DONE WITH THE DITHERING
For those of you still needing to “do more research” or other checking to figure out which candidate to vote for in the upcoming election: STOP

Stop pretending it’s about policy points or candidate background or facts or any other rational, logical process. Whatever you’re still looking for has nothing to do with anything like that. While it’s true we want to imagine our choices in our voting are guided by rational thought, the real truth is that we are driven more by our emotions than anything else. Logic and reason would take you straight to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – period. (Bear with me; I’ll elaborate on that in a bit.) The reality is that strong emotions, like anger and fear, are far more powerful motivators than facts and rationality. This year, there is only one ticket that is playing exclusively to fear and anger … and any struggles to make up one’s mind in this election are rooted in fear or anger or both.
There are things for people to fear. Our culture and society are changing and, for some, those changes can be frightening. The Founding Fathers never envisioned, let alone intentionally set their newly formed nation on a path toward an inclusive democratic republic. They envisioned only white males who owned property standing for election and doing the voting. Abigail Adams may have famously encouraged her husband to “remember the ladies” at the constitutional convention … and maybe John did try to some extent. But the original constitution gave the right to vote exclusively to white men who owned property … no women, no people of color, no men who could not afford to own some parcel of property were eligible to vote.
However, times do change. The Founding Fathers knew this. Although they did build a process for adjusting and changing the constitution into the document they produced, in all likelihood, none of them expected their work to last more than 40 years or so. They thought a new constitution would need to be written every few generations. In that regard, they did better than they imagined. The constitution they developed has been able to support and survive revisions and changes for some 237 years – including a civil war between the states.

In the course of those years, there has been a slow (maybe too slow much of the time) erosion of the exclusive hold on power in the hands of white male elites. Men without property became voters. Slavery was abolished. Black men were allowed to vote – and hold office. Eventually, women, too, were given access to the ballot. The push toward equality and rights for all people – without regard for skin color or gender or social class – was too strong to resist. However, that progress was anything but steady forward progress. It has been a long road of steps forward and pushes backwards.
We had significant progress forward in 2008 … reaffirmed (to some extent) in 2012. But then came a should-have-been-expected big push back. As always, those pushbacks are motivated in part by fear and in part by anger … and maybe oftentimes, both.
Look at what is being presented as prompts to fear: Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Critical Race Theory (applying primarily to sociological understandings that is only taught in graduate studies in a few specific disciplines), rights for persons who identify as transgender, and crime (specifically crimes committed by immigrants).
Diversity-Equity-Inclusion initiatives are not about getting unqualified people hired – contrary to the fears being stoked. DEI efforts are about ending the myth of a single “most qualified person” for any job opening and recognizing that there are any number of well-qualified people who could fill that position. The higher status or pay or significance attached to a position, the more “most qualified” is less subtly and more openly coded language for “white male preferred.” Truly, for any kind of opening in any kind of operation – including US President – there are a number of people who are well qualified and not all of them are male or white or both. DEI initiatives are about the qualifications prospective candidates bring to the opening and what a diversity of perspectives might add to the overall operation … and how societal privileges may have benefited some candidates more than others. Basic necessary qualifications being equal among candidates, DEI initiatives encourage consideration of how choosing a well-qualified candidate from a less privileged background can increase equity in the larger society.
Critical Race Theory explores long-standing inequities in society and asks: Why is this? Why does this persist? … the “why question” through multiple layers of causality to lay bare the impact racialized chattel slavery has had on our societal structure from the early days of the American story. The theory has direct application in certain areas of study, like sociology, law, education (to name a few). And while it might shape curriculum outside these specific academic disciplines, it is not taught at any level of elementary or secondary education. If we don’t know how things came to be the way they are, it becomes that much harder to identify and repair aspects that are not working, that no longer serve our societal interest. We may even be tempted to think that the way things are is just the way they ought to be.

This sense of “how things ought to be” is the place where fear arises about the rights of people who identify as transgender to be their authentic selves and move about freely in society the same as any other person. There have long been people who understand their gender identity differently from what was determined at birth. Identifying boy or girl … blue or pink … male or female did seem oh-so simple decades ago; however, these identifiers are not nearly as simple as we once thought. Advances in our understanding of genetics and brain function have increased awareness of the multiple factors that impact gender expression. We can either accept that we now know what we once did not … or we fight against the blurring of the once-sharp divisions between what is male and what is female. The real reason transgender persons are being presented as objects to be feared is because of the challenge they present to the long-standing patriarchal structures of society.
So why do people who might benefit from DEI initiatives … or corrective paths developed from Critical Race Theory … or more civility in society fear these developments, resist and actively work against them? The long-standing structures that set male as normative and superior to female, lighter skin tones as preferable to darker skin tones, personal wealth as determinator of societal value tell us exactly who we are and where we fit or don’t fit within the greater society. Without such structures, how would any of us know who we are? … where are we supposed to be? While some might welcome the freedom and opportunities to discover and figure things out, others find such freedom overwhelming and frightening.
Fear can be paralyzing. To get people moved to action, something more motivating and enervating is needed. Enter anger. Both fear and anger come into play in one of the issues the -R ticket candidates use to rouse and motivate the people they want to vote for them: immigration. All kinds of reasons to fear immigrants have been manufactured: claims of household pets being eaten in Springfield, OH … numerous apartment buildings and even the entire Denver suburb of Aurora, CO being taken over by immigrant criminal gangs … claiming immigrants are flooding our streets with fentanyl … crying out that they coming here only to prey on Americans and commit crimes without any consequences … that they are being brought into the country straight from prisons and psychiatric confinement facilities by the current administration for nefarious purposes … on and on and on – LIE after LIE after LIE after LIE.
There is NO truth to any of these claims. But neither facts nor any real sense of truth is the goal. The only goal is to feed fear and fuel angry outrage. If people are angry at things that aren’t real, they won’t have energy and focus to direct their anger at appropriate targets. Most of us are struggling with higher prices for nearly everything … stagnant wages that aren’t keeping up … more and more of household income going just for housing costs and food and other basic needs. Businesses are doing great. Stocks are up more than down. Profits are meeting and exceeding expectations. Inflation is down – but so what? Financial realities for most households are not changing.

