Colum McCann
Irish-born novelist and nonfiction author whose books include Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon. McCann has lived in New York for three decades
Almost 40 years ago, I was as a young journalist travelling across the deep south of the United States. I found myself sitting outside a diner in Waycross, Georgia, jawing with some good ol’ boys. One of them was a perfect American cartoon. Baseball hat. Plaid shirt. He used the N-word in a protracted jukebox drawl as he struck a match head off the heel of his boots.
He turned out to be an elected sheriff from a nearby town and he was running in an election on a segregationist ticket. He invited me to his house with his wife and family amid the tall cypress trees.
It turned out the sheriff was all about “state’s rights” (meaning the right of states to pass Jim Crow laws), “freedom of association” (separating the races), more “Jee-sus” and “less government”.
I was confused and horrified. But while we were at the dinner table with his sulky children, an extraordinary thing happened. A screech of tyres. A crunch of metal. We ran outside and up the road to the corner where a lone car had smashed into a tree. Inside, the occupants, a Black family – a man, a woman and two children – were shaken up. The father had cut his forehead. The sheriff tore off his shirt and dabbed it against the blood. His wife ran home to arrange for an ambulance. The Black couple protested. They had no money. The sheriff touched the woman’s shoulder and told her they would be all right.
At the hospital, doctors insisted that the injured man stay overnight. His wife didn’t know where to stay. “Don’t worry,” the sheriff said, “y’all can sleep the night in my place.”
By the next afternoon, the car had been repaired for free and the hospital bill was settled. After making pancakes, the sheriff bid the couple goodbye.
“Hell,” he said, when I asked him about the extraordinary gulf between what he had said, and believed, and what he had done, “everyone’s human, ain’t they?”
Everyone’s human until they aren’t. If the sheriff was both old school and an advance scout for the Trumpian imagination, he also held something rare in these turbulent times: the ability to echo that turbulence, to contradict himself, and to contain, as Walt Whitman would have said, multitudes.
We live in times when the channels of certainty are deeply dug. The multitudinous aspect of who we are – not just in America but everywhere else – is largely denied. Come into the room if you sound like me, or you look like me, or you vote like me, but otherwise stay the fuck out. This disease of certainty – the absolute need to remain in the one channel – is the defining mystery of our contemporary social contract, and it’s especially evident in the current election. We are canals, not rivers. We have been carved out to a purpose. We carry things for industry and for political parties and corporations and whatever other non-human entities need us.
Hideous as he was, it would now be difficult for the sheriff to be the same man he was 40 years ago.
The political canals are dug. The private and the public American are a singular thing.
In his 1993 collection of essays, Culture and Imperialism, the Palestinian writer Edward Said suggested that no one today is purely one thing, either white or Black or western or Asian. He called on the world to recognise that it is “more rewarding – and more difficult – to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about ‘us’”. We can, he suggested, be so much more than one thing.
This is not an election so much about hope as it is about survival
Maybe Kamala Harris’s difficulty is that she is, in fact, operating contrapuntally. A child of immigrants, with a Black father and an Indian mother (a district attorney, a woman with a career of shattering glass ceilings), she might be too speckled for our tied-down times. Trump, on the other hand, is relatively easy to pinpoint – he offers little more sustenance than the damp white loaf that he embodies. But his simplicity fits with the certainty and poisoned narrowness of our times that has made this race – which should not even be close – into a test of the character of our times: are we capable of being more than one thing?
Is there any hope of any solace? Given what is going on – to vast silence – in the Middle East and Sudan and elsewhere, one would have to unfortunately think no. Solace gives way to a sort of mediocre acceptance. Most centre- or left-leaning people I know feel that a Harris victory might just about be a temporary relief, while a Trump victory would be an ongoing disaster. This is not an election so much about hope as it is about survival.
But the president you get doesn’t have to be the country you get.
