And so we come to the end. 48 hours from now, all that can be done, we will have done. And then it’s just the waiting. The only question is what is the result and how long will it take.
A quick result is at least decisive. If it’s obvious for him, then we know what we are as a nation, and it will be time to reckon with spending the rest of our lives fighting a rearguard action against the United States of White Alabama. Which, at least you know. Or she wins decisively enough to call it by Wednesday morning, at which point it’s just about snuffing the dirty tricks as quickly as possible and not letting the enemy do what they tried last time.
If it wears on, that’s bad. Either we slowly bleed to death, or we win but the enemy has a foundation for another four years of saying they were cheated, of saying things were rigged, as if a complicit media didn’t sanewash a decompensating bigot for years and fly interference for the same things they hyped up to force Biden out of the block. And the longer it wears on, the more likely a rigged system tips against us – the House refuses to elect a speaker to create chaos, or the Supreme Court interferes to pick their preferred candidate for the second time in a quarter century. Either way, every day this wears on is bad news.
It should never have come to this. The time to stomp it out was in 2000, when the SCOTUS gave victory to the side that didn’t have the most votes, and we just let that go. The time to stomp it out was 2009, when Republicans laundered themselves into the Tea Party and mainstreamed bigotry as “economic anxiety.” The time to stomp it out was 2016, when Mitch McConnell tore up every last unwritten rule to steal a Supreme Court seat while the Republican Party rolled over for a reality-TV carnival freak. The time to stomp it out was 2021, when there was broken furniture in the Capitol and blood on the steps and Republicans were still willing to admit violent interference with the political process was wrong.
But now? Now we go with what we have. I have never been that positive about the impact of the gender gap, if only because I grew up in a place and culture where the Ladies Against Women could be counted on to be a bulwark against feminism and their own primacy. But if you believe Ann Selzer in Iowa, and extrapolate from there, a whole lot of women – especially those who were alive to see abortion legalized and no-fault divorce granted them and the power to obtain credit in their own names – have seen that the Trumpists can and will take away rights they thought were secure forever. And they have put away everything from their Tabs and Virginia Slims to their TikTok and Stanley mugs to stand in line for hours, to call and text and ballot-cure and doorstep and do what is necessary to defend the radical proposition that women are people.
And on paper, that might be enough. Women vote in higher numbers, and women prefer Harris more than men prefer Trump, and that might be enough to get the job done. Because the more decisive the rejection of Donald John Trump and all his pomps and works and empty promises, the harder we kick this senile bag of racist goo into the swamps from which he crawled, the sooner we can move forward. We can never go back to the way things were. We never should. We go forward. Always.
And that’s the thing: she hasn’t really put a foot wrong. For someone who rode in during July who was only half-expecting this could happen, her campaign has run a tight ship, messaged well, conveyed the signal that you can have life without the main character drama of an egomaniac, that you can have a woman of color in the White House without drama. (Which is not true, through no fault of her own. All the misogyny against Hillary harnessed to all the racism against Obama will combined to form Redneck Voltron for the next four years if she wins. This is not her fault and anyone who employs it should be called on it, not least the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and everyone else who trips over themselves to make Phony Stark and JD Vance seem like they represent a mainstream valid opinion.) She has been capable, competent, empathetic and just plain normal and nice, and if thats not good enough for America, that’s a reflection on America, not her.
I wish I could trust my gut. I wish I could trust the American public. But only a truly mentally defective individual would do either in 2024.
We’re about to find out if God really watches over old drunks, little children and the United States of America.