US HAS NEVER FACED AN ELECTION LIKE THIS ONE
Stakes are higher than ever before as the very future of the American democracy is on the ballot
The US president was infected by a virus his administration failed to tame, had to spent three days in the hospital earlier this month for Covid- 19.
More than 220,000 Americans have died in the pandemic, and the virus is still spreading. Millions more are out of work, with shops and businesses shuttered in every state.
Wildfires have burnt more than 4 million acres in California, fuelled by the fast- warming climate. Protests and spasms of violence have erupted in dozens of cities over police abuses and systemic racism.
But the stakes on November 3 are higher. In some ways, the future of American democracy is on the ballot.
Trailing in the polls, President Donald Trump has refused to say he will commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. No previous US president has threatened not to honour the integrity of a national election.
Republicans accuse Democrats, without evidence, of trying to steal or manufacture votes with mail- in ballots. Democrats accuse Republicans of seeking to suppress votes, with evidence in some states that lies in plain view.
When Trump won the White House four years ago, he was something of an accidental president. He lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, but won the electoral vote thanks to some 80,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
A one- term Trump presidency, if it ends in January, may be remembered as little more than a fluke of history, a brief detour into conservative populism after eight years of President Barack Obama.
Deconstruction of administration
But if the president wins a second term with a renewed or stronger mandate, the picture will be very different. Eight years would be an era— an opportunity for Trump to place his stamp even more deeply on the nation’s institutions and policies.
He will pass more legislation, appoint more federal judges, cement his control of the Republican Party and deepen his purges of the federal bureaucracy, a process an aide once called “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
A second term could make the Trump Revolution permanent, or, at least, more durable.
A win by Joe Biden, on the other hand, would represent a decision by most voters that four years of Trumpism was enough.
Depending on Biden’s margin of victory and whether his party takes control of the Senate as well as the House, it could provide amandate for a wave of ambitious Democratic legislation — although not the “socialist agenda” that Trump has ludicrously accused the challenger of secretly harbouring.
In almost every presidential campaign, the candidates solemnly tell voters that this will be the most important election of their lives. This time, the claim may well be true.
“At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies or two agendas,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention in August.
He’s right; rarely in the postwar period have two candidates been so far apart on major issues from taxes and health care to immigration, climate change and foreign policy.
For all that, the two candidates are alike in someways. Both in their 70s, both hark back to the past. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” suggests a return to the white- and male- dominated America of the 1950s. Biden campaigns to restore and expand the progressive policies of the Obama era.
Trump has spentmuch of the last four years undoing regulations put in place by the Obama administration. If he succeeds in putting federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, which seems likely, he may get another wish: overturning or gutting the Affordable Care Act.
Similarly, a Biden administration would set about undoing much of what Trump has done — some of it, the candidate brags, on his firstday inoffice, with executive orders on the environment, immigration and labour regulation.
More broadly, Biden would seek to revive a traditional Democratic agenda of federal activism in domestic affairs.
One of his first acts, Biden says, would be to federalise the nation’s response to the coronavirus — now fragmented among the states — by establishing a pandemic testing board and a medical supply task force in the White House.
So the fundamental choice voters face is between a thoroughly Trumpist future and a return to the pre- Trump world — those parts that Biden and his allies can restore.
Tomany on both sides, the stakes appear existential — a threat to the future of the republic as they see it. Even allowing for the excesses of campaign rhetoric, the contrast is stark.
“This election will decide whether we save the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny,” Trump declared in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
To Democrats, the threat is Trump’s not very-veiled penchant for authoritarian rule.
“The president is literally an existential threat to America,” Biden told voters in Iowa.
“What’s at stake is whether or not our democracy endures,” Obama said last month.
The stakes this year are clear enough, at least, to ensure that this election will rank among the most important of our lifetimes — which makes it imperative for every voter to consider the choice carefully, and cast a ballot by any means available.