In response to If the choice in 2024 were so obvious, the election wouldn’t be this close by Ross Douthat for The NY Times on Nov 2, 2024.

We don’t know what the future will hold.
But the role of voters is not fundamentally to guess a better future.
The fundamental role of voters in a representative government is to stand up for honesty, clarity, accuracy, competency, fair play, and human decency.
We cannot see the future, and we are not choosing policies or playing Risk or prophecy or magic steerers of the culture wars.
We can see that Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election and has continued to lie about it, and has managed to corrupt the GOP to the point that bowing to this autocrat-styled lie is necessary for political standing in the party. And we can listen to all the traditional republicans from his last administration detail how they had to keep him from going through with terrible and often anti-democratic decisions; and we can listen to them say, “Don’t do this again, America!”; and we can see quite clearly that they will be replaced by yes-men, and that there’s a good chance thousands and thousands of career bureaucrats will be as well.
Oh, well, did we break our own rule?
Have we gone into the future?
Well, maybe a little bit at the end of that long paragraph.
Or maybe we should amend the principle to a primary and a binding focus on demanding fealty to those universal values without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us (a self-deluding or a compassion-shirking Christian is just as meaningless to him or herself as a self-deluding or compassion-shirking secular humanist), paired with an understanding that the kind of procedural and immediate future like the likely makeup of Donald Trump’s second administration deserve more weight than hail-mary dreams of Trump 2.0 morphing into a benign, enlightened, somehow-not-spiritually-politically-and-morally-corrupted Catholic Kingdom.

The ends do not justify the means.
Human meaning requires that humans abide by those values without which their ideas, feelings, and actions mean nothing to them — the universal values of aware, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing.
As individuals we cannot be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we abandon the universal values.
And as groups, we cannot be meaningful amongst ourselves to the degree we do not adopt, safeguard, and abide by those values.
Trump has violated those values nonstop.
Harris has not.
She just hasn’t.
She doesn’t have a world-historic record of lying.
She hasn’t attempted to and does not now promise to use the power of the government to personally harm personal rivals, to silence critical media voices, or to use the military against civilian protestors.
She didn’t blow off the emoluments clause and use the power of the presidency to enrich herself.
She didn’t try to use federal funds to bribe a foreign leader into digging up dirt on a rival.
She didn’t spend a month trying to steal the 2020 election and four years demanding that everyone in her party bow to that dictatoresque lie in order to have standing in her party.
To reward Donald Trump with more power on the theory that he just might be what the future needs is to abandon the only meaningful method humans have for making decisions — abiding by the universal values and demanding that others also abide by them (otherwise, what meaning can we share that means anything to any of us?) — for the nihilistic leap of faith NOT into God or Love (which are concomitant with the universal values), but into a faith in one’s own whims, which is to say: into meaningless noise.
If we humans are to share meaning, we must agree to prioritize those values without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us.
If we ratify and reward fealty to a politics of truth=whatever-winners-say, us-or-them, and might-makes-right with more power, how are we to share meaning? What shared foundation could we have to base such a decision upon? Nothing that means anything to any of us.
What does it mean when everyone in a political party must find a way not to contradict their leader’s lies about a stolen election, nor to push back on his hateful scapegoating rhetoric or his promises to use the power of the government to destroy political opponents or his blithe assurance that he will continue to use the power of the presidency to personally enrich himself or his open war on limits upon his power and authority? How does democracy function if that behavior becomes entrenched? And how can rewarding that party with more power be compatible with safeguarding the universal values?
It’s as if the Republican Party and media outlets like Fox News have — of their own free will — decided to go live in an autocratic regime where you can’t tell the truth about the fearless leader.
And not in war time or any other emergency; merely because he won and he’s a bully and honestly I don’t understand why they have done this, but they have, and without a war — although the eternal pretend-crisis of the MAGA movement does I guess create a kind of illusionary emergency condition within which to rally far beyond peace-time limits on presidential power.
What Donald Trump has done and continues to do and hints and/or promises to do is not Okay.
And accepting that behavior and going along with it is also not okay.
Donald Trump has attacked the premises upon which our shared freedom and shared meaning rest: truth-over-lies, faithful-competent-stewardship-over-cronyism, win-win-over-us-or-them, equality-under-the-law-over-bow-to-the-king, arguing-ideas-over-threatening-violence, respecting-everyone-over-scapegoating, and we-are-in-this-together-over-us-versus-them.
What liberal excess during the pandemic compares?
And were there not also conservative excesses during the pandemic?
And as far as I can tell the question of how to best navigate children wishing for trans-operations is an open question.
I feel like you are so desperate to believe that liberals are just as messed up as conservatives that you kick up more dust than there is dirt for when outlining their errors, and you suppress the obvious dust storm that must arise anytime people begin to pair Trump’s record while restrained with “grown ups” with his ever-increasing autocratic rhetoric and the GOP’s decision to silence and sideline their own principled actors and elevate those who are ready and willing to refuse to certify any election that their party doesn’t win.

