Pre-election reflections from Michele Moody-Adams, Shannon Spaulding, Neil Van Leeuwen, and Catherine Wearing; Introduction by Amy Kind
A photo of one of the cartoon panels from Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!
INTRODUCTION: PUTTING IMAGINATION TO WORK
Amy Kind
Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy
Claremont McKenna College
Recently I’ve been thinking about cartoonist Lynda Barry’s fantastic collection One! Hundred! Demons! In particular, I’ve been thinking about the series of strips that recount her experience with the 2000 election and its aftermath. As the first panel states, “Like everyone else, I thought my election fixation would end at about midnight on voting day.” And then in the subsequent panel: “Little did I know that I was about to begin a new way of living.” Panel after panel goes by, with Barry depicting herself unraveling, trying and failing to work, in pajamas, yelling at the tv, unable to turn it off (“I swear. Ten more minutes. Then I’ll turn it off. Wait. Twenty minutes. That’s it. Ok. Half an hour.”) Day 17. Day 20. Day 25. Day 31.
I too spent much of November 2000 in front of the television. I was on sabbatical. I desperately needed to get writing done. And yet I couldn’t pull myself away from the slowly unfolding election recount underway in Florida, stopped and then restarted and then stopped, as a legal battle made its way to the Supreme Court. Like many people in America, I learned the word “chad” and the intricacies of ballot counting systems. I spent my days in a continuing push and pull between hope and despair. And, then, finally, on December 12 it was over when the Supreme Court issued its infamous decision in Bush v. Gore.
It’s not at all surprising why all of this has been on my mind.
I’m writing this in the evening on October 29, less than a week away from the 2020 election. I normally love voting on election day itself. In 2016, I put on my pants suit and walked across the street to the local elementary school where I cast my ballot, went out for lunch where I smiled at a group of women in suffragette white, and then came home and spent the evening watching the disaster unfold as I flicked back and forth between local news, MSNBC, and CNN (surely the news would be different on one of the other channels). But this year I didn’t want to wait. The pressure to get my vote in early, to safeguard it, was intense. I voted, masked and in person at my local polling place, last weekend. Day after day I see pictures in my Facebook and Instagram feeds of my friends who have voted – some who have waited in lines for hours to vote in person, some who trusted the postal system, some who dropped their votes in official ballot boxes.
How will this all turn out? By the time this is posted on The Junkyard on November 4, 2020, the morning after election day, maybe we’ll have some answers. Or maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll again be like Lynda Barry, frantic and torn between hope and despair for weeks and weeks.
As denizens of The Junkyard know, we normally post new content on Wednesdays. A few weeks ago, when I realized that this meant that we would be due to post new content on the morning after election day (in my head, I hear that in caps: The Morning After), I knew it couldn’t be business as usual. And so here’s what we decided to do. I wrote to some friends of the blog, scholars of imagination all, and asked them to engage in some imaginings themselves. The simple instruction: Imagine the world we’ll wake up to on November 4. Other than asking them to focus on the world we will wake up to, and not on the world we hope we will wake up to, I gave them free rein. And I gave them a deadline of today, October 29.
Here’s what they came up with.
* * *
Michele Moody-Adams
Joseph L. Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory
Department of Philosophy
Columbia University
I imagine, first, that on the morning of Wednesday November 4th 2020, no matter who wins the presidential election and no matter what happens with control of the House and Senate, Americans will wake up to profound uncertainty about two important questions. First, can the American experiment in democracy survive the deep doctrinal, ethnic and racial divisions in American society? Second, how do we repair the damage done to people, businesses, social and economic institutions, by the pandemic? No matter which party triumphs at the federal level, it will be clear on November 4th that there are no easy answers to these two critical questions, but that unless we can find satisfactory answers in good time, will be relinquishing almost everything that we care about as a nation.
