Election Day 2022: Some Thoughts From The Heartland

Today Will Tell Us About Where America Is Headed

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything- high and low and, most especially high- lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.”- Charles Krauthammer*

As our nation wakes up this morning to cast votes in another midterm election, we are at a fork in the road and the choices that are made today are going to say a lot about who we are as a country and the direction we will be heading in the future.

Krauthammer is correct when he argues that everything lives or dies by politics. Everything. Politics matters.

The choices we make today are going to have a profound impact because they could set in motion the forces that could lead us away from our liberal democratic form of government and toward an authoritarian political system that tells us what we read, what we teach in schools, and ultimately, how we think and live.

On the other hand, perhaps voters will surprise us all and vote to maintain that status quo and reject the authoritarian candidates who are intent on changing our political culture in such a drastic and radical way. Perhaps we will step back from the chaos that seems to define contemporary American politics.

Over the past few months, the professional political class and the media, mostly based inside the DC beltway bubble, have been bombarding us with poll numbers, focus groups, interviews from rural diners, and all other sorts of political “analysis”, trying to make a case for this or that outcome, trying to handicap the outcome like it is a horserace or basketball game.

This mindset is missing the point.

This election is about something much deeper. It is about the future survival of the American experiment in liberal democracy, about the survival of our republican form of government, about the control of what Madison called in Federalist #10 the mischief of factions, about the survival of our constitution.

It is about the struggle between government doing the people’s business or government characterized by performance politics, owning the other side for the sake of owning the other side, and chaos.

It is about reinforcing and supporting our existing institution that have served us so well over our history or burning the whole thing down just to wreck it.

It is about the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

It’s about who we are as a people, political culture, and society.

It is about doing our politics well and keeping the barbarians out or descending into anarchy.

It is about the very survival of the United States.

Think about that when you vote today.

*Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics, 2015, pp.2-3.