Time To Vote for Democracy

In the early 1990s, when I covered the end of communism in Eastern Europe, I learned a lesson about governance. It had been much easier for the Communists to create an inefficient centrally planned country than it was to turn the wreckage they left behind into a functioning free market democracy.

That lesson is in the back of my mind as I ponder our nation casting ballots for president.

For many Americans the choice boils down to policy preferences on a broad range of issues. But this election may be far more profound than that. It may be about protecting our battered democratic system and the freedom it affords us.

There is a lot to dislike in this campaign.

Both candidates pander. Donald Trump says he will change the tax code so tips are not taxed. Kamala Harris responds by promoting the same dumb idea. A financial expert I know observed that exempting tips from taxes could benefit everyone who provides a service. They could ask for tips instead of charging fees.

Both candidates blame the other for out-of-control immigration along our Mexican border. In fact, both political parties are to blame.

Both candidates have flipflopped. Trump has dialed back his comments on abortion. Harris has changed her mind on fracking.

Free trade has become the third rail of politics. Trump is calling for across-the-board 20% tariffs on imports, which will lead to retaliatory tariffs on our exports and drive up prices for Americans. But Harris is hardly an unabashed free trader: The Biden administration kept in place the tariffs Trump leveled when he was president, even while criticizing them.

I believe that most Americans would like to see a campaign with more substance. They clearly hunger for policy discussion by Harris, who has only recently submitted to interviews and still serves up vague answers. Even many of Trump’s supporters are weary of his school-yard taunts and hyperbolic statements reminiscent of former North Korea leader Kim Jong-il, who once claimed that he scored 11 holes-in-one during one golf outing.

Then we have the issue of age. We began with 81-year-old President Biden’s unsteadiness on the stump and now have increasingly disjointed statements by Trump, who if he served a new full term would be the oldest president in American history.

But one factor rises above age or policy or self-aggrandizement, and it calls for voting against Donald Trump. This is his normalization of behavior that undermines our government institutions – and in government itself.

Previous presidents have not been saints. But Trump’s troubles with the law far exceed any other occupant of the White House. No president has ever been indicted on criminal charges, let alone convicted of felonies. While Trump claims he is a victim of political persecution, many of his civil court cases have nothing to do with politics.

Shortly after his election in 2016, Trump paid $25 million to settle a case in which Trump University was accused of defrauding students. Since then he has been found liable by a jury of sexual abuse. After the verdict, he added insult to injury and was fined millions more for defaming his victim.

As reported by the New York Times, Trump and his companies have been defendants in more than 1,000 lawsuits in which he was accused of not paying contractors or taxes, breaking contracts, and withholding overtime from employees who earned it. He did not lose all those cases, but they fit into a pattern of a troubled relationship with the law that manifests itself in his roguish views of the presidency.

Trump regularly says that, as president, “you have extreme power.” He argues that presidents should have unlimited immunity from prosecution, which the Supreme Court, as supportive of presidential power as it has been recently, has not endorsed.

Many officials have inadvertently taken sensitive documents home after leaving public office and apologized for it. Trump unapologetically took classified documents into retirement. When he was initially subpoenaed to return them, he refused.

Joe Biden has reportedly griped in private that his attorney general has not been sufficiently aggressive in prosecuting Trump. He has been angry over the prosecution of his son Hunter Biden, but let the judicial proceedings against his son play out. Trump directly chastised the Justice Department for not going after Hillary Clinton and others. In a moment that will forever remain a black mark in American history, he urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, who was at the time expected to challenge Trump’s reelection.

Proponents of the former president often dismiss his extreme statements as “That’s just Trump. He would never do that.” But words matter.

We should want presidents who talk more about the extreme responsibility of safeguarding our institutions and our Constitution than they do about the “extreme” power they can wield, about being a dictator for a day, or about using military force to go after the “enemy within,” which Trump has defined as such people as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We should want candidates to hold up images of prior leaders who reflect the best in our history instead of envying tyrants, as was alleged by Trump’s White House former chief of staff again this week.

As this election winds down, we should pay attention to the many men and women who served Trump and now, in numbers unprecedented for any president, assert flatly that he is unfit for office. (It is also worth asking how, if he was such a “genius” at picking talent, he fired so many people.)

We should take seriously the signal that Trump has sent about his view of the Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol and on Congress’ sacred duty to ratify votes for president in a time-honored way. Videos clearly show unruly violence. Trump has called it “a day of love.”

This is straight out of dystopian political novels, such as Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” which warned Americans in 1935 of the dangers of demagogues like Huey Long and the dictators who were rising in Europe during fascism’s heyday. The novel’s antagonist declares martial law shortly after being sworn in so he could exercise “complete control of legislation and execution” without judicial review.

There is a fancy term for what Trump says about Jan. 6, and that term is “rhetorical redescription.” It is a technique to distort reality in order to bend public opinion to one’s own ends. It has nothing to do with fact or anyone’s intentions to protect you.

There is quite a lot wrong with the way our political parties work these days. Both are off the rails. One is elitist and the other nihilist. We can hope that, as has happened before in fraught times, we will right the ship of state. In the meanwhile, we need to elect someone who won’t take a wrecking ball to our democratic values.

For those who think our institutions should be broken, they would do well to consider this: Once set in motion, wrecking balls swing in both directions. It won’t be that difficult to shatter our democratic norms, and they will be very hard to rebuild. Everyone will suffer.