Is there any way to shake the soul of the US out of its malignant certainty? What could ignite an imaginative fury? Maybe a strong third party. Or full political representation for the District of Columbia (for the past 200 years Washington DC has been considered a district, and not a state, effectively denying three-quarters of a million people full political representation in Congress). Or a takedown of the electoral college, resulting in a system that – logic and democracy forbid! – gives the presidency to the person who gets the most votes.
As my late father used to say: “Don’t put all your begs in one ask-it.”
Or maybe it will come down to teachers and artists and students and ordinary people who recognise that it’s about time for some decency, cordiality and personal engagement. While we certainly don’t need the sheriffs of bygone times, we do need those who can see one another’s humanity, even in the most seemingly impossible circumstances.
What people will vote for on 5 November is the survival of a messy hope against the myopia of certainty.
Margo Jefferson
Pulitzer prize-winning critic, academic and nonfiction author whose works include Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System
We are all on tenterhooks about the election. I am following newspapers, online postings, podcasts, TV. Every so often I’ll get overwhelmed and pull back briefly, but that’s mostly to refresh myself. Like many people, I’m often terrified. It’s such a ghoulish spectacle. There’s this glee around Trump and his supporters, who thrive on vicious accusations about Haitians eating dogs and cats and women killing babies, on infantile protests, sneers and denunciations. So, yes, I’m frightened, and I’m angry too. We keep saying to one another: “How did we get here?” Well, that can be analysed, but still, he’s so low, so debased. And yet here he is.
Looking back over Biden’s time in office, he’s done some good things domestically, in his support of unions for example, and raising wages, but he has not been impressive internationally, though he likes to think that’s his core strength. Just look at the Middle East. He’s obviously made a mess of it. It’s not only his actions, or non-actions, but also his manner, the way he all but dismisses the horrors of Gaza. That’s just not acceptable.
Closer to home, one can quarrel with him or object to some mealy mouthed statement about this or that, but for people with a certain amount of social and economic security, life goes on, as it has for me. Of course I understand the anger and alarm at prices going up. But the sentimentality about the Trump years, the dreamland of how effective Trump was on the economy, I find intolerable. And I’m shocked that he is let off the hook about Covid by so many of his supporters.
I am very glad Biden didn’t run again. That would have been impossible, both for reasons that are fair, in terms of mistakes he’s made, but also in terms of the post-debate rap against him. He wasn’t going to be able to surmount that. So I was profoundly relieved when he stepped aside, but he should have done it earlier. It left Harris at a great disadvantage in terms of time. Now, voters who are unsure about her can say: “I don’t know enough about her.” I do think that is partly a form of evasion. There are ways you can find out more. But it reflects a kind of uncertainty, a suspiciousness that has everything to do with her being a woman, and a woman of colour, as well as her having been Biden’s vice-president.
When Harris stepped forward, there was the ebullience and joy of having a new candidate and being released from the terrible certainty that Biden would lose. So some of the joy came from sheer possibility. There are points I wish she would emphasise more fully and declarations I wish she would make, but she’s certainly shown, given the level of misogyny in our society, get-down-to-business gutsiness. Discipline and intelligence. You saw that in the debate. She’s not afraid of Trump in any way. That’s impressive. What I can’t gauge is what difference it’s making to people who are wavering. If you’re undecided, you have to take more of a leap of thought as well as faith to vote for Harris.
Whoever wins, we are going to have demonstrations, fights, all kinds of legal challenges. We will be in turmoil
One of the obsessions in the news coverage in recent weeks has been about Harris losing Black male votes. Of course it’s worrisome, but the major problem here is disgruntled white men not voting for her. It was almost as if there was a kind of projection of all our worries on to these Black men, who certainly should know better. Well, your white men should know better too, but they don’t.
