ArcaMax

Years ago, my dear friend the late Alan K. Simpson, Republican senator from Wyoming, explained to me how America viewed our two major political parties. “Democrats think Republicans are stupid, and Republicans think Democrats are evil,” he said with a grin. “You’re in the evil party. I’d rather be a member of the stupid party.”

That was before Trump turned the Republican Party into a neofascist cult, premised on the lie that he won the 2020 presidential election.

The most immediate choice Americans will make tomorrow is between politicians who have led and enabled that neofascist cult, and politicians who have rejected it.

But the real choice goes much deeper.

More than a decade ago, with the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked hundreds of people in America’s heartland who they thought should be our next president. At the time, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush were the two parties’ presumptive favorites, but most people told me they preferred Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Many mentioned both.

When I asked them why, they told me that America needed someone “authentic” who’d “shake things up” and “make the system work for ordinary people” — and they thought that Sanders or Trump fit the bill.

The following year, Sanders — then a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the primaries — ended up with 46% of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention from primaries and caucuses.

Trump, a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elected office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about almost everything, won the Republican primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America. Granted, he didn’t win the popular vote and had some help from Vladimir Putin, but he won.

Something very big was happening in America — and it continues to this day: a rebellion against the establishment. Hillary and Jeb Bush had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers, and all the name recognition you could want, but neither of them could convince voters they weren’t part of the system and therefore part of the problem.

When I did my interviews across middle America at the end of 2015, the overall economy was doing well in terms of the standard measures of employment and growth. But those indicators didn’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans felt — and still feel.

Nor did the standard measures reveal the searing unfairness most Americans experienced — and still experience.

The indicators didn’t reveal the linkages most Americans saw — and continue to see — between wealth and power, between corruption in high places and their own stagnant real wages, between the soaring fortunes of a few and their own loss of ground, between the emergence of a billionaire class and the undermining of our democracy.

The standard measures didn’t show the frustration of American workers without college degrees who for decades had worked harder than ever but had nothing to show for it, and whose lifespans had shrunk.

Much of today’s political establishment still denies what has occurred. They prefer to attribute the anger and ugliness in our politics solely to Trump, rather than see him for what he is — the consequence of decades of neglect of millions of Americans, for whom the American Dream has become an ongoing nightmare.

Trump has channeled their frustrations into hate for scapegoats who have nothing to do with their problems — Muslims, transgender people, Mexicans, undocumented immigrants, and other Trumpian boogeymen.

The real choice tomorrow is not between Left and Right, or between socialism and capitalism, and surely not between Alan Simpson’s caricatures of an evil party and a stupid one.

The real choice is between a cruel, regressive, and bigoted America that blames vulnerable “others” for our wildly unequal and increasingly rigged system, or a diverse, equitable, and inclusive America that gets to work unrigging it.

I know how frightening this time may be for you. I understand the stomach-churning mixture of hope, fear, disgust, and outrage you may feel.

Even if the Democrats win big tomorrow, our work will just begin. You and I and all of us will have to push very hard against the widening inequalities that are corrupting our system, and push very hard for democracy and social justice.

In other words, even if Democrats win tomorrow, we will be at the end of the beginning.