Election Eve
By about this time tomorrow, it will have been a decisive dozen Presidential elections for me.
I have little wisdom to dispense this Election Eve, yet still feel compelled to write. Tomorrow I shall have voted in a “decisive dozen” Presidential elections, and intently watched a baker’s dozen.
The Nixon Era
My formative first political memory was Nixon’s resignation. I remember the summer I spent two two-week sessions at Boy Scout summer camp, the second of my summers there. That summer there were fighter jets from a nearby airbase breaking the sound barriers, and the sonic booms would echo across our neck of the Adirondacks. Before breakfast we raised the flag as always, and then it was announced that Nixon had resigned. People clapped, and that made an impression on me. None of the aircraft had strafed our camp, denoting an orderly transition of power. The system had survived the person of the President. This took on added significance as I later learned that in times of system stress, people reaffirm their trust in the person of the President.
I did meet Gerald Ford back in the days when that was still likely. I was part of a Boy Scout color guard that heralded his whistlestop in my city, as I recall run by a Republican mayor at that time. Ford was reaching out both hands to the crowd as he passed by, and we ended up shaking left hands, both upside down. Weird.
But my dad was a solid labor Democrat then, and in the wake of Watergate, a humble peanut farmer captured my imagination. I remember recording his inauguration speech on the cassette recorder I carried everywhere, and playing it back for choice moments of inspiration. My first journal coincided with his inauguration.
Able to Vote At Last
But it wasn’t until 1980 that I could vote in my first election, and I cast mine for Carter, despite my concern that he had, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, pulled us out of the Olympics, and resumed registration for the draft, which was suspended at the end of the Vietnam war. I was overjoyed my Eagle Scout certificate was signed by Carter, and not Reagan.
This had begun a long period of bitter disappointment, only partially punctuated by the elections of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. For me, Clinton was a “triangulating,” so called “New Democrat,” who marked some wins, and some unfortunate compromises. Similarly, Obama was able to secure the ACA, and complete the withdrawal from Iraq, but escalated in Afghanistan, and stepped up the use of drones there and elsewhere. Throughout all of this what was salient to me were movements for justice and peace. Despite having preteen children by then, I was deeply involved in opposition to the Iraq war. This led to a cessation of my “whistling past the graveyard” of Palestine. By this I mean that I could no longer appease otherwise progressive Jewish allies by ignoring peace and justice for Palestine. Instead I gained relationships with progressive Jewish allies who advocated for that. My activist and academic worlds had even run together for a while.
It was in the mutually affirming support of activism and academia that I learned to consider electoral politics as a strategy of social movements, which do the real heavy lifting of social change.
Vote Like A Radical
So this is where I stand, in the realization that simply stepping into the Oval Office commits one to courses of action that preserve a system that perpetuate many structural injustices. We should not be confused that this quadrennial choice of a personality magically undoes these. That is an error of MAGA, of thinking somehow that a celebrity “outsider” will shake things up enough for things to somehow shake out.
Thus it was with great relish that I saw this well–executed reel “Vote Like A Radical,” posted by If Not Now, an organization of “American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for Israel's apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future for all.” It was created by NDN Collective, “a national organization dedicated to building Indigenous power.”
The video puts this choice starkly; we vote to choose our opponent. We vote tomorrow not for strange bedfellows who will continue, for instance, to support Israel, or uphold system injustice or regressive taxation. We vote for the candidate less likely to usher in a fascist dictatorship in which we and our friends, families, and allies will be deported, maimed, or killed when we exercise our right to peaceably assemble for redress of grievances. We’re picking our battles. Strategy is made necessary by the inability to have the full force of one’s opposition mustered everywhere all at once.
Voting Like Writing
One of my grad school professors suggested that writing was often like dropping a feather down a well, and waiting for it to hit bottom. Having cast a ballot by this time tomorrow will have been like that. Barring some sort of landslide, and anticipating from MAGA some of the same sort of shenanigans from 2020, it will be some time before we have a result. We must, as a beloved yoga teacher often intones, “soothe ourselves” through potential distress. To me this means to carve a path between spiritual bypassing and other forms of dissociation—though we may joke about bourbon and pints of Ben and Jerry’s—and complete absorption in every burp and fart of counties reporting and exit polling. It means being “in but not of” both social media and the kind of granular analysis now afforded the reporting infrastructures of or corporate media. I'll think I’ll join Francesca Fiorentini at The Majority Report when I’m able.
More than the ground game and gains Harris–Walz may have made in the eleventh hour, I look for hope to the sea of pink hats which graced the protest of Trump’s inauguration. I look as well to the Sandy Hook generation being of voting age. I look to the 100 days of campaigning which have defied all expectations. I look to the historic swell of identity politics in the candidate, and the utter inability of the right to dismiss the folksy progressive normalcy of her running mate. All those hands which have not known a hammer cannot get a purchase on him.
So vote, soothe yourself, write if you dare, and as the great labor organizer Mary T. Harris “Mother” Jones said,
Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.
