Eight years later, the choice is similar but far clearer. However, the root problem is that we are not all seeing the same things. Maybe that’s always been true, but it’s more of an obstacle now that we seem to lack shared reference points. So how does one proceed from here? Well, increasingly with every season of my life, I see the influences and effects of what I might call the generational lens. Now, when I think about people, culture, politics, religion, or sports, I am more aware than ever of being a man born in the early 1970s. This framing of my perceptions is not necessarily negative, and it has in fact helped me to make more sense of one of the more stressful decades of politics I’ve ever witnessed. Even so, the journey of reflecting on these times and this decision before the nation has been frustrating beyond words.

I came of age during the Ronald Reagan presidency with three parents that were in a relative spectrum of center to left and a grandfather who was prone to approvingly refer to Reagan’s reputation as the ‘Great Communicator.’ The twenty years and five presidential terms from roughly 1981 through 2001 created a sense for much of my own Generation X—and for many members of the Baby Boom generation as well—that although there was inarguably prejudice and inequity that still required attention and effort in American society, there was a prominent feeling of overall stability and gradual improvement. Looking back on those politics through the combination of both personal recall and my education, I can assemble the general sense that the country had moved on from the unrest of the 1960s and the rabble-rousing and vociferous left-wing protests of the 1970s as well as the economic problems of that latter decade. People expected life to offer increasingly more conveniences and opportunities, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the feeling of national tension related to past or future wars seemed to dissolve in an uplifting new zeitgeist.

This description is of course a superficial construction of things as they actually were because during the 1980s, sexism, racism, and other forms of bias were jarringly present much of the time, and in the 90s, the LA riots in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and the social recoil of the O.J. Simpson verdict both revealed the mismatch between notions of relative harmony and lived experiences. It must also be said that the 1980s were a key inflection point in decades of failed controlled substance policies championed by both Democrats and Republicans. However, in comparison to prior decades, 1981 to early 2001 was a remarkable period of optimism, particularly in the final five years of this timeframe, in which crime and murder rates notably went down while the access to exploration and commerce available through the internet became the focus of society’s attention and enthusiasm. 

During these two decades, we certainly saw our share of dissenters. Perhaps the most prominent whom I can remember was independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, who mounted a historic campaign against George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton for the 1992 presidential election. Perot used a populist approach to preaching for fiscal practicality and government reform. He may have even had a chance to win the election had he not decided that his campaign was actually working too well. Even after the strange two-step of withdrawing and then re-entering the race, he still garnered an unthinkable 18.9% of the national popular vote. Upon reflection, Perot was probably everything that Donald Trump never was in terms of qualifications and success as an entrepreneur and philanthropist.

I cite this specific period because beginning with the September 11th, 2001 attacks, the chaotic nature of events every few years in the 21st century thus far have created repeated openings for figures such as this version of Trump to take advantage of a sense of lost stability particularly among Generation X and Baby Boomers. Changes in racial demographics and gender roles also created the conditions for a candidate who might (falsely) promise to take this middle-aged and older group of voters back to so-called simpler times. The 2008 financial crisis resulted in a government rescue of big banks, and both the crisis and the bipartisan solution directly contributed to the next period of dissent in the form of first, the Tea Party movement and then in late 2011, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Looking back on President Obama’s second term, it’s more possible now to understand some of the factors that gave an opening to the unusual candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

In 2014, the Obama administration was unable to predict or respond effectively to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea. In addition, the terrorist organization ISIS repeatedly struck in murderous fashion in the Middle East, and the conflagration that they caused was followed by two more events that I believe helped to elect Donald Trump. The first of these was the San Bernardino, California terrorist attack in December of 2015 carried out by a married couple who were Muslim extremists partly inspired by ISIS. The other event was the similarly horrifying shooting attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in June of 2016. These events absolutely contributed in those years to what I would consider the most upsetting social and geopolitical atmosphere since the 9-11 attacks themselves.

Despite the brighter moments of the Obama era such as the rescue of the automobile industry and the Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage, there were still other ingredients that detracted from the Democratic Party’s effort to hold onto the White House in 2016, and one of these was what has been called the hidden recession of 2015-16. In those last two years of Obama’s presidency, industrial production, retail sales and global markets had substantial slowdowns or outright declines. Even though central banks acted to stabilize things and managed to avoid an official recession, businesses and some workers registered the effects. Lastly, for the first time in decades, there were increases in the rates of murder and crime overall in both 2015 and 2016.  

