Polls tell us that affordability and corruption — and the nexus between the two — are driving the blue wave that threatens to sweep out MAGA politicians up and down the ticket. But in the closing days of the campaign, more evident is that the depravity, cruelty, bigotry, and dishonesty — the nexus of traits, emotions, and base urges — that drive Donald Trump and his cult are very much on the ballot.
As former president Barack Obama said last weekend in Ohio:
There is a moral component to the choices we face right now. We are not going to fix the economic system or the political system that’s broken. We’re not going to unrig our economy, so long as we’ve got a culture where anything goes, and where people in the highest offices in the land think it’s okay to lie and cheat and bully, and where money is the only measure of our worth....
Yes, we need to lower costs. We need to put money in people’s pockets. Yes, we need to end this war and the corruption in Washington, but we don’t do any of those things if we don’t fix our moral compass as a nation, if we don’t return to some of those old-fashioned virtues — (Applause.) — if our fundamental attitude to each other is to try and hurt other people so they don’t hurt us first, if we’re driven by fear instead of by hope, if we think it’s okay to snatch children from parents or cut programs for the aged or the infirm, so the powerful can get whatever they want, we will continue to fester in anger and division.
Politics is said to be downstream from culture, but politics, as Obama reminded us, it is also how we express our collective aspirations and values. He told the crowd:
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being angry, and I’m tired of being divided.…
This election can be a start. This election can be an inflection point. This election can be a course correction in America’s long journey toward a more perfect union — (applause) — because if we’re willing to turn out in big numbers here in Ohio and across the country, if we’re willing to vote for change and vote for Democrats up and down the ballot, then this election might just mark the moment this country began moving in a better direction — (cheers/applause) — when we leave our worst impulses behind and start aligning our politics with our highest ideals!
In another election, that might simply be empty rhetoric. But in an election in which Trump and former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) are openly and blatantly lying, fanning the worst Islamophobia, and accusing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed of being a Muslim Brotherhood supporter; Vivek Ramaswamy, egged on by Trump and Vice President JD Vance, is running the most despicable ad in memory to attack the victim of childhood sexual abuse; the Justice Department is making patently absurd, unfounded claims (rejected even by judges Trump appointed) to thwart free and fair elections and intimidate nonwhite voters; and Trump uses a transphobic slur to describe Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic nominee for Senate from South Carolina, viciously throws around racial invectives against entire Somalian-American and Haitian-American communities, and seeks to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), we cannot deny that the moral fiber of our democracy is at issue.
We are deciding not only if we want to continue a set of disastrous policies (e.g., an illegal and reckless war, tax cuts for the rich paid for by cutting healthcare and food stamps for the poor, tariffs that raise prices for everyone, unregulated AI) but also whether we want a government run by grifters, racists, propagandists, and exploiters. Trump actually framed the election perfectly: We should pretend he is on the ballot. But what he stands for is also on the ballot — the sort of rhetoric he has tried to normalize, the cultish loyalty of a soulless party, the mindset that says exploiting victims of child sexual abuse is acceptable to keep power, the brutish and blatant fear-mongering against our neighbors, and the lawless brutality perpetrated in the name of border security.
It is not every election in which the contest between darkness and light, between hope and fear is so evident. We saw earlier this week what it looks like when pro-democracy forces turn out the vote and popular solidarity triumphs over thuggish authoritarianism.
The eruption of unbridled joy that we saw in the streets of Serbia and Brazil after democratic forces beat back right-wing authoritarians — a political earthquake driven in large part by young people and labor unions over the despotic, corrupt right-wing parties openly aligned with Trump (and in the case of Brazil, aided by Big Tech) — illustrates the global hunger for communal action and the repudiation of the politics of meanness, exploitation, and repression. Those celebrations of the triumph of democracy reverberated around the world as international leaders congratulated voters on the defeat of forces of violence, corruption, and repression.
The Guardian captured the mood in Belgrade, where “tens of thousands of people flooded the city’s main boulevards, chanting euphorically, waving flags and setting off flares against an unrelenting backdrop of honking car horns. ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know how to explain it,’ says Tamara, 35. ‘I’m so happy and excited.’” She and others expressed hope that the elections would give rise to “freedom and hope for a better tomorrow.”
The U.S. elections do not come in a vacuum. Be it in Hungary or Serbia or Brazil or the United States (in the outpouring of communal energy in the No Kings movement), ordinary people have coalesced to form a powerful counterweight to authoritarianism. A common revulsion against exploitation by the rich and powerful consistently has defied expectations, overcoming better-funded elites and their Big Tech allies. (In victory, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared, “We had to overcome foreign interference in the election, coming from outside through digital platforms that we will have to regulate…. No, we cannot fail to recognize that crimes in the digital world must be treated in the same way as crimes in the real world.”)
In the U.S., as Obama said, we now have the opportunity to “leave our worst impulses behind and start aligning our politics with our highest ideals.” Imagine the celebrations that will erupt if we do.
Trump & Co: a RICO enterprise intent on retaining power by any means.
Jdg Carter denied Trump’s DOJ lawless request to set aside more than 20,000 California ballots with no trial & no appeal: "Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.”
https://mitchthelawyer.substack.com/p/breaking-the-judge-read-the-list?
Bring on a Blue Tsunami.
#VoteBlue!
“It is not every election in which the contest between darkness and light, between hope and fear is so evident.” Vote for the light!