TOO EXPLOSIVE FOR THE CAMPAIGN?

OCTOBER 11, 2024 – Okay, okay. By this stage of the game anyone who’s not residing (“surviving”?) in a cave off the grid is liberally familiar with the “style” of the Republican candidate for president and that he’s all about two things: 1. Himself; and 2. Pyrite. As far as I can discern, his prospective voters fall into one of three groups: A. Those who are attracted by his bull-in-the-china-shop antics (“What we need is someone who can shake up the status quo,” they say.); B. People who think he’s God’s messenger, as counterintuitive as that might seem, except that, according to this group, God works in mysterious (and devilish?) ways; and C. Voters who are convinced that if elected Harris would “destroy” the country, with some members of this group going the third party route, which in nearly every jurisdiction is the equivalent of voting for Pyrite Man. If I don’t generally fraternize with members of Groups A and B, I do know and count among my friends and acquaintances, members of Group C. I fully understand that my persuasive powers, such as they are, will never change their minds.

What I can’t fathom, however, is that the race is still neck and neck; a race between a supreme bull(sh_ _ _ _ _) in a china shop and a person who presents as a consensus builder, a centrist by record, disposition and assurances; a fairly normal human being in thought and behavior, who can tell a story and laugh at a joke.

This running tie around the final curve into the straight away and on to the finish line is starting to trouble me more than it did a month, a week or even a few days ago. At each stage of the race, my mind was focused on the issues and non-issues posing as issues but in either case, matters raised by the two campaigns. I would say “matters of concern to the voters,” as reflected in polls, but regardless of what concerns voters say they have, campaigns are effective in telling voters what they should worry about. Immigration is the largest example of this, thanks to Trump’s daily unsubstantiated and outlandish “red meat” claims. With all the hot air, is it any wonder that people polled identify “immigration” as a priority issue? The economy—no matter how well it might be doing statistically and in practical terms—is another example of campaigns leading voter sentiments: one campaign insisting that across the board, people are suffering from a really bad economy and the other campaign trying to convince prospective voters that the economy is doing fine and will do even better once this-that-and-the-other enhancements are added.

Another central issue of the Democratic campaign, and for good reason, is abortion rights. The Republicans, of course, would rather not talk about it.

And then there’s the specter of 2020 election denialism and January 6 and whether that attempted power grab is now a portent of what we can expect on November 6.

For much of the campaign, these four “issues”—immigration, “the economy,” abortion rights and “preservation of democracy” have formed the central poles of the campaign merry-go-round.

But then out of left—make that “leftist”?—field, The [good old] New York Times ran a sweeping series about nuclear re-armament. The series’ most recent installment, published yesterday, reports on the revamping of our nuclear arsenal. It’s a decades-long project quietly approved by Democrats and Republicans in Congress, costing us in excess of $1.7 trillion, which, the last I checked, is serious money: a full 6.0% of this year’s projected GDP. More serious than the direct cost, of course, are the policy and security implications for a world that is growing ever more unstable as the post-WW II order continues to erode.

I’m hardly a student of this issue, though in college—during the height (“depth”?) of the Cold War—I took a seminar on the Cold War and read extensively about MAD (“Mutual Assured Destruction”), our triad nuclear strategy (nuclear warheads launched from air, land and sea) and the arguments pro and con for preserving the strategic nuclear status quo. As paradoxical as it is to any rational human being, the MAD approach to peace among nuclear adversaries does turn on a certain logic, and for the entire duration of the Cold War, that logic allowed us to avoid thermonuclear extinction.

Today I can hardly embrace the overhaul of our nuclear weapons systems and the return to a nuclear arms race, especially for a price that given the cost over-runs to date, could well exceed $2 trillion—over $60,000 for every man, woman and child in America—not counting the annual maintenance and operational costs once the revamp has been completed. But my personal—not yet fully informed—opinion about a renewed arms race isn’t the point here. The aim is to underscore that while we and the campaigns chase our issues of choice round and round on the merry-go-round—without the the horses of either color opening up a lead over the other color—big issues casting long shadows over all other concerns, lurk on the periphery of our current phase of political angst.

Neither campaign has given us a wake-up slap on the cheek. Some matters—such as nuclear rearmament and national security in a destabilized world—require robust and informed public debate, especially in the run-up to a presidential election coupled with re-election of the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Yet, with just three and a half weeks remaining before an election as critical as any in our history, given that one of the least qualified and most dangerous candidates in our history is in a statistical dead heat with his opponent, we are unlikely to hear a word about the issues that should keep us awake at night.

Someone needs to ring the bell.

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson