Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Election Day Diary: Dark Mood for a Dark Moment

I have few illusions. I voted for Joe Biden. I did so because the alternative — voting for a third party or voting for Donald Trump — would only lead to four more years of Trump in office, and that is something we cannot afford as a nation.

I’m writing this on Election Day. More than half of the expected vote is in, but we are hours from the start of counting in most states. You may know the results by the time you read this, but I don’t at this moment and I suspect we may not for days and weeks.

The choice matters, maybe more than in any election since I first cast a ballot in 1980. Biden is the less offensive candidate, no great shakes overall. I disagree with him on many things, but he is not a wannabe autocrat and does not inspire cult-like devotion from his supporters.

I write this at a moment of high anxiety. City business districts are taking extra precautions — covering storefronts with plywood, erecting street barriers — in anticipation of violence that the conventional wisdom assumes might come from either side. Let’s be clear — and again, I am writing this before we know — the threat of violence is not from the left, and the threats we face have a less to do with post-election dissatisfaction with a winner than it does with the growing realization that the structures of our supposed democracy have been in decay for a long time.

The United States has never been a fully functioning democracy, and the constrictions built into the system by the Founding Fathers have taken their toll. We are 231 years into the Constitutional experiment and we continue to fight many of the same fights. We do not have full suffrage and access to the vote, though the constitutional prohibitions have largely been removed.

Blacks and women can vote, and there are no poll taxes or literacy requirements, but by no means do all have equal access to the ballot thanks to ID requirements, restrictions on polling sites, felon purges, general voting roll purges and the like.

We pretend that we operate on a one-man-one-vote basis, but the structures of the Electoral College and the US Senate mean that some voters’ votes matter more than others. This is simple math. Delaware has three electoral votes, Texas 38. Delaware has less than a million residents, Texas more than 29 million. Each elector in Delaware essentially represents 325,011 voters; in Texas, the number is 765,449. Keep in mind that there are six jurisdictions with smaller populations who have the same number of electors as Delaware. This is exacerbated by the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College, with nearly all states giving all of their electors over to the popular vote winner in that state — which is why the virtual ties in three blue-leaning Rust Belt states cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election.

Disparity in the Senate may be worse. The 25 smallest states, which have have the seats in the Senate represent less than 16% of the population. In theory, then, just one sixth of the population can prevent the majority from acting. Senate rules (filibusters, holds) complicate this, by increasing the power of individual senators to shut the body down.

Our party system and the first-past-the-post manner of deciding winners narrows legitimate choices to two. The fragmentary nature of our voting laws often means partisans control the process. And lifetime appointments of partisan judges — and the machinations of a reactionary Senate — means that the judiciary is unlikely to change with the times, or to rule in favor of average people.

Much of this was purposeful. The founders were not small-d democrats or populist progressives. They were rich white men who were seeking to protect their privilege, while at the same time keeping the new nation from shattering into independent states. They made compromises that made sense in that moment — the New Jersey plan that gave us the Senate, for instance — but may not make sense now. They included a provision designed to allow the rule book to be updated, but made it incredibly difficult to use.

And yet, this constitutional experiment has survived since 1789, through a Civil War, presidential assassinations, two world wars, several impeachments, a Great Depression, and other massive calamities. I think it has survived, despite itself, despite the flaws in the rule book, and only because a set of norms were agreed to over the course of two centuries. Once those norms came into question — which was inevitable and which the right has made its main goal for 60 years — the structure started to list. The foundation is cracking, the roots coming loose from the soil.

This is where I am supposed to offer solutions. This is where I tell you how to fix what is broken, to present you with nifty policy prescriptions. I don’t have any. I write this on Nov. 3, not knowing who will occupy the White House in January. I write this not knowing whether Biden will replace Trump and pause the immediate disaster enough to give citizens a chance to force needed changes on the system, or whether Trump will return to the White House and continue to blast away at the foundations, to expand executive power and take us farther and farther away from even a semblance of democracy.

A friend posted a meme on Facebook the day before the election, comparing this year’s election to a biopsy. We are awaiting results, it said. I think that’s wrong. The biopsy took place in 2016. We know there’s cancer and that it’s malignant. The question we need to answer is whether we can cut it out and stop its spread so that we can make the needed changes to survive.

Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist, and journalist. He teaches at Rutgers University and several community colleges. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Patreon, @newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2020

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