Staring Down Election Day (Again)

[EDITORS NOTE: Due to various issues, this did not run when it was intended, the first Monday of the month, the day before the US Elections on November 4.]

There are so many races, locally and across the nation, that I’m watching. The one that seems to be on most people’s minds is the New York City mayoral race. I have my opinion about the race. I loathed Andrew Cuomo when he entered the race and he’s revealed himself to be an even more vile and loathsome human being as the race has gone on. 

I mean, I don’t want to Curtis Sliwa to be Mayor, but he wasn’t endorsed by Eric Adams, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Stephen Miller.

Many have pointed out that the big division within the Democratic Party is less about policy than it is simply about fighting. About the belief that we are in a dangerous moment and that we can take nothing for granted. Not a school board race or congressional seat, not a single policy fight or philosophical debate. That we have an authoritarian president who is aided in these efforts by a Speaker who has essentially shut down the legislative branch. That we are no longer in a politics as usual moment. That we need new ideas and new approaches to rise to this occasion.

I’m well aware by now that there is nothing to say to people who hate Muslims. Who believe that Zohran Mamdani hates LGBTQ people and women, is planning to install sharia law and genocide the Jewish people, and that his winning the Democratic primary was the equivalent of Kristallnacht. That all of his statements and actions in support of LGBTQ and Trans and Jewish and multicultural organizations and groups and individuals have been calculated lies and that once elected he’ll rip off his mask like a Scooby-doo villain to reveal that he’s an evil Muslim who will destroy the West and all it stands for.

I can only point to Bess Kalb’s newsletter where she details her own electoral choice and thought process in a way that I would not presume to excerpt and would encourage people to read in its thoughtful entirety.

https://besskalb.substack.com/p/the-zohran-question

Cuomo of course has many problems as a candidate like his previous statements, his sexual harassment, his policy decisions during the pandemic. The campaign has raised new issues around Cuomo like his being funded by billionaires and wealthy people who don’t live in New York, stating that diversity is not a strength, his refusal to engage with people or with the media, his unwillingness or inability to say the name Zohran Mamdani correctly.

I was reminded how much of the argument for Cuomo, is the logic behind so many strongmen and would-be strongmen. That he has no vision and no political agenda, but that New Yorkers need someone tough who will fight for them, no matter how deeply flawed he might be. Yes, he never visited a mosque despite holding public offices in the state for more than a decade until after he lost primary. Yes, he won’t take a strong stand for LGBTQ people. Yes, he won’t stand up for trans people. Yes, he refuses to correctly pronounce his political opponent’s name. He’s too busy to care about such things. We should see this as a positive thing because a basic fundamental decency is something we have to sacrifice. He’ll pander to some people, because only some people matter.

As Anne Applebaum wrote:

"Many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying."

I think Charles Blow captured what has made such an impression about the Mamdani campaign to many of us. Namely, a refusal to surrender to this kind of thinking. To not give in to doomerism:

“it’s also important to recognize the degree to which young people — who do not make up all of Mamdani’s supporters but are a crucial and sizable portion of them — are desperately fighting fatalism, bracing themselves against never-ending waves of cataclysm and depression. The world as they knew it is crashing around them. Hope is a vanishing commodity. Darkness reigns.”

https://charlesmblow.substack.com/p/one-thing-people-are-missing-about

The current government and their tech allies want to tell us that the future is already written. It is controlled by them. They choose who owns what. They choose how we live our lives. Our options are to obey or die. Laws are for the rest of us, not them. Jaywalking or a speeding ticket will get you deported. Murder, rape, sedition, helping Al Qaeda and Hamas launder money – that’s fine when the right kind of people do it. Their side can do nothing wrong. They don’t want to live in a democratic nation where we are all subject to the law.

They want to live in a country where some pigs are more equal than others.

Fuck that.

As Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch put it so eloquently, everybody counts or nobody counts. That’s the country where we want to live.

Every Election Day I wear an NAACP t-shirt that reads “Defeat Hate. Vote.”

Let’s add:  Fight the Future.

For Election Day, another vision of the nation. Courtesy of Willie Nelson:

Give us your tired and weak

And we will make them strong

Bring us your foreign songs

And we will sing along

Leave us your broken dreams

We'll give them time to mend

There's still a lot of love

Living in the Promiseland

Living in the Promiseland

Our dreams are made of steel

The prayer of every man 

Is to know how freedom feels

There is a winding road 

Across the shifting sand

And room for everyone 

Living in the Promiseland