Trump is very much the same beast we’ve seen before, only worse. The insults flung at women, at immigrants, or at any opponents, are gleeful, reckless and genuinely ugly. They excite people and they stick. He’s more degraded, the aggression has intensified, and now he’ll say anything that his little psyche throws up. It’s horrifying to watch. I don’t invest huge amounts of psychic energy into being proud to be an American, but I find looking at him humiliating. This is what this powerful country has produced, and what so many citizens endorse. My God. It’s not just shameful. It is humiliating.
Whoever wins, we are going to have demonstrations, fights, all kinds of legal challenges. We will be in turmoil. At least if Harris wins, there will be some kind of norm, of respectability, of reasonableness, of legal and political systems operating in ways that we understand and have legislated for. But it will be harder because the Republican party remains the Republican party. These divisions and their will to power are unshakable.
What will I be doing on 5 November when the results start coming through? I was talking about that with friends, some of whom are insisting they’ll go to bed early. I remember doing that in 2016 when it became clear that Trump was going to win and I just thought, well, night night. This time I will be watching up to a point, probably up to midnight, and then I suspect it will get so cluttered and clamorous that one will try to sleep, but will any of us sleep, really? As told to Killian Fox
Richard Ford
Novelist best known for his series featuring the character Frank Bascombe, including The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer prize-winning Independence Day and Let Me Be Frank With You
The problem for American now is how to ready ourselves to face a new Trump presidency. Preparing seems the only sensible thing to do – rather than putting on the blinkers like most of my friends. Oh, I loathe the prospect. Don’t get me wrong. And we need to hold an election, first. I’d have voted for Biden. He’s a good enough man, though he proved surprisingly power-hungry and had to be driven out of the race whingeing and mewling. And I’ll unhesitatingly vote for Ms Harris – though she hasn’t made an especially good candidate, yet might make a decent president if she can get over her fear of making mistakes. In their own quite hesitant and narcissistic way, the Democratic party has put the country up for grabs by not ratifying a qualified Biden successor two years ago. They’re a disgrace, and in their doze don’t even seem to know it. Whether they win or lose, it’s hard for me to wish a future for them as they are. No wonder only 66% of us vote.
Trump, meanwhile, has basically promised to ruin the country if he’s elected: to be a dictator, to terminate the constitution, to drag the US out of Nato, to forgo our Ukraine and Taiwan commitments, to sell out the Palestinians, to build walls of expensive tariffs, to give Russia carte blanche to invade more of its neighbours, to attack Iran, to re-exit the Paris climate accords – and these are just his foreign policy goals.
Domestically, he pledges to repopulate the justice and state departments with his sycophants, to stack the supreme court with more extremists, to prosecute and jail his opponents, to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and the department of education, to ban the teaching of Black history, to abandon school meals programmes for kids, and to leave reproductive rights to the coarse motley of the 50 states. Pretty much everything but ordering drone strikes on Chicago.
A lot of Americans want precisely that, of course. My wife and I hear them snarling and fuming about it in diners, in the grocery store, in car repairs and at the bank around where we live, here in eastern Montana. On my flight across the Atlantic last month, I sat beside a professor of constitutional law at the prestigious University of Virginia. This woman told me she believed vice-president Harris to be a non-entity, and that a second Trump presidency would “stabilise America’s place in the world”. She conceded there were “some problems” with Trump. But I walked off the plane convinced she’d vote for him. Who knows what these people have been drinking?
Curiously, though, polling shows that when American voters see more of Mr Trump his popularity declines. Whereas, when they see less of him, his popularity squirts up – a bad omen, you’d think, in a popularity contest. Yet it might make the task of beating Trump easier if swooning Democrats can just cause more people to see him, and by framing him the way they want him seen – which is pretty much as he is: a bloated, orangish, cartoon creature spouting nonsense and untruth a mile a minute, a figure so unreal and inauthentic it might be difficult to make him out clearly.