Second, I imagine that we will also wake up to uncertainty about who has won the presidential election. As a result, we will be forced to ask hard questions about the role of the Supreme Court in shaping the outcome of any presidential election. But we may need to ask even harder questions about the value of preserving the Electoral College. Those of us who remember the presidential election of 2000, when we went to sleep thinking that one candidate (Gore) had won only to wake up to the fact of uncertainty about who had won, will remember how hard the choices surrounding the role of the Supreme Court in addressing contested outcomes can be. I imagine that thoughtful people at every point along the political spectrum will be prompted to ask whether it is time to undertake a thorough review of our constitutionally-grounded assumptions about how elections should work and of how our political processes (as shaped by those elections) should function. Should there be widespread suspicion that the outcome of the popular vote is wrongly divergent from the projected outcome of the decision of the Electoral College, we will certainly need to brace ourselves for some civil unrest.
Finally, I imagine that whether or not we have clarity about the outcome of our most important national elections, people of good will are going to start asking how we can revive our cities and towns to recover from the pandemic, perhaps in ways that bypass the federal government (and its current imperfect functioning -- as almost an enemy of broad-based progress across all regions). The emergence of a strong “localist” movement, in which people learn to work across racial, ethnic and doctrinal differences, may be just the thing to save America from the destructive forces of fear, resentment and despair that have shaped far too much of our public life for the last four years.
* * *
Shannon Spaulding
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Oklahoma State University
Back in my competitive running days, I’d have this recurring nightmare about getting to a very important race. In the dream, I’d oversleep or misremember the time of the race. Then I wouldn’t be able to find my shoes or clothes. Then I’d get lost on the way to the race. I’d trip and slip on every possible obstacle on the way to the starting line, which somehow was always at the top of an impossibly steep, muddy hill. Finally, I’d stumble to the starting line just as the race started. I’d be exhausted just from stress of trying to get there. But, then the challenges suddenly shifted, because now I was trying to perform well in a very important race.
This nightmare is a good metaphor for how I’ve felt about the lead-up to election day and how I anticipate feeling after the election. The last four years, but especially 2020, has felt a lot like facing the absurd, improbably long succession of hurdles I dreamt of. From impeachment to racial unrest to the pandemic to environmental catastrophes, 2020 has been an exhausting, nightmarish slog toward election day. Leading up to election day, I’m anxious about voter suppression, court rulings about absentee ballots, the deliberate slow-down of the US Postal Service, and various other hurdles to voting.
But like the nightmare, on November 4th the challenges suddenly shift to an even more serious concern. All the anxious worrying about disenfranchisement will be replaced by worries about social unrest and the unraveling of principles of democracy. I hope that doesn’t come to fruition, of course. But I imagine waking up on the morning of November 4th – if I manage to sleep at all – on high alert for signals of that unraveling. I imagine worrying that militant groups unhappy with the trend of election results and hostile foreign nations happy to take advantage of the uncertainty will try to undermine the integrity of the election.
I expect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will rightfully win the election. I do not have a good sense of whether we will know that on November 4th, though I suspect the trend of results will be clear by then. I’ll feel genuine relief about having gotten past so many hurdles to achieve that result, but I expect the relief to be paired with uncertainty and dread about whether Donald Trump, his supporters, and opportunistic agitators will respect those results.
This pre-reflection turned out to be very dark and cynical. I hope the cynicism is misplaced. I hope the election brings a wave of relief – for me, for most Americans, and for our allies around the world – and renewed faith in the promise of America. After all, the strength and character of a nation are not determined by whether it faces serious challenges. All nations do. The strength and character of a nation are determined by how we respond to those challenges. And this certainly is an opportunity to demonstrate the strength and character of America.
* * *
Neil Van Leeuwen
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience
Georgia State University
Nov. 4, 2020
Dear Reader,
What follows below is the entire text of a strange note I found on my walk early this morning. It was written in an eerily elegant hand that I can’t convey here. The ink was somehow luminous. The parts I underline in my transcription were not actually underlined, however. But they jumped off the page so much that I felt the need to underline them here.
I have no idea what to make of it. Maybe it was some joke? But it struck me as so interesting that I had to share it, as I was instructed to do. I leave it to you to decide what it means.
