Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
[A] nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown — that’s one way to describe the condition of the republic during this latest election season. The crisis may have passed, but the condition remains, perhaps more deeply rooted than ever.
What are the symptoms?
Perhaps you were up late on election night, obsessing about House races in Florida, governor’s races in Wisconsin and Ohio, that Senate race in Nevada. Those are the symptoms. My own friends and family, from deep blue Seattle to deep red Florida, were caught up in the drama, agonizing over results. (The agony was especially acute in Florida.) A friend in Vermont stopped looking at the news weeks ago to preserve his spiritual well-being.
Vermont’s drama was more muted. Gov. Phil Scott coasted to re-election, a rare moderate Republican who has thrived even while repudiating President Donald Trump. At the same time, Vermont Democrats solidified their hold on the Legislature and swept the other statewide races. Vermont remains an anomaly, partly, it is said, because we don’t like to make enemies of our neighbors.
It’s no secret that the heightened drama this year has been driven by the behavior of Trump, whose demagogic methods are designed to stoke hatred and fear. His lack of shame allows him to indulge without compunction the dark arts of propaganda and fear-mongering. Those who buy into his apocalyptic scenarios — the caravan! the terrorists! — may scorn those who discount the threats that they perceive. Those who see through Trump’s methods may have scorn of their own for those whom they view as Trump’s gullible dupes.
The result has been Democratic control of the House, plus victories in numerous governor’s races, combined with a strengthened Republican position in the Senate. Most of the commentary following the election suggested we were in for two years of trench warfare — particularly considering the inevitability that the president will be mired neck-deep in scandal.
So the election settled nothing, except to remind us that nothing is ever settled. It’s tempting from the vantage point of Vermont to imagine that if only nice, reasonable people would finally rise to the surface, then everything would be all right. We could work across party lines and solve problems. We could learn to get along. But history teaches a different lesson — of numerous seemingly irreconcilable forces gathering for new battles every few years, rebounding from defeat to achieve surprising new victories, always seeking to drive their foes into oblivion. The victory of one’s favorite — Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama — does not mask the fact that opposing forces are gathering with the aim of reversing gains one had thought to be permanent.
The dark forces that coalesced around Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, Richard Nixon in the 1960s, Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, went underground during the years of Barack Obama, only to burst forth with new malevolence around Donald Trump. It’s tempting to think that a majority vote in a given election will end racism and demagoguery, but it only contains them for a time.
Elections are partly mathematical. Polling firms and political consultants focus on how best to muster 50 percent-plus of the vote, and the hour-by-hour tallies on election night are the stuff of those nervous breakdowns.
But elections are also the sinew that holds the body politic together, a ritual enacted as a means to preserve democracy and the values we attach to it. If we were to be strictly rational, we might decide that our individual vote doesn’t really matter. How often is an election decided by one vote? (In Vermont, it happens.)
And yet to withhold one’s vote as a gesture of cynical realism would be to strike a blow against what Lincoln called “our bonds of affection.” It’s a phrase that goes beyond the strictly rational. He used it in his first inaugural address, on the eve of the Civil War, when those bonds were facing their most extreme test.
Thus, to vote is to participate in a ritualistic affirmation of our democratic values, even if our vote is swallowed up in a sea of opposition. The conservative in Vermont or the progressive in Oklahoma may feel the futility, but then again, a Democrat won in Oklahoma City, and Phil Scott continues to bob to the surface in the blue sea of Vermont.
A reading of history shows that the forces contending for power today are a reconstitution of forces that have been at work for centuries. Jill Lepore’s new history, “These Truths: A History of the United States,” follows the evolution of numerous movements and trends over the decades. There was populism, which arose in the late 1800s in response to corporate abuses in the Gilded Age. Populism, laced with anti-Semitism and underpinned by fundamentalist religion, was a close cousin of progressivism, which also sought to contain corporate interests and to serve the people. But progressivism became identified with intellectual elites and became tainted by eugenics.
Fundamentalist religion burgeoned in the late 1800s as a reaction to modernity and in the 20th century was harnessed by celebrity preachers such as Billy Graham on behalf of conservative politics. It has led to the politicization of social issues such as abortion and women’s rights.
Meanwhile, racism and white supremacy have permeated the whole society, creating the nation’s most persistent schism. And that schism remains one of the biggest challenges to democracy today.
We know that the Constitution provides equal representation among the states in the U.S. Senate. Thus, Vermont and New York each have two senators. The effect is to give rural states an advantage, creating a system by which an electoral minority may maintain a hold on power. The minority used its power to prolong slavery and then to impose a regime of racial oppression following the end of slavery. These days the minority, holding onto majority power in the Senate, serves a different master: the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests.
Republican strength in rural states thus preserves a form of oligarchy, and it’s not clear that liberals will be able to break the GOP hold on the Senate even in 2020. Trump has used his appeals to racism and xenophobia to widen the division between rural regions and the rest of the country. Populism, fundamentalism, resentment of immigration, racism — these are the historic trends exploited by conservatives to serve the economic interests that finance their campaigns. Battling against those trends has been the work of the American people going back for centuries, and that battle continues.