In what may turn out to have been a providential stroke (though it seemed to me too tame at the time), Harris’s brain trust, last summer, hit upon a momentarily resonant strategy – portraying Mr Trump as “weird” rather than as the great Satan. A diminished buffoon. No one to take seriously. This is a familiar American archetype, one we all grew up with. The incompetent, slightly daft village screw-loose. A sort of feral Oliver Hardy – unquestionably an individual most Americans wouldn’t imagine being president, albeit not misreading the threat he fecklessly poses to us and the world.
Thus. Seeing Trump as he bizarrely presents is what we citizens will have to do if he incongruously wins back the presidency. This is how we face it.
In the end, I think there’ll be more Americans who don’t want to see the US wrecked than there are those who do or who don’t care
Plus, setting goofy archetypes aside, I find myself taking perverse comfort that such a man as strange as Trump actually submits to running for the presidency at all, that he mounts an actual campaign, worries and fidgets and blasphemes that he might not win. That he fears prison – just the way a normal, non-orange person would. This suggests to me that Donald Trump is at heart an institutional creature; a clownishly spoiled child, always trying to get away with something, but who knows it and knows better; a man, in Trump’s case, who cares inordinately about how he looks and how history will judge him. His Maga followers may be nihilists and anarchists and thugs, or just greedy oligarchs who cheat on their taxes. But Trump is (one almost wants to say merely) a narcissist, whose most destabilising defect is that he and we never know what he’s going to say or do next. Listen to his speeches – if you can. All he wants is to please and aggrandise himself. Big, complicated countries may pride themselves on having strong leaders, but they thrive on predictability and consistency at the top. Whereas Trump’s idea of leading is just to say stuff – such as abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, or terminating the constitution, or injecting bleach into humans to cure Covid. After which he says other opposite stuff – such as after boasting about abolishing the right to an abortion, he declares himself a supporter of reproductive freedom. He’s nearly 80 – my age, for Christ’s sake.
So, if he becomes president again we need not to take up arms against our neighbours or relocate to Bali or Connemara, but to strive evermore to see Trump as that strange but knowable creature he is. More like our fallible selves than the great destroyer. This can be our way to preserve our country: vigilantly to see Donald Trump so we can vigorously oppose him, stymie him, impugn him, deride and defeat him using whatever institutions of government he can’t abolish. As with all our 46 presidents, governing the US has always required a battle.
And by the theory of lasts, I also happen to think that President Donald Trump doesn’t really want his legacy to be that he took down the United States of America – no matter what he says. Not that I think he’s really a good guy, down deep. He’s really not. He just couldn’t do without the US. Its institutions and traditions are his vital context. But whether he wins or loses, I have to stay hopeful – not let him turn me against my better self or my country’s. In the end, I think there’ll be more Americans who don’t want to see the US wrecked than there are those who do or who don’t care. There’s a chance good might prevail in November. We just can’t avert our gaze from the thought that it might not and in that way render ourselves unready.
First, though, there’s November fifth. We need to vote.
Marilynne Robinson
Award-winning novelist and essayist whose 2005 book, Gilead, won the Pulitzer prize
A great source of energy behind the rise of the Maga phenomenon is the idea, and realisation, that there has been a pervasive and highly effective campaign of indoctrination going on in this country for decades, since the civil rights movement. All societies indoctrinate their members, of course. They educate, adjudicate, give or withhold approval, expressing and reinforcing assumptions that support institutions and shape character. In our case the indoctrination was meant to promote change rather than to maintain a status quo. The country had, beginning in the 1950s, passed through a great awakening, more powerful than most. Americans realised finally that prevalent attitudes about colour and gender led to insupportable injustice and the suppression of gifted populations. The problem was societal. Behind any instance of insult or exclusion there were the prejudices that normalised such behaviour. So, much of America set about to change these attitudes. The work is not done but the effort has been fruitful enough to have triggered a potent reaction against it in the past decade.
