4 The New York Review
Elaine Blair
When I was six, an aunt gave me a book
of fairy tales in which I discovered
Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Fir
Tree.” The story, which I reread about a
thousand times during my elementary
school years, is about a little evergreen
in a forest who longs to grow bigger and
have things happen to him. The fir gets
cut down in young adulthood to be a
Christmas tree in a well-to-do house
in town. He’s hung with candles, dried
fruits, and toys. People admire him.
Children search his branches for hid-
den presents. It’s the most fun he’s ever
had, Christmas, and he can’t wait for
it to begin again the next day. Instead
he’s dragged up to an attic and left there
for months with only mice for com-
pany. When the family takes him out
in spring he’s brown and withered. The
children gleefully crush his branches
under their boots. An adult chops the
tree into pieces and throws them in the
fireplace. As he burns, the dismem-
bered tree sighs for all the parts of his
life that he can’t get back, even the ones
that just recently had seemed quite dis-
mal—the attic, the mice, and the chil-
dren who stomped on his branches.
It’s the second half of the story that
I found so dreadfully fascinating: the
steep slide from Christmas to obliv-
ion, the way that a turn of events first
seemed bad, then—too late!—seemed
not so bad in retrospect, when com-
pared to the next, worse thing. These
days I think of the story pretty regu-
larly. Its bad-to-worse directionality
seems to describe our national political
condition as well as our future of global
warming. Remember worrying about
the prospect of climate destruction?
In the last month I’ve caught my-
self—just for a minute—looking back
with something almost like wistful-
ness to the earlier years of the Trump
administration. Back then five inspec-
tors general whose names I did not yet
know, but would come to know in 2020
as they were dismissed for no clear
reason, were still in place at the State
Department, Pentagon, Transporta-
tion Department, Health and Human
Services Department, and the intelli-
gence agencies. Back then, Trump had
some aides with independence of mind.
Coats, Kelly, McMaster—people for
whom I felt no particular political affin-
ity at the time of their appointment but
who, it emerges in retrospect, checked
some of Trump’s destructive impulses.
It’s not much to look back on, but it’s
more checks than we currently have
going into a possible second administra-
tion of the president who has repeatedly
encouraged violence, stirred up white
supremacists, and threatened to use the
military against civilian protesters.
I have a list in my mind of the actions
I can take, and have taken, to move
elected representatives further toward
the left, where I (with a majority of
Americans) would like them to be on
most issues. I can vote, march, occupy,
canvass, and text bank for candidates I
support. Follow obscure local elections,
call elected representatives, persuade
people I know to do the same. These
actions can, and have, turned purple
districts blue and brought progressive
candidates to blue seats. But when it
comes to shoring up nonpartisan insti-
tutions and practices, watchdog panels
and oversight mechanisms, I have few
levers to pull, no interface with these
parts of democratic government. Their
functioning until recently has seemed
quiet and barely perceptible, like the in-
voluntary smooth muscles of the body:
you don’t feel their fluctuations, and if
you do it’s often a bad sign. If you’ve
learned the name of an inspector gen-
eral in the Trump years, it means he
probably won’t be holding his position
much longer.
The dread of post-election uncer-
tainty and violence is intense among
everyone I talk with (a number shrunk
by pandemic lockdown to about three
people a day who are not immediately
related to me). I wish it were already
November 3. I can’t wait to start getting
it over with. The vote that I’m about to
cast feels like an instrument ridicu-
lously too small and too blunt for our
overlapping crises. I can cast it only
once, and only from California, a safe
blue state currently turning eerie shades
of orange, yellow, and gray as our trees
burn. On a hot day in late September, I
walked with my kids to a federal court-
house in downtown LA. I don’t usually
get emotional about politics (unless
you count seething anger), but when we
stuck a bunch of flowers in the chain-
link fence enclosing the courthouse and
said rest in peace, Justice Ginsburg,
I was glad to have my sunglasses on
to cover what turned out to be unex-
pected physiological manifestations of
sadness around my eyes. Things seem
pretty bad right now. I hope they will
still seem bad in retrospect. QDavid W. Blight
Democracy works best when politics
don’t mirror the country’s deepest so-cial divisions, and all sides can accept
defeat and a transition of government.
