The vote is a miracle

There are 245 days remaining until the American people decide who becomes the president of the United States and leads the Earth’s preeminent nation.

I was thinking about time this morning in the quiet. No matter what, it presses forward. The seconds fall like drops of water in an unrelenting drizzle. They land and vanish prefacing the next and next. From them emerge the days and months, and ultimately, long life spans of human beings who witness the accumulation of time and can divide it into epochs where war, tragedy, suffering and destruction come and then abate. They have seen the cycles of hope and despair, and have come to understand the deep wisdom of teachings like those found in Ecclesiastes.

All of us enter life in the midst of an unfolding story in an uncertain era. When we are children everyone around us is older, but that changes quickly enough.

I was born in 1970, which meant that a 25-year-old B-17 pilot or crew member who is depicted on Apple TV’s epic ‘Masters of the Air’ was 50 years old when I was born, and 65 when I was 15. When I think about things that have changed during my lifetime that are profound — that my children seem blissfully unaware of — it is this: the loss of this generation didn’t happen overnight, and in truth, they aren’t yet all gone. There are 250,000 living survivors of the Nazi death camps. When D-Day is commemorated on the Normandy coast on June 6, 2024, there will be a handful of the few living combat veterans there.

Once, there were 16 million Americans who wore the nation’s uniform in an existential battle between global slavery and freedom. The preeminence of the United States was established through victory in a global war in which the nation’s economic and martial strength were harnessed under a maximum effort that changed everything from the South’s apartheid society to the role of women in society.

The world in which we live is a product of victory in a war for survival fought by a generation that has vanished quietly from national life, one at a time, until they are all but gone. Suddenly, the elderly are the Vietnam veterans who were young men when I was growing up. Their dads were mostly still around when I was a kid, and one day, the generation that fought in the wars after 9/11 will take their place. Some will wear hats commemorating their service, and young people will mostly walk by them blankly, unaware of the names and meaning on the hat, let alone the colored ribbons sewn on it. Perhaps, this is best. America was never a martial society like Prussia or Imperial Japan. American children were never raised to die for an emperor, or give their lives for conquest of another nation. George Washington’s admonition about avoiding foreign entanglements was taken seriously in America. The United States was a neutral nation that could not maintain its neutrality when a threat gathered that would take away the American way of life.

What is the American way of life? What should it be? What can it be? What must it be? 

These are questions asked by free people who can write the next chapter, and the one after that, but let’s answer all of them in the broadest sense. The purpose of an American life is the pursuit of happiness. We further recognize the dignity and value of each human life as equal regardless of race, creed, religion or sexual orientation. All of this is protected by a rule of law that holds no one is above or below it. It is anchored by a vote that establishes majority rule and subordinates the elected official below the sovereign, who is the ordinary citizen.

This reality is an achievement, and it is among the greatest in world history. The fact that it remains a work in progress does not diminish the scale of the accomplishment and epic human achievements that sprouted from its free soil. The United States of America is an idea that exists as a nation that has become the most powerful in world history, premised on the most revolutionary idea in world history. All of the Earth’s people have come to America. Every language is spoken here, and every religion and then some is practiced here. We are far from perfect, but what has been achieved should be recognized and celebrated because what we must build requires it.

We seem to seldom talk to each other through a prism that unifies the overwhelming majority of us in a way that has deep meaning for the majority of us. We all have identities. They may be as a husband or wife, brother or sister, friend, child or something else. The one identity that 332,000,000 of us share is American.

We are Americans.

Isn’t it time to start looking forward again and believing this nation’s best days are ahead of us?

What must be done to expand the ideals of the country to the places that have remained in the shadows and hidden from the light of justice, opportunity and hope?

When will we talk about rebuilding our schools and making them world-class?

There is something terrible that the generation that fought the Second World War tried to teach us, and it doesn’t seem like it took from a plain look around. They tried to teach us a phrase: “Never Again. Never Forget.” Now they are gone, and many have forgotten.

‘America First’ is a discredited slogan from an era when a generation of the hapless was so cloistered and sheltered from reality that they didn’t recognize Adolf Hitler as humanity’s greatest threat. In fact, many lionized him as their political descendants lionize Vladimir Putin. ‘America First’ has always been the cry of American fascism. Yet, the generation that would have remembered is gone, and their children have forgotten.

In the end, the vote is a miracle. It gives us a choice and a say. Today, we all have it in America. Some won’t use it, and some will throw it away. I suppose that is human nature, but it doesn’t diminish the power of what we have been bequeathed through tremendous struggle and profound sacrifice. Donald Trump tried to steal the votes away from the majority who removed him from power. He sought to destroy the integrity of the closest thing this nation has to a sacred right. What he did was disloyal, despicable and unforgivable.

Donald Trump is grotesque and repellent.

Donald Trump is an American fascist, who seeks to topple the republic and the US Constitution. He declares he is above the law, that revenge is righteous, and tyrants are friends.

The hour of crisis imagined by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison has fully arrived. The simple truth is that a man like Trump could never have risen when the World War II generation was here. They would have been collectively revolted and discharged him from public life in a manner appropriate for a dime store Mussolini, who can’t speak in coherent sentences, yet somehow captivates his cult with flourishes of inanities and slurred non sequiturs. He would have been laughed out of the room, but now they are all gone.

It is up to us. The question at hand is very simple: do you see what is looking back at us through the night from the edge of the woods?  It is a malevolence, and it is coming. Thankfully, the generation that recognized it left us monuments and museums to memorialize it so we wouldn’t forget.

2024 will be a year during which the proverbial hand will be called.

It will be time for America to show the world our cards. The deficiency of the choice at hand is not what will be remembered. The choice of Trump will be. It will change everything. Forever. Nothing good will come from it. When fascists take power societies get poisoned. It is exactly what will happen to America.

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I spoke with The Daily Beast’s Jake Lahut about the future of Nikki Haley’s campaign in this story. My question is: what is her endgame?

“Is she trying to build a blocking force of 40 percent in the GOP?” Schmidt asked. “Is she trying to build a coalition between conservatives and fascists? Or conservatives who believe in democracy and liberals who believe in democracy?”

Schmidt, who served as a top adviser to the late Sen. John McCain’s 2008 campaign, said it’s not surprising Haley’s supporters have held out hope that Trump might somehow disappear from the 2024 fray.

“In every political campaign that I’ve ever been involved in where you’re in an underdog position, the more difficult the circumstance, the greater the faith is in the magic bullet—the event—the thing that everyone talks about that is lurking out there about to be discovered,” Schmidt said. “Every race has one.”

Haley’s continued strength among GOP donors, Schmidt said, is more a sign of deep-pocketed conservatives being out of touch with how campaigns work in the modern era. “I just think that there’s a tendency among the donors to believe this is a football game,” Schmidt said, “and the game started when New Hampshire began as opposed to when it ended.”

Instead, Schmidt explained, those early contests are “climactic events,” and the year before voting starts is the true beginning where candidates can make a quality first impression to set themselves up for success.

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Tonight will be a busy night given that it’s Super Tuesday.

You can find me doing Instagram Live with Katie Couric (@katiecouric) at 8 pm ET. I hope you’ll join us.

Screen capture from @katiecouric on Instagram

Following that — beginning at 9 pm ET — I’ll be joining the Scripps News “America Votes 2024” team for up-to-the-minute polling analysis and live reporting of Super Tuesday results. Watch Scripps News live all day today.

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