Donald Trump took advantage of the existing narratives around Hillary Clinton and the difficulty for either party to win three consecutive presidential elections by emphasizing the near-term troubles of 2014-2016. The actual accomplishments of Mr. Trump’s administration were very limited. What he described as tax reform was mainly a tax cut that went out of its way to remove local tax deductions that largely benefited people in blue states. He enacted inhumane policies at the border, and he increased the number of overseas drone strikes made by the military. As a nod to the far right, he made Jerusalem the new location of the United States Embassy in Israel. His administration built a fractional portion of a wall on the Southern border, but it was of course not financed by Mexico as promised. And then there were the tariffs.

During his term, Trump enthusiastically put into effect a series of tariffs of which he remains quite proud. This issue is particularly important in the current election campaign because he is promising a kind of Tariffs 2.0 policy. However, it is this policy that was on the merits by far one of his worst debacles while in office. The tariffs did have an effect, but it was not the one that was intended. Taxes on Chinese imports led to a trade war, and the loser was ultimately the American farmer. As farmers saw a substantial drop in their exports, their financial predicament became untenable. An existing trend in farmer suicides worsened under the Trump tariffs regime. The Trump administration’s solution was something that might ordinarily be called socialism. According to reporting in Forbes, Mr. Trump authorized more taxpayer funded cash subsidies to farmers than the federal government would spend in a calendar year on building ships for the Navy or maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal. A failed policy that results in more bankruptcies, deaths, and cash payouts from the government used to be exactly what conservatives and Republicans used to warn us about.

As I said at the outset, shared reference points are gone. Right wing media outlets and social media corporations have curated complete confusion about what does or does not constitute reliable information. Republican voters and state-level activists are living in a bizarre reality in which they insist that all of their congressional election outcomes are largely valid but that the election of Joe Biden in that same cycle has somehow been engineered by vote-switching mechanisms that do not exist. That’s because after Trump lost the majority of swing states in 2020, new realities had to be created out of whole cloth to feed the victimhood of Trump and his voters. There is a $787 million price tag on the harms done to truth and civic decency by Fox News Corporation after they were forced to settle in court at that figure for knowingly feeding people lies in their echo chamber about the Dominion corporation’s voting machines in the 2020 election. The even more pro-Trump outlets Newsmax and OANN have also had to settle similar suits for blatantly lying to their audiences in an effort to prop up Trump’s election lies.

The centrists and conservatives who have maintained a consistent point of view on things such as tariffs and opposition to authoritarian governments at home and abroad are now disparagingly called ‘RINOS’ (Republicans in name only) or worse, and so as a result, I’m in a strange coalition now that manages to include people such as Dick Cheney, Bill Krystol, and Mark Cuban along with Nancy Pelosi and Beyonce. Earlier this year, I read the book Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins, and it made me think back to 2012. There was a specific moment in about August of that year when I said to Meredith that I was preparing for the possibility that Romney was going to win. What I also said was that on balance Romney and Ryan were a much better ticket than McCain and Palin overall in my view. If Romney was going to be president, I wouldn’t like it, but I could live with it. In the years since then and especially as demonstrated in Coppins’s work based on Romney’s personal journals and documents, it’s even clearer that Mitt was more correct about both Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s candidacy than I would have imagined.

This will be my ninth presidential election in which I’ll vote, and I’m extremely tired of the Trump phenomenon. I know that immigration is a genuine concern for some people, and I’m aware that despite the fact that the pandemic and Trump’s earlier tariffs have contributed to high prices, these issues stand out in people’s minds in relation to the current president and his party. However, almost all of these policy discussions are whistling past a future graveyard—of women. Donald Trump, a man who was a pro-choice Democrat into his mid-60’s, does not care about abortion except as a card that he was able to play via the appointment of federal judges. By loading the United States Supreme Court with the explicit promise of overturning Roe v. Wade, he gave his most extreme supporters on the Christian right a victory that many moderate Republicans did not really want and thought was impossible. As a direct result, he set in motion the conditions for numerous deaths (particularly in Texas under S.B. 8 and Georgia among other states) and the unnecessary suffering of scores of women within months of the Dobbs decision as horrendous state-level bans automatically took effect. Abortions on the whole have increased since Roe was overturned, which is the best proof that this was not about reducing abortions or helping mothers and children in any way. The point was to push forward a culture war ideology as an exercise of political power at the cost of women’s lives.

