January, which occurred several years ago, featured a charming set piece known as the Iowa caucuses, the first round of our peculiar presidential sweepstakes, in which various candidates, from the famous to the obscure, display their oratorical wares, their media savvy, and their organizational chops. This year they were subjected, as customary, to all sorts of cringe-worthy and humiliating exercises, much like the Miss Universe and Miss America pageants once forced their aerobically smiling contestants to sing, dance, declaim, sashay, charm, eyelash-bat, and respond to vapid questions with appropriately safe (but not content-free) replies.
I say “once” because though the beauty contests probably still exist, they barely register in our national consciousness, and not just because the tawdry and goofily sexist aspects of the spectacles have become more obvious. They simply no longer respond to modern life. Women don’t just dream of being gorgeous and sitting around doing needlepoint while they await gentleman callers, and men don’t expect them to. The sight of leggy señoritas from the 50 states or 100 nations parading in swimsuits registers as an historical relic, a nostalgia exercise recalling a time when we could pretend that none of these hot babes had ever had sex.
Similarly, the presidential showdown scheduled (for now) for November 3, which used to be the key marker of our nation’s future path, is undergoing a similar slow eclipse. What once offered a quadrennial choice between contesting visions of social goals—the way forward proposed by Johnson versus that of Goldwater, Reagan’s v. Carter’s, Obama’s v. McCain’s—now looms small, almost as an afterthought. The Trumpian slash-and-burn approach to governing has upended long-standing habits and assumptions about how and even what we choose when we line up at the voting booths. Both of the competing camps are now so weakened and disfigured that the event itself feels like an exercise of anticlimactic symbolism.
Take one of the heated debates that dominated the Democrats’ primaries just weeks ago: Medicare for All and how the Federal Government would ever find the money to fund it. Who can deny that this artificial and tendentious argument now makes no sense? The country, even under Donald Trump's haphazard leadership, found a way to promptly create $2 trillion and to pour some hundreds of millions of it into struggling hospitals and unemployment funds. Debate still rages about how to assure that people falling ill with COVID-19 can get the treatment paid for since suddenly universal healthcare—in this case only, of course—is a national priority. If employer-based private insurance premiums rise 40% next year, as some predict, will the GOP hesitate to federalize some healthcare costs if that’s what is needed to drag business from the brink of depression? Will the party platforms to be drawn up this summer even bother to include boilerplate about healthcare financing given that nothing anyone can now say about it matters?
Even voting itself appears less of a solemn exercise of democratic sovereignty than a ratification of popular resignation to the inevitable. The evidence of widespread vote manipulation and tampering is out in the open for all to see. While electoral fraud like ballot stuffing and mass voting by the deceased are nothing new in American politics, computerized shenanigans are a vastly more efficient form while the old Jim Crow tricks are reborn everywhere in myriad varieties. Getting the most votes has less and less to do with assuming office, as at least two of the five most recent presidential contests have demonstrated (with barely a peep of protest). Great swaths of voters can be peremptorily forced off the rolls and out of the voting booths, or alternatively, invited to enter them at the risk of fatal illness as recently occurred in Illinois and Wisconsin.
Even where voting itself proceeds more or less fairly, its presumed policy impact is ever more easily gamed. The politics of New York State, where I live, were upended in 2018 when citizens rallied to dislodge the intransigent minority Republicans. We then succeeded in pushing a range of long overdue legal reforms in 2019, including reforms to criminal law and greater protections for tenants.
But Governor Cuomo has taken advantage of the statewide COVID lock-down to start the process of reversing these gains while simultaneously ramming through hugely unpopular cuts to Medicaid—in the midst of a nationwide medical emergency. Since no one could go to Albany to raise hell, Cuomo, who slams Trump as a would-be king, thus dictated the terms of our state budget and protected his billionaires in the face of massive, but kneecapped, opposition. He even slipped in language that will permit him to cancel the state’s presidential primary now that Bernie is not contesting the nomination. And the sovereign people can’t do shit about it.
Then there is the surreal Biden candidacy. Did we not just weeks ago face, according to our opposition party, a national emergency that merited Trump's impeachment due to his grave crimes against the rule of law? And yet the Democrat establishment along with its loyal, elderly voters have handed off the leadership of this crusade to a bumbling fossil from yesteryear. It would take a AI-equipped supercomputer to find a more complete set of unpopular positions wrapped up in a single individual: support for mass incarceration, gouging by credit card companies, elimination of bankruptcy protection, failed foreign wars, and, just to complete the bonny picture, a credible sexual assault charge. This is hardly the strategic move of an opposition that truly cares about dislodging the current occupant of the White House. Is this the best they can do? Or are they in fact complacent about Mr Trump’s dirty work because they don’t fundamentally object to it?
These phenomena subvert the comforting fantasy that we citizens determine our fates through the ritual of suffrage. Perhaps on some level we only now grasp, with the unwelcome help of a nasty microbe, that conditions have escaped our control and that events gallop furiously forward while we wave our tiny arms at them in vain. And this is just the beginning: as many scientists have pointed out, the impacts of climate change will hit us just like CV-19 and bankruptcy, little by little and then all at once.
Powerlessness, however, is not the same as helplessness. The radical change in our social and economic organization has thrust new actors to center stage, and it would be very interesting to see the Bernie Sanders campaign (for example) pivot away from its current charity-based response to the epidemic toward a more political one, i.e., support for the wildcat strikes breaking out everywhere over things like protective gear, dangerous working conditions, and lack of paid sick leave. Now that we rely on delivery workers, grocery clerks, and warehouse restockers like never before, wouldn’t it be grand if they discovered their power and forced the Jeff Bezoses of the world to stop stockpiling the gold in their Uncle Scrooge palaces and spread some around?
The elections may be hollowed out, but they still occur and can produce surprises. (A society that doesn’t hold them at all is even worse off, to which I can personally attest.) Latin Americans, deeply cynical about what they call the “political class,” nevertheless do not sit around wondering which of the interchangeable suits in the campaign posters are going to improve their lot. They are much less hypnotized by their glorious democratic traditions, such as they are, and more hard-nosed about using direct confrontation to force the hostile ruling pooh-bahs to retreat. It involves 100 times more engagement than a visit to a polling place and often draws appalling levels of repression. It’s slow, dangerous, and not instantly gratifying. It’s also refreshingly free of delusion.
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