“Indoctrination” is a word with darkly negative connotations. But the best societies do have doctrines which at least name their aspirations, and they teach them, actively and passively. In our case, the promotion of reform came under the hostile scrutiny of the conspiracy-minded. The genius of this worldview is that no policy or idea has to be considered on its merits because it is all scheming and fakery, however apparently plausible. No fact need be acknowledged, no source credited unless it is wise to the great deception. Debate and persuasion are defeated before they begin.
I have been amazed and appalled to see my great-hearted America go into eclipse behind this mean, undignified nonsense
The recoil from liberalisation has placed its opponents in a very strange place. When America was church-going and many churches were sound, precepts that ran against the grain of personal interest were familiar and respected. These revanchists overwhelmingly claim to be Christian, but if loving the neighbour, not to mention the stranger or the enemy, involves any cost or disadvantage they are outraged. With Trump as their guide and model, they have found their way to a netherworld of primitive emotions. We know these feelings from the cradle, though we may unlearn them at an attentive mother’s knee. Basically, they go like this: if I feel fear, then something or someone is threatening me and this must be dealt with as a matter of extreme urgency. So too with anger and resentment. Greed belongs in this suite of primal emotions because it is admired and because it lies behind fear of the loss of status, whatever that may have amounted to, and behind the anxious certainty that others’ prosperity must diminish one’s own. No profit or happiness is imagined that might come to a society truly committed to justice.
I have been amazed and appalled to see my great-hearted America go into eclipse behind this mean, undignified nonsense. My former home state, Iowa, has turned deep red, rejected its own liberal history, relaxed its child labour laws, cut food aid to poor children, banned books, prohibited equity policies in state universities, and on and on.
But then came the Democratic national convention, and our much disparaged diversity showed its beautiful face. I am old enough to know how much has been accomplished, how gratifying it is to have the benefit of the brilliance and purpose of people who, in my childhood, had virtually no voice or presence in public life. The convention was a joyous celebration of the fact that we do know how to reform, which gives us practical hope for further reform. The change in the political atmosphere in this country has been unbelievably swift, in fact sudden. The emergence of Kamala Harris has put matters in extremely capable hands, clearly. And many of us, quite possibly an electoral majority, were waiting for the day when civility, humanity and hope would reassert themselves.
If Harris wins I expect important continuity with Biden, especially regarding foreign affairs. I would expect big programmes like his, to ease the housing shortage, for example. I think she would support and enhance education and healthcare, the kinds of things expected of a Democrat. A normal president has a strong interest in basic continuity, with changes the public and the Congress can agree to support. I would expect her to be strategic and persuasive.
If Trump wins, I don’t think anyone, even he, knows what to expect. Everything depends on what he thinks from day to day are his interests, and how they can best be served. He has his pals and is very readily influenced by them, and by flattery. As a rhetorical tactic, he makes truly terrible threats involving mass deportations of immigrants, also concentration camps, prosecution of critics and political opponents, and he makes truly crazy threats, like bombing drug cartels in Mexico or giving Putin free rein in Europe. He desolates the landscape of rational expectation, then if he hasn’t done anything as dreadful as his threats, it is as if there were nothing in the malicious lunacy he offers to his crowds that should alarm us. Major Republican politicians support him on this basis. He has acquired vast latitude on the grounds that few actually believe anything he says. How do you challenge someone with no credibility? I have never heard of such a creature, or seen influence like his. He says hideous things about America to people swaddled in flags and they cheer themselves hoarse. He is neither Christian nor nationalist but he might stir up a crusade of sorts among people who claim these identities in order to fall into line with him. God knows how that would end. He is silent about normal policy positions. He wants to cut taxes. The wealthy would benefit.
We may expect him to govern in accordance with his own interests as he perceives them – an adviser might suggest he be more presidential, but that would mean no more calling names or selling gimmicks to suckers, so that won’t happen. Other than that, he seems to feel he has the mandate of heaven without regard to votes. If he actually is elected, he will be full of a sense of the truly preposterous power of an American president, and of whatever retrogressive or retributive use he might try to make of it.
