Notes from a Battlefield
As Americans cast their votes on Election Day, the writing is on the wall
Edited by David Swanson
If you’re reading this and haven’t voted, go vote, obviously. Even if it feels futile. Or silly, or extraneous. It is a choice between ground glass or sheep shit, but at least sheep shit has fiber and won’t shred your intestines.
Plus: if you vote, you can stand up and yell if your ballot gets nullified or contested or shot up by rifle-wielding zealots.
The way things are going, this may be the last election that isn’t hollow pageantry for the foreseeable future—one half of the party system has spent two years braying at increasing volume that any election result where they don’t win is fraudulent.
The aftermath of the 2020 vote showed how a conspiracy can be spun out of just about anything, how local governments are prone to screw-ups—some more innocuous than others—and how vote counting is an ill-understood, sometimes messy and protracted, and easy-to-demonize process. (Bits of paper have a certain inherent sinister quality to the conspiracist: anything could be written on them!)
As the Big Lie about the “stolen” 2020 election has calcified into GOP orthodoxy, there’s been a concomitant push to strategically place individuals who adhere to the lie in election administrator positions. A lot of state-level Secretary of State races are divided along those lines, but election administration is sprawling and federated, and contains multitudes.
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Insofar as I expect violence (I study the American right, so this is always a live possibility) I expect it to be around vote counts and election results rather than at or around polling places, although this is of course subject to change. The most likely targets for any sort of armed-right-wing-protest-gone-wrong are states with close races and lots of militant-right groups, to wit, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia. That being said, stochastic terror (or “networked incitement” as some call it) is inherently unpredictable, and there are militant right wing groups arming across the country. All I know is that, regardless of how things go today, in actuality there is a parallel reality being coaxed into being by overpaid pundits, grassroots zealots, and conspiracy grifters (these are categories with significant overlap, by the way).
These groups have crossed paths at Stop the Steal rallies, anti-vaccine and anti-mask rallies, anti-trans “End Child Mutilation” rallies, and Drag Queen Story Hour protests. They form a big sprawling network now, having rubbed elbows, shared plague germs, and marinated in a big grody shared hot tub full of fascistic vitriol for years. Many of them have guns; all have loud voices and are unlikely to go away. The radicalized, conspiracy-raddled, fundamentally antidemocratic forces of this self-proclaimed volk will make themselves heard one way or another. I just hope they’ll stick to words and stunts; the last time they got really riled up, the Capitol was breached and people died.
I’m sorry to sound glum, it’s just been mene mene tekel upharsin—the writing on the wall—for a long time now, and teetering over a chasm stresses me out.
I early-voted last week and spent yesterday wandering the battlefield at Manassas, reviewing the minute-by-minute violence of the first big sortie of the last Civil War. If we’re due for another, it won’t feature artillery brigades or heroic pushes to hold some plateau in Virginia. It’ll be everywhere and nowhere, explosions in the night, like a big loud stupid version of Italy’s Years of Lead. I covertly pissed on the Stonewall Jackson monument, his enormous hobnailed boots hovering over the sere autumn grass, the unseasonable heat. It was a lovely place to think about people getting shot to pieces. I sat with my beloved under the biggest oldest tree around—the park rangers said they didn’t know if it had seen the battle—and talked about what the sequel would be like. We hoped it wouldn’t come. I kissed him big time and the red dying leaves rattled down to the asphalt as we drove away.
Excellent. *chef's kiss*