As Trump flags replace Confederate
flags on truck caravans and at Republi-
can rallies, we are about to experience
a presidential contest, perhaps the first
since 1860, when it is possible that mil-
lions on each side will not find defeat
acceptable.
Democrats represent a coalition
held together loosely by an ideology
of inclusion, a commitment to active
government, faith in humanistic and
scientific expertise, and an abhorrence
of what they perceive as the monstrous
presidency of Donald J. Trump. Re-
publicans, with notable defections, are
a party held together by a commitment
to tax reduction, corporate power, anti-
abortion, white nationalism, and the
sheer will for power. We are essentially
two political tribes fighting a cold civil
war that may determine whether or not
our institutions can survive the strife
fomented by a pandemic, a racial reck-
oning, an economic collapse, the death
of a transcendent Supreme Court jus-
tice, and the reelection campaign of our
homegrown authoritarian president.
How can this be the case—not in
the dictatorships of Belarus, Hungary,
Turkey, or Venezuela, but here in the
US, during the 233rd year of the Con-
stitution? The answers are historical
and structural. A modern campaign of
voter suppression conducted by one of
our parties grows with warped inten-
sity. Changing demographics and the 15
million new voters drawn into the elec-
torate by Barack Obama in 2008 have
scared the Republicans—now largely
the white people’s party—into fearing
for their existence. With voter ID laws,
reduced polling places and days, felon
disfranchisement, voter roll purges, re-
strictions on mail-in voting, an eviscer-
ation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
and a constant rant about “voter fraud”
without evidence, Republicans have
soiled our electoral system with un-democratic skull duggery. They are also
frightened of the results of the 2018
midterm elections, when voter turnout
favoring Democrats was 67 percent for
ages 18–29, and 58 percent for ages 30–- Nearly 30 percent of the electorate
is now Black, Hispanic, Asian-Ameri-
can, or another ethnic minority. White
nationalism and conservatism are col-
liding with the future. There is no Re-
publican majority in America, except
on election days. It all depends on who
votes and who is allowed to vote.
President Trump frequently claims
that “the only way we’re going to lose
is if the election is rigged.” He also
loves to milk cheers from his crowds
by warning them to “watch all the
thieving and stealing and robbing” of
votes by Democrats. Every reasonably
informed American knows that the
only things rigged in this election are
the Electoral College itself (in favor
of less populated states that tend red),
the decidedly undemocratic institution
of the US Senate (a Republican major-
ity represents a population smaller by
15 million than the Democrats), and
the myriad ways the current adminis-
tration has manipulated government
agencies to influence voting.
The Republican Party has become
a new kind of Confederacy. They are
secessionists without taking the rev-
olutionary step of seceding, power-
obsessed rebels who fight to preserve
a bygone America by gaming the sys-
tem. They have managed to win the
presidency twice without the most
votes, maintain control of the Senate
although vastly outnumbered in the na-
tional electorate, and build a majority
on the Supreme Court by stealing an
appointment that belonged to a sitting
Democratic president.
According to the historian Stepha-
nie McCurry in Confederate Reckon-
ing (2010), the original Confederates
of 1861 took “perverse pride” in being
“out of step” with the modern world.
One Southern minister saw the Con-
federate nation as a righteous minority
of “three hundred and fifty thousand
white men” commanding the labor of
“four million African slaves” in the ser-
vice of civilization. That “nation” faced
colossal defeat four years later; a simi-
lar political fate may yet befall a Repub-
lican party unhinged by today’s world.
This new Confederacy is partly re-
gional and also rural (a declining pop-
ulation). It knows what it hates: the
two coasts, diverse cities, marriage
equality, certain kinds of feminism,
political correctness (sometimes with
reason), university “elites,” and “liber-
als” generally. It is racial and undem-
ocratic. It twists American history to
its own ends, substituting “patriotism”
for scholarship and science. It has wea-
ponized “truth” and rendered it oddly
irrelevant. It has brought us almost to a
new 1860, an election in which Ameri-
cans voted for fundamentally different
visions of a proslavery or an antislavery
future. For now, this minority interest
fights for its existence from within the
union by trying to own it.
We cannot imagine the same violent
result this time, even as we resolve to
save our democracy from the grip of
minority rule. But a preservation of
our Union will not come from merely
On the Election
Dawn Williams Boyd: The Trump Era: Trump’s America, 2020Dawn^Williams^ Boyd/Fort^Gansevoort