It is with great dejection that I watched the Democratic National Convention, just as it will surely be with great dejection that I watch the Republican alternative next week. For the second straight election, I see not even a halfway decent choice for president. Indeed, I see awful prospects no matter who wins.
I write in the first person, but I believe there are millions of others who feel as I do. And I, we, just don’t know what to do to change things.
To be clear, this isn’t one of those situations where the choices merely fail to inspire me fully or where I’m sore that my first- or second-choice candidates didn’t win the nomination. This is far worse than that. I see both choices not just as uninspiring but as disastrous.
For all of his empathy and his decency in personal relationships, Joe Biden is nobody I want in the Oval Office, especially at his advanced age while pinned to a hard-left running mate.
A serial plagiarist and prevaricator, a deliberate enabler of his son’s sleazy foreign profiteering, a career-long member of the Democratic left wing, an advocate of notoriously wrongheaded foreign policy at almost every turn for 40 years, Biden should inspire not a lick of confidence from centrists, much less conservatives. He pretends to preach a return to a politics of decency and light, but he was one of the foremost participants in polluting the judicial nomination process by overseeing the character assassination of Robert Bork, lying to Clarence Thomas about how Thomas’s hearings would be conducted, and breaking 216 years of Senate tradition by killing the nomination of Miguel Estrada and subsequent nominees via minority filibusters.
When Biden’s own political interests are at stake, there is almost no limit to how conniving, underhanded, two-faced, or heartless he can be.
And now that he has moved rapidly and radically leftward since clinching his party’s nomination, while choosing in Kamala Harris a likely successor even more leftward still, Biden offers no real impediment to the Bernie Sanders-like lurch toward creeping socialism and no counterweight to the dangerous decline of public safety in our cities. And if Biden is elected with angry Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate as well, with the latter determined to eviscerate the filibuster, there is no limit to the systemic damage they can do.
President Trump is, in different ways, equally horrendous. He is destroying U.S. diplomacy, thoroughly corrupting its conduct while virtually abandoning the cause of human rights. He is deliberately divisive, deeply dishonest, terrifyingly unstable and inhumane, appallingly cavalier with national security, and pathetically inept at actually getting initiatives passed as legislation.
The damage Trump has done to civic discourse, to norms of behavior, and to basic political decency is incalculably huge. The aid and comfort he has given to rank bigotry is appalling. And his predilections toward authoritarianism are alarming.
I think Trump is a menace and getting steadily worse.
For all those reasons, I see no option that is even remotely reasonable. I cannot in good conscience vote for either candidate. In sum, I see no obvious way out of this mess other than an essential decency within the people — combined, one hopes, with the grace of God.
