Write a letter to yourself to read on November 6
Anxiety
I took this photo a few days ago as we were wrapping up two weeks in Timișoara, Romania. ‘They’re on a precipice,’ I thought, just as we Americans are as we approach our national quadrennial ritual.
I was born in 1949. This election feels like the most critical of my lifetime.We could go one way, toward the Declaration of Independence’s aspiration of equality, or turn back toward the ugliness of exclusion. Both options are ‘as American as apple pie.’
The Romanian and American Fulbright Commission sponsored my visit to talk with audiences about The Crisis of American Democracy*. West University hosted Rebecca and me in this beautiful western Romanian city.
Romanians are also anxious about the election. They fear what a Trump victory might mean for the NATO alliance of which Romania is a member and Russian aggression at Romania’s borders. Historically, Romania’s geography has put it at risk from invading armies. Imagine living in a country that sits between Germany and Russia.
Here are two photos from one of my talks.
A loss of innocence
I taught politics to college students for forty years, retiring in 2018. One of my regular courses was a seminar on the American presidential election in the fall of an election year.
The first sentence on each syllabus was always, “This is the most important election of your lifetime.” History has finally caught up with my hyperbole.
In 2016, I remember telling my students that Donald Trump had a 30% chance of winning. That was pollster Nate Silver’s estimate a week before the election. We live in a probabilistic world, and sometimes, improbable things happen.
I even joked the week before the election and after the Chicago Cubs had won the World Series, coming back from a 3–1 deficit, that odds makers had given the Cubs only a 15% chance of victory. If the Cubs could do it, then so could Trump.
But when Trump won, most of my students and I were unprepared. We had yet to internalize the possibility. Now, I know that roughly half of America was jubilant. I have a friend who sat up on election night with his 95-year-old mother, and both cheered when Trump’s victory was announced.
I was devastated. I recall thinking I didn’t know anything about my country. How could America go from Barack Obama to Donald Trump? What crashed and burned that night was my innocence.
What do I mean by innocence? I thought the election of the first Black president proved Martin Luther King, Jr’s dictate:
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. (source)
America had made progress toward the Declaration of Independence’s equality aspiration. Obama the person proved that.
But I had forgotten that the struggle for inclusion is never over in America. There is always a backlash.
Former slave Frederick Douglass put it this way.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” (source)
Write a letter to yourself
For eight years, I’ve focused on understanding these two parts of America: progress and regress. Barack Obama’s election made Donald Trump inevitable. If not in 2016, someone else like him and MAGA would appear at some other time.
A fierce backlash was inevitable. When Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the ticket, we were given a contrasting image of two visions of America competing.
One vision is a multiethnic democracy.
The other is an America of the past.
I don’t know which vision will win next week.
Even if our side wins, the struggle for equality and inclusion will not be over.
Some forces in America always want to take us back. This phenomenon explains the extremism of Donald Trump’s language of division and hate in the last few weeks of the campaign. He and many of his supporters know exactly what’s at stake.
Robert Hubbell, one of my favorite political analysts, suggests writing a letter to yourself you will read when you know the winner. He says to thank yourself for the efforts you have made to make America a better place for your grandchildren.
And to remind yourself that you are standing on the shoulders of other Americans who fought the good fight.
My camera’s magnifying lens shows the Romanian workers working around the edge. They understand the danger; perhaps that is the secret.
Building an American house big enough, welcoming enough, and generous enough to include everyone requires constant vigilance.
That labor won’t end even if Harris wins.
If she loses, we’ll return to that roof the next day.
Because we are not going back.
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The idea for this story came from this terrific essay by Robert Hubbell.