Donald Trump is at the financial and legal breaking point, so he is desperate to win this election. For years now, he has been funneling fistfuls of cash from his fundraising PACs into his prodigious and self-inflicted legal bills, and he needs easy revenue in the form of an influx of foreign diplomats staying at his clubs to curry favor and US Secret Service rentals at his golf courses and other schemes to bilk taxpayer dollars to keep himself afloat. This time there will be no Rex Tillerson or John Kelly to impose even a modicum of statecraft or reasonable judgement on Trump’s impulses. He and J.D. Vance will eventually pull us out of NATO and effectively abandon Ukraine. Trump will pardon the criminals convicted of illegal acts in the January 6 riots because they unwittingly supported his attempt to steal the previous election. The tariffs policy will be rolled back for individual cronies and companies who donate to Trump or support him in a similar structure to a mafia boss’s way of operating. If these likelihoods aren’t bad enough, Trump has promised influential roles in the government to highly unbalanced people such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Elon Musk. Imagine what it will be like to have a government full of cronies and cultlike figures dismantling public health and services on the basis of personal grudges and warped opinions.

Yet somehow, there are people who say that they could never vote for Vice President Harris because of what students on college campuses are saying about Israel or particular subgroups deciding to use unexpected pronouns. To be clear, she is not running to be the spokesperson for American college students or to encourage people’s novel use of the English language. It’s a genuinely bewildering time in the United States now as self-identified conservatives attack the FBI, cede democracy to Russian aggression, abandon free markets and claim that they must at all costs oppose a successful prosecutor in order to elect an elderly fraud and criminal.

As each generation comes of age, this country undergoes changes. There has never been a particular time in this country when things were uniformly optimal across the whole of society, and there have most definitely been backward steps. In 1960 Black Americans were not freely able to exercise their right to vote. In 1970 women were not able to open a credit card account without a man co-signing for it. In 2000 gay couples were unable to get married and have full legal recognition for their unions. Whatever I think about some of the trends in society today, I do not want to go back to those days, and millennials, Generation Z and Generation Alpha are most definitely not going to want to go back to those days.

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The other day, I saw the film Conclave, which deals with the death of a fictional Catholic pope and some creative drama around the cardinals’ choice of a new one. There was a remarkable quote at one point in the film spoken by Ralph Fiennes as Dean Lawrence of the cardinals. He said that in his experience he had found one preeminent sin, which was certainty. He calls certainty the enemy of unity and tolerance. After all, with complete certainty, there is no mystery and no need for faith. Donald Trump and his surrogates are building in their base supporters a sense that the only acceptable outcome is victory and that any defeat for Trump is false and unjust. I know that we are poised between two outcomes, but this certainty is being loaded like a weapon in the minds of his next angry mob of supporters. This movement is fully prepared, more than ever at the grass roots level, to stop the certification of Democratic candidates and literally do away with electoral outcomes that are unsatisfactory to one man. Perhaps the clearest view of the dire situation at the local level was voiced recently by evangelical Christian and anti-Trump conservative David French in a discussion with the Catholic anti-abortion opinion columnist Ross Douthat. French lives in Tennessee, and he provided a clear example of how things have gone completely awry:

So, for example, my brother-in-law ran for school board locally and had to have security, Ross. Running for school board! Why? Because he works for Pfizer. Because he works for the vaccine company. This is part of a broken culture here.

If you have to have security running in a local school board election because you work for Pfizer because the MAGA elements are so outraged all the time and so conspiracy driven that they’re going to lash out at somebody who’s a strong conservative person and lash out in that extreme of a way, this is the culture that is existing at the grass roots.

And I don’t sit here and think that if you just remove Donald Trump, that all of a sudden the green shoots will fly up and balance will be restored to the Force and all of that. But here’s what I do know: that as long as Trump and MAGA are the standard-bearers of the G.O.P. and that Trump is the model of what it means to be a G.O.P. candidate, this is just going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. (September 6th, 2024, nytimes.com)

It’s important to recognize in this moment that we’ve been very lucky over the last decade or more that Gabby Giffords, Steve Scalise, Paul Pelosi, and Donald Trump each survived the incredibly serious attacks and attempts on their lives. In every one of these cases, the attacker was either a deranged loner or a verifiably psychotic person, but it’s important to note that while Democrats writ large expressed condemnation for the violence against Scalise and Trump, it is unfortunately unsurprising that Trump himself and a number of his supporters have openly embraced conspiracy theories and jokes about Nancy Pelosi’s husband after he was attacked in his own home.

Usually the act of writing gives me great satisfaction, but I have to confess that the more I think about this election, the more disturbing it is to consider how close we are to going back down this same old rancorous road. It’s the chef’s kiss perfect hypocrisy that this man is running on immigration issues after he used his influence to kill the most comprehensive bipartisan immigration bill in generations. A vote for Harris is a vote for public health, stability, the rule of law, alliances with democracies, free markets, fixing the border, and good character. Imagine how much better we could use our capital and resources than to prop up the most divisive and parasitic man in America today. Folks, vote accordingly—by no means am I certain, but I see all the signs that lives will depend on it.

C.S.