It is hard to feel and think differently from one’s friends and families.
Within our immediate groups, we tend to pass over quietly or with minimal dissent those notions that we feel go a little far.
And as the stress of feeling the other side wants to destroy us and gloat over our remains (at least that is how the Trump era feels to people who are so radically left-of-center that they think blatantly trying to steal elections should be a disqualifying infraction) causes us to retreat further into separate camps, we become more vulnerable to there other side’s characterizations — since they are not dealing with most of us, but with loud voices from within our ranks that outlets like Fox News — more committed to maintaining a vibe than to telling their viewers the truth about the world around them — cherry pick.
What can I say?
What this Donald Trump and this GOP are doing is decidedly and clearly in the direction of political evil, and a free people should say NO to it here and now, so that (1) by together publicly agreeing to stand for the universal values over short-term partisan victories they can publicly share meaning and thus meaningfully work together within the framework of a representative government, and (2) because if you keep handing the man who would be king and those who slobber over his ring power, well at some point, he or one of those slobberers is likely to stop giving you the choice of who you give power to — and even if they never do, rewarding that kind of behavior amounts to selecting for political evil, which brings us back to (1).

No one knows the future, but everyone knows that if we are to share meaning, we need to share values. And everyone also knows that we humans already share the universal values — and the spiritual Love that animates, ratifies, and explicates them. So to share meaning we need to admit what values we already share — and that they spring from the fundamental spiritual insight that we are all in this together bound in and through and for the Love without which nothing means anything to any of us — and together select for those values. It is not possible to vote for this Donald Trump with this GOP and to select for those values. It is possible to vote for this Kamala Harris and this Democratic Party and to select for those values.

What do Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and RFK Jr have in common? A willingness to jump into the nihilism of choosing conspiracy theories over careful, self-acknowledgingly-imperfect consideration — into the meaningless noise of less-aware, less-clear, and less-honest feeling and thinking.

Anyway, the whole premise of your article is specious.
Hitler’s NAZI party won a simple, though not absolute, majority in parliament.
The fact that the electorate is 50/50 proves nothing about the moral equivalency of the two sides.

– – – –

So what is evil? The embrace of meaninglessness: the embrace of values that have no real value to humans. It is turning one’s attention away from the tension of seeking to follow infinite Love with our finite resources, and to worshipping one’s own ideas and feelings rather than the Love that is infinitely wider and deeper than our big ideas and grand feelings. What is political evil? Organizing the government around meaningless values.

How can people cohere around sharing meaninglessness? They can share clannishness and fuzzy that into feeling like they share spiritual Love (the sense-of-things, not necessarily the concept), which they then posit as higher than and/or as redefining the universal values. But spiritual Love wants self-aware participation, so It would never ask us to abandon those rules for feeling and thinking that we must abide by in order to be meaningful to ourselves. Anyway, Love is aware … joyfully-sharing.

But Trump supporters think they share meaning. How to tell who is sharing meaning versus who is sharing meaninglessness?

And then two people can think they agree on A even if one interprets A as B and the other interprets A as C and B and C are not at all similar.

I think we should also note somewhere in here that many Trump voters are not thinking too much about either his threats to democracy or the horrors of liberal trans policies.

We need a little more work, always a little more; but the patterns are clear: liberal representative democracy is a spiritual good because it allows us to share meaning and to select for good behavior and to avoid top-down criminal states where standing up for the universal values gets you bankrupted, slandered, imprisoned, or murdered; and Donald Trump has betrayed us and our shared government, and he has corrupted the GOP to the degree that instead of repudiating him for that they silence and marginalize those within their ranks who would yet speak up for those principles they would’ve all ten years ago said of course are more important than partisan victories; and what meaningful role do the citizens of representative government have if not to together in both their public conversation and their stewardship of their shared government to stand up for the universal values — and thereby for the ineffable (i.e. harder to publicly organize around and more liable to the kind of corruptions for which mixing spiritual and political authority are infamous) Love that these values help humans flow more faithfully in and out of — as a final check on madness and corruption in their politics and their government?

These patterns are big and billowing enough to make it obvious that this Donald Trump and this GOP should be resisted by this free people here and now.

And you know what: Come on! Because you know that voting for Kamala Harris is not to vote to ratify any real or imagined excesses of democratic group think — she’s not at all running on a platform of forcing everyone to wear masks in public places or forcing parents to let their children get trans operations*; but Donald Trump is campaigning on the lie that the past election was stolen from him and that he and his followers have a right and a duty to break the bonds of civil decency to take back their country. You are painting apples orange.

*[This stuff boggles my mind. I do not see any kind of groundswell of support for blithely letting children decide for themselves if they’re going to undergo irreversible, gender-altering surgeries. You act like your reality is informed by hanging out in liberal America, but I guess that’s different than most everyone I know who are going to vote Democrat in the 2024 presidential election, and who are desperately hoping to stop Donald Trump’s consolidation of power — first he corrupts himself, then the GOP, and next … ? Like this is a debate you can easily win within the confines of the democratic process; you don’t have to install an autocrat and hope he’s going to side with you here. If you are dead-set on banning abortion in all cases, okay, then either you have a lot of persuading to do, or you will have to silence dissent; but please remember that once you put the dissent-silencers in charge, you also lose meaningful control over your own government. And did you ever hear about this thing China did, where they didn’t allow anyone to give birth to more than one child?]

(Actually what exactly is it we’re debating with the trans medical issue? Whatever it is, I think there is room for compromise and careful decision making for families; both this and the pandemic issues are made a little tricky by the newness of their respective sciences; that is in stark contrast to the very old very predictable very boring reality of the men who would be kings, and remains eternally true that the bird upon the wing will never give his power to the man who would be king)
The day the river sang

Flying

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AM Watson