Today's the Day

Discuss the election in the comments

Dear Readers,

The U.S. presidential election is today, which will determine whether the United States remains a liberal democracy. I don't have much left to say about it, other than to vote, which you probably already have. I have never lived in a swing state, so my vote has never been consequential in the Electoral College; at the same time, I can't imagine not voting in a presidential election. I could ground voting as a Kantian categorical imperative: individuals should act based on whether their actions can be universalized. (E.g. "Don't steal.") But this passage from Timothy Snyder's 2017 book On Tyranny has stuck out to me as a reason to vote: 

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don't know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that.  Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czech and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance*. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in the country's history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person making the vote. 

I want to open up the comments section of this post as kind of a group therapy (if you're anything like me, you haven't been getting much done in the past day) and a place to share thoughts and news stories. I'll try to respond in a timely fashion now through Wednesday; I'll have more to say later.

In the meantime, I want to share a few interviews from earlier this year about politics and elections.

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