Fine-Tuning My Weltanschauung
I re-submitted my application to register to vote in Austria; I might’ve mailed the first to the wrong office. This time I got an email from Vienna asking for proof of identity (Identitätsnachweis), to which I replied in Google Translate German, attaching images of my New Jersey driver’s license and U.S. passport. Then I called Disney because my six-month-free bundle hadn’t stopped the monthly Hulu charge. The woman on the phone sounded Puerto Rican, and I was tempted to ask what she thought of the “floating island of garbage” line as she helpfully terminated my Hulu Basic and processed a refund.
My 14-year-old son, who got his dual citizenship with me this summer, will be able to vote in Austrian elections at age 16. He did some research and found a party that appeals to us both: NEOS, a centrist party little more than a decade old that’s said it stands for “democracy, rule of law, and environmentally sustainable free market economics; freedom, personal responsibility, sincerity, equal opportunities, fairness, fraternity and sustainability, and diversity.” It’s also “pro-European,” or favorable toward the EU. NEOS is small, getting 9.1 percent of the vote, and 18 legislative seats, in the September election. Recently, the conservative-leaning People’ Party has been trying to form a coalition, as the far-right Freedom Party, though first in votes, wasn’t able to do so. NEOS could end up in a center-right coalition.
In New Jersey, I cast my vote weeks ago, putting my mail-in ballot in a dropbox at Town Hall that’s chained to a wall and has a camera trained on it in case anyone tries to set it on fire. My town, Wyckoff, had Republicans win at all levels in the 2020 elections (Trump 5,814 to Biden 5,458), so I was surprised by a recent Washington Post map, of political donations town-by-town nationwide, which showed that in Wyckoff this year Biden/Harris have had 475 donors, raising $100,000, compared to 237 and $40,000 for Trump. Lawn signs in town suggest a Trump edge, so I wonder if the anonymity of donating (and voting) gets different results than public acts such as putting up a sign.
It's important to be willing to recalibrate your Weltanschauung. New information is always coming in, sometimes posing a challenge to established views. I’ve made my preference in this election clear, but I’ve tried to be open to possibilities that I may’ve overstated negative implications of a Trump victory, or underestimated them for a Harris one.
For instance, I’ve looked at claims Harris enthused about riots in 2020. A much-quoted passage about how “they’re not gonna stop” and “they should not,” was from the Daily Show on June 18, 2020, which, in the video, is clear she’s referring to protests, not riots. In a speech on August 27, 2020, Harris amplified on that difference: “We must always defend peaceful protest and peaceful protestors. We should not confuse them with those looting and committing acts of violence, including the shooter who was arrested for murder. And make no mistake, we will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the path to justice.” A tweet by Harris asking people to donate to a group called Minnesota Freedom Fund to post bail for protestors was distorted by Trump into a false claim that Harris had something to do with bail posted years later for a man accused of indecent exposure who went on to commit a murder.
Trump, by contrast, abused the pardon power as president, extending pardons to people in his own orbit (who might’ve testified against him) and various con artists, war criminals, brutal police and more. He’s spoken of pardoning January 6 rioters, which would be an invitation to future mob action aimed at influencing elections and government operations; and pardoning himself, one of several ways he may avoid facing charges on which he’s been indicted. That Trump would use the federal government to further his own personal interests, taking vindictive action against political enemies, undermining checks and balances, and corrupting electoral processes, is a hard-to-avoid conclusion based on his first-term record and current campaign rhetoric. Thoughts that he’s a proponent of free speech are incompatible with his talk of penalizing media organizations. In foreign policy, his transactional outlook will undermine alliances, weakening U.S. security. People who think Trump would be more favorable to Israel or the American Jewish community overlook the implications of the anti-Semitism in his movement (and not symmetrical to leftist anti-Semitism, which is broadly antithetical to the Democratic ticket).
Even if Trump loses this election, the harm he’s done to our nation is far from played-out, including that he’ll certainly contest such an outcome, through legal or extra-legal means, further entrenching the precedent that candidates should “fight like hell” after they lose, and rally their followers to do the same. His promotion of violence for political objectives is a poison that has weakened our democratic system.
Keeping in mind that I might be wrong in scenarios I’ve sketched out above, I’ll leave open some further possibilities for consideration:
President Trump 2.0 may be too mentally or physically impaired to commit the harms I’ve described, in which case control of the executive branch may fall to J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel or others, with consequences that, while presumably negative, can be expected to have a distinct “post-Trump” quality.
President Harris may manifest as a determined left-winger and/or cackling lightweight, which if mutually present would cancel each other out to a degree, but anyway result in sub-optimal policies that, in turn, would likely spur some form of conservative and Republican revival, which too may be “post-Trump.”
—Follow Kenneth Silber on X: @kennethsilber