My thoughts are not fully formed, but I felt it was worth it to write them out before the 2024 elections occur. The 50-50 forecast creates what feels like an opportunity for some sort of objectivity.

I write without a particular political cause in mind. My plan for Tuesday is to tick no box for a presidential candidate. I am not fearful about the outcome of the election.

What do we make of a situation where the two political parties have carved up the country so neatly into even portions?

The explanation that would perhaps be accepted by the majority is that we’ve split the country down the middle between good and evil. In this theory the parties are pulling in diametrically opposite directions. Vexingly for all but Zoroastrians, there must be approximately equal numbers of good voters and evil voters.

I think that intellectual honestly compels us to consider the possibility that in fact what has happened, is that there is not a substantive difference between the two candidates. Under that theory, the 50-50 split arises because there are is a small army of political operatives who have found the most efficient way to appeal to voters on the basis of (relatively) trivial cultural and tribal identity markers. The reason that the split is even is because the political operatives of the respective parties are (on average) equally good at their jobs.

(I have never watched reality television, but I would bet dollars to donuts that one of the important elements of the production is to create have at least two characters that sufficiently are in their individual ways both revolting and sympathetic, so that the audience can form an opinion of who is best. I believe this is a feature of soap operas as well. The point is that it’s possible to create drama and the illusion of personal loyalty within an entirely contrived narrative world.)

The latter reading is depressing in that it denies that the American people are actually being presented with a choice; it is heartening because it suggests that the outcome of the election will not be catastrophic to our American way of life, one way or the other. (Takeway: relax.)

A conceivable response to the illusion-of-choice position is that it comes from a position of privilege: I, who am neither a woman, a Ukrainian, an immigrant, a Jew, a Gazan, or a factory worker, am in the privileged position of not having to care about the outcome of the election. I certainly grant the point; I live a life of remarkable privilege. I can throw away my vote; and I even have the time to go to my polling place and submit an empty ballot so that my conscience doesn’t charge me with laziness. Be that as it may, I don’t think it detracts from the plausibility of the illusion-of-choice position. Which of these scenarios is prima facie more likely?

  1. Your political party has the better position (morally, prudentially) on every issue, but for some reason is able to convince more than 50% of the country that this is the case.
  2. Your political party is whipping you into a moral frenzy over situations which (though important in themselves) will not be substantially affected by the occupant of the White House for the next four years?

I have just finished reading Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder’s account of the mass killings in eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. It is not quite the book to make one feel apathetic about politics. But it is a book to make one suspicious of any claim that the left or the right have all of the answers.

In fact, my own takeaway is that mass killing is frighteningly easy to get going. You need a few morally compromised people at the top—and they don’t need to be anything but ambitious for personal advancement. Then you need to create a circumstance where each participant feels it’s cooperation or death. (The German death camps were largely operated by Jewish and Soviet prisoners, for instance.) I find it impossible to believer otherwise than that there is sufficient group of willing participants in mass killing in any society; and I do not believe they can filtered out through elections. Here again the obligatory Solzhenitsyn quote:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

So there is a war to be won, but this Tuesday is not even worthy of being called a skirmish in that battle.

So loosen up. Read a book. Talk to someone who disagrees with you. It’s not entirely clear that everything is going to be all right, but that will not be decided by an election.