Sincerely yours,
Neil Van Leeuwen
---TEXT OF THE NOTE FOLLOWS---
I write this note in most unusual circumstances, because I feel a burning need to share something with the world. It is something I experienced last night or in the early morning hours of today. Whoever finds this note, please show it to everyone you can. You see, I am the soul of a Trump supporter. And it is finally time to explain myself.
I had to go to extraordinary lengths to get this note written, since the body I inhabit is now asleep. He is sleeping off the alcohol from last night that I drove him to drink out of frustration with our station in life.
We—that is, me and the body I inhabit—are one of your “deplorables.” Even though we have a high school diploma, you still call us “uneducated.” We are white.
Our community is about 90 miles outside a major US city. It doesn’t have good jobs for people with high school diplomas like it once did. People like me used to be able to buy a house and have a roast after church on Sunday. But the factory is closed. Now we have trailer parks, oxycontin, and teen pregnancy.
We had dignity. We have misery. Though out of shame we don’t usually admit this, it is key.
What, you may wonder, is so important for me to share?
It’s that I had a dream last night! A great dream.
Donald Trump came to me in this dream.
He said to me, “You’re okay. No really. You’re okay.”
He said, “You’re still good. You don’t need a college degree to be good.”
It felt good to hear that.
He said, “You deserve more than what you’re stuck with. You deserve the decent life your parents had.”
He said many more things too.
He said, “You don’t have to be ashamed of where you come from. Your church is okay. Your skin color is okay too. It’s not bad. And the things about the changing world that you’re uncomfortable with…I get it. It’s okay to be uncomfortable with those things. The old rules that your parents played by—those are good rules. I’m proud of you for caring about them.”
And then, as the dream continued, he looked me straight in the eyes and saw all my self-doubt and anxiety—he saw my misery—and he said, “It’s not your fault.” He saw I didn’t believe him, so he said it again, “It’s not your fault. Your loss of dignity is not your fault.” And again, “No really, it’s not your fault.”
And when he said it that last time, I began to cry, and a weight of shame lifted from my shoulders.
And then he vanished. The dream was over.
I know that you, whoever is reading this, probably can’t hear it when Trump says those things—those things that made me feel better about myself. But I hear them every time he speaks, not just in the dream.
So you ask me why I am loyal to Donald Trump? The answer is that he’s the only one who has been able to make me feel okay about who I am. Of all the faces I see on the TV, he’s the only one who even tries to do that…who tries to speak to me directly. So I will always be the soul of a Trump supporter.
It will be a dark day for me and for the body I inhabit, if we wake up this morning to find out that that blessed man will no longer lead us.
Donald Trump is the only politician to ever tell me that I—yes me, as “uneducated” and “deplorable” as you think I am, truly matter.
If he wins, it will be glorious.
---END OF NOTE---
* * *
Catherine Wearing
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Wellesley College
Imagining the world we will wake up to on November 4th.
This has been surprisingly difficult to write. So while I was trying to work out what to say, I was led to think about why it was proving so challenging. I think there are two reasons.
One challenge has simply been keeping my mind on the task. It has been difficult to stay focused on what I imagine, rather than immediately veering off towards what I hope for or what I fear. Presumably this is because there is so much at stake. I’m trying to imagine what the world will actually be like and the seemingly live possibilities are wildly diverse. Some of those possibilities fill me with despair and others give me a small measure of hope, so perhaps it’s no wonder that those emotions are occluding my capacity to imagine.
The other thing that makes this assignment hard is the starkly opposing nature of the options in front of us. Will we wake up to a leader who endorses decency, empathy, and truth in the public sphere? Will we wake up to bands of roving militias and calls for a general strike? How can I imagine what we will wake up to when options as different as these are in play? Do I imagine a disjunction? I’m not sure that’s possible.
So, is there anything I can say about how I imagine the world will be? I imagine that some things will be as they always are. Two hungry cats will let me know when it is time to get out of bed. I will make a cup of tea to help me face the day, whatever the day turns out to hold. I’ll reach out to friends and family to see how they are doing. And I think – or at least I hope – that I will feel relieved that the months of buildup to the election are finally over, so that we can get on with dealing with whichever reality we are in fact facing.