own lifetime. Thomas Jefferson, the chief among the geniuses who wrote our constitution, was of the opinion that it was in a sense a provisional document that would be renewed, reexamined, and refreshed by regular and timely reviews by constitutional conventions. Instead, it has become a verbal idol.
It is very difficult to find anything like balanced or objective political news. Neither the national print press or the radio and television stations make much genuine effort at “objectivity.” Many don’t even try. And perhaps there really is no such thing as “just the news” when so many in the news business are genuinely convinced that we face “existential” and apocalyptic threats unique in our history. There are actually times when being a medievalist has psychic rewards in the present. Logically, after all, “things can have never been so bad” only once, and the odds that that once is right now must be statistically remote. Lincoln—I believe he was discussing agricultural problems—told the anecdote of a mythical wise king who asked his mythical wise advisors for a bit of advice: he wanted his wisest philosophers to provide for him a sentence that would always apply to any situation, and always be relevant and never stale but always true. The gem of universally applicable wisdom provided was the following: And this, too, shall pass away.
Such advice is important to take to heart. Somebody is going to win the election, and the chances that it will be Mr. Trump are far from negligible. Halperin speaks in contexts other than those of his “Two Way” program, and in one such conversation he has expressed his opinion that should Trump win, despite the ostentatious revelations over a long period of time of a bullying , name-calling vulgarity, a nearly bottomless mendacity, and the nearly uniform hostility of the nation’s social, cultural, journalistic and educational elites—that is to say if he is democratically chosen by an electorate which cannot possibly be blind to his flaws—the results will trigger a national mental health crisis. Among the heaviest burdens of big-D’d Democracy is the social obligation of putting up with the choices of small-d’d democrats. We shall do well to be spiritually prepared, knowing that whatever the outcome, this too shall pass away.