The -R ticket wants to blame it all on immigrants or the current administration or (best of all) both. But there’s no reality to any of this. Inflation is a result of a combination of economic factors; there is no way to just make it go away or stop it from happening. The Federal Reserve adjusted interest rates to control the drivers for inflation and, to a large extent, it worked. The much-feared recession did not happen. However, lots of operations used inflation as an excuse, cover, or justification to raise prices. The retail price reductions for thousands of items by several major retailers demonstrated they raised prices too high; consumers just were not going to buy at those prices. Given how few companies control a major part of the food production and marketing, cooperation or collusion to raise prices and keep them high really ought to be considered as the real cause of the price increases at the grocery stores.
What the tax cutting (only for those at the top!), “business friendly”, trickle-down policies, which have been enacted over the past decades, have done is create a pipeline that funnels more and more wealth to the highest levels … from the lowest.
Part of why housing prices are so high is the basic economic principle of supply and demand; this is especially true in the smaller, lower priced “starter” home market. Potential new homebuyers are losing opportunities to investment companies that are buying up these homes, with cash offers, only to convert these homes into rental properties. Although this creates more profits for these companies, this trend also means fewer opportunities for someone to buy a home to live in and start developing their own personal wealth.
Almost all of the profits in companies go to those at the top and are not shared with the people actually doing the work to produce whatever it is the company sells. This is the common narrative (and I’ve seen where I work) goes like this: Top leadership proudly announces another successful year … sales goals were met or exceeded … profits are up. “Great work everybody! Here’s your 2% … 1.5% … 1% raise. Isn’t that great?” We ought to be asking ourselves, “If the company is doing so well, why is my salary staying much the same (even falling behind with where inflation has been recently)?” But if one dares to ask, the ready answer is: “Well, we have to balance competitive salaries to keep our talented people with overall costs. If we raise salaries too much, then we’ll have to charge more … and then we’ll lose sales because our customers will choose a cheaper option … and then we won’t have any money to pay you with – or work for you to do.”
Leadership could choose other options. They could give less of the profits in executive bonuses and dividends to major shareholders. They could fund raises for employees with the profits and not have to raise the selling price points. But these leaders choose not to do so – in large part because these executives all sit on the board of directors for each other’s companies, and they take care of one another. What good in the world are the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and their imitators doing with all the billions and billions of dollars they are accumulating exclusively for themselves.? How much more good could they be doing by investing much of it in other people – their employees? Their communities? (For a good critique of this trend, check out the work of Nick Hanauer … The Gardens of Democracy, and the Pitchfork Economics podcast.)
If you want to know the facts, they are readily available and easy to find. News articles about why prices are rising and why they are being cut are readily available. So are stories about trends in the housing markets, CEO salaries, and how much mega-billionaires could spend per day and still have plenty of money. The producers of The Apprentice have been open about just how much illusion was needed to create the alternate reality of the show. The facts and details of the rioting and invading of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 have been extensively researched and reported; we all know what happened that day (or could, if we choose to know). The -R candidates were fact-checked during the debates because the blatant lies were far beyond the normal political exaggerations and spinning; the statements were denying actual facts and reality — in a word, lies.
Four years was more than enough time to amply demonstrate that the occupant of the Oval Office from 2017 to 2021 had zero interest in the actual work of governance. If things were really that much better four or six years ago, why did he get voted out in 2020? He lost because people wanted someone better as President. Even now – when he should know better – he continues to tout ridiculous policy ideas that will not work … like massive tariffs (real business leaders loathe the potential impacts from this), closing the borders to immigrants (which will actually raise the prices food – not lower them), on and on and on … meanness upon cruelty to reinforce the superiority and power of wealthy white males over everyone else because anyone else is inherently inferior to them, unworthy of being accorded any modicum of humanity.
If you want to be angry – and maybe many of us should be – there are far better targets for that anger than immigrants who are largely without social standing or any effective power. The vast majority are trying to make better lives for themselves and their families. They come because they believe the story of the American Dream: if you work hard and do your best and take the right steps, you can have the life you want. If you want to be afraid, then fear what surrendering Ukraine to Russia could mean for the rest of Europe and NATO and for the US … fear what could happen if someone who has bankrupted business after business were granted some authority over interest rates and other economic regulatory powers and monetary policies … fear ethnic concentration camps in our country again and the deportation of US citizens.
The real question we are working out the answer to in this Presidential election is: Are we going to retreat back into the past of the white male patriarchy and empower that group over all others – or – are we moving into the future of a diverse and inclusive democratic republic? Thought-leader Brene Brown has characterized the current political milieu as “the last stand of white male patriarchal power-over” … and she’s probably right. Which way shall we go? Back to the nostalgically remembered past? … OR forward into the as-yet unknown future?
