American voters stand at a fork in the road

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/10/2024 (345 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Nov. 5, voters in the United States will be standing at a proverbial fork in the road. One path leads to Kamala Harris, the current vice-president and Democratic party presidential nominee. She represents adherence to the Constitution, respect for the rule of law, and, despite her flaws, will as president maintain the political, economic and social mores of a stable democratic society.

The other path leads to former president Donald Trump, the Republican party nominee, a pathological liar, narcissist, con-man, misogynist and racist, whose anti-immigration rants hearken back to the Ku Klux Klan eugenics-inspired hateful rhetoric of the 1920s. He is a convicted felon, who also has been charged with inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the U.S. Capitol; and who retired general Mark Milley has warned is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” If elected, Trump has said that he will go after those who have allegedly wronged him — the “enemy from within,” as he caustically refers to them.

His current mental state, epitomized by his inane rambling speeches — that he nonsensically calls “the weave” — with delusional thoughts on climate change, windmills, Haitian immigrants eating family pets, and Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer, peppered with juvenile and vulgar insults about Harris and others who do not support him — are signs possibly of growing dementia.

On Oct. 14, at a town hall meeting in Philadelphia, Trump, 78, stopped talking or taking questions and bizarrely bobbed and danced to music for 30 minutes. While the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and other mainstream media have commented on Trump’s strange behaviour, many journalists, who like to pretend that this is a normal election and want to maintain balanced coverage, have not focused on Trump’s fitness for office to the same extent that they did to President Joe Biden, 81, with an onslaught of criticism of his ailing speeches and actions when he was still running for re-election.

Trump has shown repeatedly that he does not respect the Constitution or law and order. His plan to raise tariffs to levels not seen since the 1890s — his meandering statements show he has no clue about how they work or their potential impact — is sure to bring economic chaos to the U.S. (and likely Canada). Finally, electing Trump, who eschews U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and Vladimir Putin, one of several dictators who Trump admires, is a tremendous risk that endangers the U.S. and, indeed, the world.

That, as of two weeks before the election, political polls, if they are to be believed, have Harris and Trump virtually tied, most notably in the all-significant seven swing states — which because of the arcane electoral college system gives the vote in these states far more importance in the overall outcome than they should have — is difficult to fathom. The cultish popularity of Trump will be studied and analyzed for decades to come.

Not since the presidential election of 1860 has the U.S. tottered on such a precipice. That contest fought over the issue of preserving slavery in the country, was a battle between four contenders: Abraham Lincoln, of the then-new Republican party (yes, the same party that has been taken over by Trump) who opposed slavery; Stephen Douglas of the Democratic party, an Illinois senator, who favoured popular sovereignty that would leave slavery up to each state; John Bell, a veteran Tennessee politician, who represented the conservative Constitutional Union Party, which wanted to avoid making a decision about slavery; and the incumbent vice-president John Breckinridge of the Southern Democratic Party, who, while supportive of the Union, accepted his party’s pro-slavery platform in favour of states’ rights and treating slaves as personal property.

The campaign was far different than today. While Lincoln’s opponents gave speeches, he did not. There were pamphlets written about him and the other nominees, but he chose to let the voters decide with no input or influence by him personally.

On Nov. 6, 1860, Lincoln won the popular vote (39.8 per cent) and the electoral college (with 180 votes of a total then of 303) taking all of the northern states. But a majority of the 15 slave states opposed him. His victory proved ominous: by February 1861 most of the southern states had seceded from the Union, the Confederacy was formed, and the bloody Civil War started on April 12. Four year later, Lincoln was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer.

Seven years before he was killed, in June 1858, Lincoln delivered his famous “a house divided” speech at the Illinois Republican state convention. He declared his faith that the U.S. might escape violence if reason and commons sense prevailed. “To give the victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary,” he said. “Thanks to our good old constitution, and organization under it, these alone are necessary. It only needs that every right-thinking man, shall go to the polls, and without fear or prejudice, vote as he thinks.”

Here’s hoping that on Nov. 5 Americans truly “think” about what they are doing and the fork in the road they are taking.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.