Just a little friendly pleading from a neighbour with a soft spot for democracy.

AFP

Lisa Van Dusen

October 31, 2020.

Two years ago, a source whose intelligence on matters pertaining to the turbid tessellations of aspiring new world order power games is usually pretty solid confidently told me that “Donald Trump will be the last democratically elected president of the United States.”

As it happens, in the closing months ahead of Tuesday’s American election, Trump himself has given every indication that he also believes his destiny is to drop the curtain on democracy’s most aspirational, mythologized and flawed epic. By refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, by normalizing authoritarian attacks on the machinery of voting, by tricking-out the trappings of what would once have been referred to with racist condescension as a tin-pot, Third World dictatorship on the South Lawn of the White House, Trump has behaved like a man not only careening toward a Full Mussolini but already unburdened by the demands of organic electability.

That aura comes with a pre-totalitarian sense of entitlement common to all anti-democracy leaders of democracies these days, from Boris Johnson to Jair Bolsonaro — that swaggering certainty that a particular brand of corruption can engineer any narrative, hack any poll and secure any outcome so that voters are merely extras in your Andrew Lloyd-Webber-meets-Terry Gilliam, means-to-an end political soap opera.

This has not been a mystery in America’s Trumpian melodrama. Trump is backed and protected by interests quite serious in their distaste for voter interference in the current consolidation of power and while he may just be playing a rampaging despot on TV, his rampage has a strategic purpose.

Which makes the fact that, on the eve of election day, he is still polling within the margin of error in some “battleground” states a puzzle. Why would so many people — people represented in percentages incomprehensibly greater than the base Trump has relentlessly whittled down from sane America to a core of racists and evidently suicidal COVID rally attendees — declare an intention to vote for a candidate who has all-but promised it will be the last vote they ever cast? Do people really vote in favour of being robbed of the right to vote?

As with so many previously unthinkable political narratives these days from Brexit to Trump’s screwball impeachment trial, this isn’t just about democracy vs. corruption, it’s about democracy vs. industrialized, tactical bullsh*t (pardon my language but please believe me, as an editor who values appropriate word usage, my hunt for a less vulgar, equally accurate substitute has failed miserably). Unfortunately, much of that bullsh*t is deployed at the reputational expense of entirely rational voters being portrayed as self-sabotaging at best and masochistic at worst.

If US presidential elections — like all head-of-government elections in democracies — are about weighing one candidate’s strengths and weaknesses against another’s and making a choice based on one’s own interests as well as the country’s, what is it about Joe Biden that some voters think poses a threat to their interests so ominous that they’d rather forfeit their right to ever vote again if it means not voting for him?

Why would so many people — people represented in percentages incomprehensibly greater than the base Trump has relentlessly whittled down from sane America to a core of racists and evidently suicidal COVID rally attendees — declare an intention to vote for a candidate who has all-but promised it will be the last vote they ever cast? Do people really vote in favour of being robbed of the right to vote?

Here in Canada, we’d really like to know. Since the end of democracy in America — given the way cross-border trends work — will threaten democracy in Canada, which is already vulnerable, it would be good to know what you’re seeing about Joe Biden that’s worse than a clownish, authoritarian dictatorship led by Donald Trump.

Is it the finger-gunning? Would you really embrace an authoritarian future to avoid four years of finger-gunning? For what it’s worth, Canadians like finger-gunning; we’re a country where the overwhelming majority of citizens have never seen a gun, much less owned one, so finger-gunning is all we have. It makes Biden seem like one of us but, you know, not in a socialist way. It’s one of the things that put his support among Canadians at 72 percent vs. Trump at 14 percent in a recent Léger poll. Canadians can’t vote, but we have a huge stake — not just on trade and security but on peace of mind, as the upstairs neighbour who defends the rules-based international order, generally stands up to authoritarians and has worn its mute button down to a blank little nub.

It may help to clarify things by understanding that 21^st-century authoritarianism isn’t as romantic as Margaret Atwood has portrayed it and surveillance-state life is nowhere near as much fun as George Orwell envisioned. Surveillance-state totalitarianism these days exploits cheap, wireless, warrant-less bugging, hacking, tracking and other bespoke harassment methods to keep critics in line, squelch dissent, curate political and personal vendettas and micro-engineer narratives on an unprecedented scale, which is why it’s so popular in all the wrong circles, including with corrupt intelligence agencies and politicians who love power but have their own reasons to hate democracy. It destroys lives, divides families and puts previously unthinkable levels of coercion, abuse and corruption in the hands of people who, not surprisingly, aren’t fans of freedom, any sort of equality, inclusion or human rights. Does that really seem less odious than the occasional bout of digital salutation hijinks?

And, for the record, in case Bill Barr wants to make an example of me as a diversion from Russian electoral cyberlubrication: this isn’t a coy attempt at foreign meddling. It’s blatant, shameless begging.

Mask up and vote, America. Please?

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and a columnist for The Hill Times. She was Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP in New York and UPI in Washington.