Well, here we are—Crunch Time! It’s become a drag to think about/listen to/research/opine on the distance between Rs and Ds, and how massive the differences have become. If I have to read the words “we are a divided nation” again in an Op-Ed I’ll scream and my poor suffering husband will put his headphones back on and dive into TV drama.
As always, it’s up to us, and the polls are moving. I’m not seeing nearly the number of Trump flags that I saw in 2020. Back in February, during the lead-up to the Super Bowl, I wrote about the effect that a Taylor Swift endorsement could have. Swift has 184 million followers on Instagram, and I have no idea how many on other apps. One friend we’ll call A said my column was a waste of time (!) and I just laughed. And, yes, A and I remain friends on Facebook. And friends in real life also, I might add.
A few elections ago — or even in the last election—social media had little if any impact on our voting behavior. Today, the barrier between internet and real life is disappearing. We must hope that fact check experts are given a place at future debate tables. Any candidate that repeats internet rumors should get an instant “You’re fired!”
Both sides are fighting for oxygen and the sane among us need to think about how we got here and how we can avoid it in the future. It is, as I said, up to us. My county is a good example of how government can swing over. For decades voters filled our courthouse and statehouse with people who called themselves “public servants.” The first (and so far, only) female speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives in Jefferson City was a Democrat from our county. She retired in 2001 without having mentored a successor. What happened to her party?
Rs had people running for office that didn’t deserve to win. But the old Democrat guard didn’t replace themselves with credible choices. Today, this sounds like business as usual, when the powerful refuse to step down and let new generations have a chance. In the case of my county, old candidates ran unopposed in primaries but they didn’t have anything to offer; if they retired, they didn’t help new folks learn the ropes.
At the same time, the Rs gained power by aligning themselves with the new mega churches that were growing by leaps and bounds. Traditional small churches with their Hammond organs and 200-year-old music lost population as the mega-churches added rock ‘n’ roll, coffee shops and gymnasiums. Their messages became competitive. If you joined the right church, they seemed to say, you’ll be one of the souls swept up in the rapture. There was no more community building.
And, then, almost imperceptibly, the born-again message morphed into the MAGA message. My charismatic friends left off speaking in tongues and slipped into Donald Trump’s shiny world. The change was incremental at first and it’s possible that nobody really noticed it happening. It was easy to go with the flow. How many millions of tiny social changes could we point to that grow into similar massive landslides?
Now the pendulum is swinging back. First notice, for me, was when I volunteered to sit at the D booth during one of our county’s many summer street fairs. To the surprise of all us, there was no R booth at all. At the same time, our local newspaper kept publishing pro-Trump op-eds. Joe Biden was still running, remember, and the D’s two answers to the op-eds were (1) Trump’s a liar, a felon and (2) Biden has experience. Those were not winning arguments, and kind of lame, but it’s all we had. We could see how old both candidates are and we didn’t have much more to say. No energy.
Then came Kamala.
Nobody thinks she’s exactly what the country needs, but we agree she has promise. We know that women and minorities will be better off with Kamala in the White House and that’s a plus. And Kamala realizes Benjamin Netanyahu is off the rails but at this time she can’t leave Biden’s team. It’s an impossible situation but at least she realizes the complexity. Old Joe and Old Donald were simply reactive, leaping to the side of Israel like mice after cheese. No clue that the trap was spring-loaded.
Joan Walsh, writing for The Nation, observed, “On climate, trade, free college, student debt and the filibuster, she pressed for better policies before Biden and in many cases she calls for going farther …” So, now, if we want to see possibility, it’s up to us. And Taylor Swift. But mostly us.
Perhaps the main thing about the next election is where the down-ballot races go. That’s where the future is hanging out. To give those kids a boost, well, as I said, it’s up to us.
Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.” Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2024
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