During office hours for a fall 2023 sociology class, I asked my professor this question: “Is it fair when people say that if Donald Trump got reelected he’d bring an end to democracy?”
“People,” in the question, was implied to include talking heads, commentators, news reporters, columnists and comedians. And me. I was worried too. Maybe because of the “people,” maybe because they were right. For the Americans paying attention, we’re seeing what’s either a worrying or promising tilt toward autocracy — the sentiment depending on the American.
The professor said something about it being a fair assumption, but too many legal barriers existed for an autocratic takeover. Protections were written into the Constitution to prevent Trump as overlord.
Now, in October 2024, the election is less than 30 days away and the candidates are polling closer than middle school besties. So, 28 days before ballot booths are inhabited, I visited the same sociology professor and asked the same question.
To paraphrase his current answer: Forget I ever even said that. It doesn’t stand anymore.
To be an American in this election cycle is to potentially be any person in any historical society whose government fell to authoritarian or fascist ills. It may feel, to you, like a losing game voting for either side. But one ends with possibility. The other: another stain on American history.
Things in this country figure to be appreciably worse under Trump — which, for huge swaths of its population, is saying something.
What’s been unencouraging is the resignation of the worried and the optimism of the assured. It’s like our bent towards apathy, individualism, misogyny, societal resentments and fragmentation are preventing what should be a mandate for Harris. The media landscape and the general privatization of entertainment have desensitized the masses to even the most sensational politics. And don’t even get me started on democracy-mocker, billionaire, radicalizer Rubert Murdoch. Fox News is its own monster.
More than our desensitized callousness, we’re paranoid and egocentric, too. When you’re self-siloed into algorithms and sources that singularly reflect your doctrines, you’ll likely place outsized value on your own opinion. That’s, in part, how we get progressives so far left they’ll give their lack of a vote to Trump. Leftists who refuse to vote for the “lesser of two evils.” Who protest Kamala’s ‘conservatism’ by inadvertently ushering in a neo-fascist version of it.
Yes, Harris — the gun-owning “border czar” — is considered by many to be precariously moderate. Yes, her wavering opinions and at times vague platform are questionable. So, too, is her partner, President Joe Biden, who mishandled the now-widened war in Palestine.
But as you’re sure to know, Harris is a Black woman. Biden, an old white man, could — if he desired to — afford to run on a more explicitly progressive platform. Harris can’t. Think about it. A Black woman running for office, over the span of less than 100 days, on a hyper-leftist agenda. It wouldn’t work. It didn’t the first time she ran. And in the four years since her initial running — since the social unrest following George Floyd’s murder — America’s absorbed more and more a collective “anti-wokeness.”
Let me speak directly to my American generational cohort, Z: I get it. The individualism and apathy make sense. I speculated briefly on why that is — private entertainment, news stations that radicalize, societal fragmentation. But regardless of the reasons — because there are many, many more — we were born into all of it. We were guinea pigs for social media. Proclaimed future-fixers of climate change. Pupils in an education system largely devoid of teaching us that history repeats itself. Human petri dishes for mental illness and pessimism. These are conditions that enable being out of touch and not caring who wins the presidency.
We would be the generation to s— on boomers for setting us back, only to let our pseudo-liberalism postpone progressive social and political change. Because that’s what it is. A waste of time. By not voting — in protest or in ignorance — we’re wasting time. If we elect Kamala Harris, we’re at least setting ourselves up to democratically elect someone better after her. We’re setting ourselves up — after this election — to be able to vote again. At all.
Top photo: Vice President Kamala Harris has gone hard after the young vote in her presidential campaign, doing interviews on podcasts frequented by Gen Z listeners. (Photo by Nareshkumar Shaganti/ Alamy Stock Photo)
Olivia Fitts is the News Editor and Opinions Editor for The Express. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter @OLIVIAFITTS2.
