Voting for Voting
Election 2022: the latest chapter in “partisan politics,” or a collective attempt to get real with our ‘better selves.’
Ask not what your country can do with your vote, ask what your vote can do for your country.
Those words, adulterated, were spoken by the last President of America, the exceptional. Exceptionalism, which is to say, America’s alleged moral superiority, died with a gun shot on November 22, 1963. For the second time in her history, America witnessed the assassination of a President.
On October 28, 2022, a man broke into the house of the Speaker of the US Congress, looking for her, the target of an attempted torture, kidnapping and murder.
Consider both moments of political drama in Marx’s words: “History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.” If November 22, 1963 was ‘tragedy,’ October 28, 2022, is ‘farce:’ America, the exceptional, now America, the degraded.
This was the ‘October surprise’ vote watchers dreaded. On November 2, speaking to the nation, the current President inferred that if one questioned “what the country can do with my vote,” ‘country’ as America has portrayed to the world may cease. As he spoke on prime time cable, 27 million votes had been cast; hence his warning: because the ‘early votes’ won’t be counted until after November 8, many “deniers” will be requesting that they be discarded.
‘In a democracy we accept defeat of the side with the lessor vote count, we don’t deny the outcome. That is rule by one party, one ideology, one side. That is autocracy.’
“Every political project requires a definition of ‘us,’ the community of people it aims to unite and protect. This is true of both democratic and antidemocratic projects, it is true of nationalist and imperialist projects, and it is true, too of, of autocratic attempts, though they are fundamentally antipolitical. Precisely because an autocracy attempt is the opposite of politics, it demands a narrowing definition of ‘us,’ in opposition to an ever greater and more frightening ‘them.’”
-Masha Gessen, “Throw Off the Mask of Hypocrisy,” chapter 18, Surviving Autocracy, pp. 170–171 (1)
What the President didn’t say was what ‘voting for voting’ means: a chance at eloquence, the freedom to make distinctions.
It’s a chance for “our better selves” to persevere.
November 3
Notes
1-Surviving Autocracy, Riverhead Books, 2020
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