This Election Is Different

When I was a young boy, my father adorned the back of our Dodge Coronet 440 station wagon with bumper stickers. Proud to Be An American, one read, a manifestation of a simple truth: Both of my parents deeply loved America, and they transmitted that love to their four children.

In high school, I defended America in my social-studies classes. I wrote a paper defending America’s support for the South Vietnamese in the war that had recently ended in defeat. My teacher, a critic of the war, wasn’t impressed.

At the University of Washington, I applied for a scholarship or award of some kind. I don’t recall the specifics, but I do recall meeting with two professors who were not happy that, in a paper I’d written, I had taken the side of the United States in the Cold War. Their view was that the United States and the Soviet Union were much closer to moral equivalents than I believed then, or now. It was a contentious meeting.

[From the November 2024 issue: The moment of truth]

As a young conservative who worked in the Reagan administration, I was inspired by President Ronald Reagan’s portrayal of America—borrowed from the Puritan John Winthrop—as a shining “city upon a hill.” Reagan mythologized America, but the myth was built on what we believed was a core truth. Within the conservative intellectual movement I was a part of, writers like Walter Berns, William Bennett, and Leon R. Kass and Amy A. Kass, and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote powerfully about patriotism.

“Love of country—the expression now sounds almost archaic—is an ennobling sentiment, quite as ennobling as love of family and community,” Himmelfarb wrote in 1997. “It elevates us, invests our daily life with a larger meaning, dignifies the individual even as it humanizes politics.”   

I find this moment particularly painful and disorienting. I have had strong rooting interests in Republican presidential candidates who have won and who have lost, including some for whom I have great personal admiration and on whose campaigns I worked. But no election prior to the Trump era, regardless of the outcome, has ever caused me to question the fundamental decency of America. I have felt that my fellow citizens have made flawed judgements at certain times. Those moments left me disappointed, but no choice they made was remotely inexplicable or morally indefensible.  

This election is different.

The nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump, is a squalid figure, and the squalor is not subtle. His vileness, his lawlessness, and his malevolence are undisguised. At this point, it is reasonable to conclude that those qualities are a central part of Trump’s appeal to many of the roughly 75 million people who will vote for him in three weeks. They revel in his vices; they are vivified by them. Folie à millions.

Trump may lose the election, and by that loss America may escape the horrifying fate of another term. But we have to acknowledge this, too: The man whom the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” is in a razor-thin contest against Kamala Harris, a woman who, whether you agree with her or not, is well within the normal boundaries of American politics. If he loses, he will not concede. Trump will instead attempt to tear the country apart. He can count on the near-total support of his party, and the majority of the white evangelical world. They will once again rally to his side, in the name of Jesus.

This should leave the rest of us shaken. Not because America, despite being an exceptional nation, has ever been perfect, or close to perfect. We have experienced slavery and segregation, the Trail of Tears and the internment of Japanese Americans, McCarthyism and My Lai, the Johnson-Reed Act and the beating and torture of the suffragists, the Lavender Scare, and the horrors of child labor. But what makes this moment different, and unusually dangerous, is that we have never before had a president who is sociopathic; who relishes cruelty and encourages political violence; who refers to his political opponents as “vermin,” echoing the rhetoric of 20th-century fascists; who resorts to crimes to overturn elections, who admires dictators and thrives on stoking hate. Trump has never been well, but he has never been this unwell. The prospect of his again possessing the enormous power of the presidency, this time with far fewer restraints, is frightening.

[From the November 2024 issue: The case for Kamala Harris]

Jonathan Rauch, a contributor to The Atlantic, recently reminded me that the Founders warned us about such a scenario. They knew this could happen, he said, and they gave us multiple safeguards. Those safeguards are in danger of failing. “My faith in democracy is breaking,” he told me. “Part of me is breaking with it.” Americans have three weeks to keep the break from happening.   

Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, in his annual message to Congress, told Americans that “we here hold the power, and bear the responsibility.” What was at stake was emancipation, of course, but also “honor or dishonor.”

“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth” is how Lincoln concluded his remarks.

If Donald Trump wins the election, those of us who grew up loving America won’t stop loving her. But it will be a love tinged with profound disappointment and concern, almost to the point of disbelief. It is one thing, and quite a disturbing thing, for Trump’s soul to represent the soul of his party. It is quite another, given all we know, for him to represent, as president, the soul of his country. It would be an act of self-desecration.

We’re not there yet. Ours is still a republic, if we can keep it.