US election 2020: Trump is terribly flawed, but the alternative is simply terrible

Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Traverse City, Michigan. Picture: AFP.

“I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything,” the second Viscount Melbourne is supposed to have said. The weary observation of a Victorian prime minister about an intellectually self-assured political rival and the most famous historian of his age is a good starting point to ponder the state of American politics on Election Day 2020.

We live in an age of Macaulays. Everyone, it seems, is cocksure of his beliefs, absolutely certain about the choice the nation faces this week. American democracy stands at a crossroads. One way lies renewal and recovery, salvation from the forces of darkness, a last-ditch affirmation that the US can be redeemed after all. The other is the one-way path to perdition, an accelerating descent into an abyssal underworld of misrule, repression and corruption.

We should expect this kind of absolutism from ideologues, especially on the left. As Americans choose their leaders for the next four years, radical Democrats and their vocal enablers in the media, academia and leading cultural institutions have never been more certain about anything in their lifetimes of steadily diminishing intellectual curiosity.

Yet on the right too there’s a growing tendency to narrow down a complex choice to simple verities.

How America voted since 1972 🇺🇸🗳️ #election2020 pic.twitter.com/w2rSuvFFoB

— The Australian (@australian) November 2, 2020

It would be nice to think that the world presented us with such simple choices: that the alternatives on offer on the ballot paper — or in life — are clearly labelled “good” and “evil.” But those of us who graduated from kindergarten know that picking one from the other involves discernment and judgment, not revelation.

Conservatives especially should bring a little scepticism to the cartoonish morality tale that has debased our modern politics. We should vow to be a little more Melbourne and a little less Macaulay.

For the truth — the irony — is that for all the absolute conviction that so many people bring to the choice in this election, only the intellectually or morally blindfolded could not be consumed by doubts about it.

You don’t have to believe a single word of the media’s hysterical hyperbole about Donald Trump these last four years to think that this president is seriously lacking in the character of the men and women who have made this country the greatest nation on earth.

You don’t have to think he’s Hitler’s heir to be alarmed by his evidently cavalier disregard for small matters like the independence of the judiciary, the proper use of executive power, or the truth.

You don’t have to think he takes personal joy in incarcerating children in cages to worry that his underdeveloped capacity for human empathy has made him especially unfit for the crises of the past year.

You don’t have to believe he’s Bull Connor to worry that his rhetoric and manner have done harm to the nation’s fragile social contract.

Yet for all his faults, for all the legitimate fears stoked by the last four years, it’s not immoral or irrational to think that the incumbent still represents a better alternative to what’s on offer.

This is an improbable but singular success in forging the basis of a new conservatism that has involved an economic record of tax cutting and deregulation that had begun to restore the nation’s self-confidence and dynamism before the virus hit; a recasting of national interest that has made a decisive break with decades of futile international engagement and needless American sacrifice; a rebalancing of the judiciary toward much-needed restraint up to and including the Supreme Court.

It’s about above all recognising the alternative. Voters after all are not being asked to choose between Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln.

The alternative today is a candidate who sits vacantly smiling and slightly bewildered atop a party that, in its radical platform, its emerging leaders and its ideological associations, represents a sustained challenge to the shared ideals that have defined the United States through its history.

The Democrats have spent four years falsely accusing their opponents of mounting a coup, but now threaten an assault on many of the pillars of the constitutional order. They’ve spent the last six months conniving at brazen lawlessness and allying themselves with proponents of an ideology that rejects the nation’s values, while compelling allegiance and silencing those who dissent. Their elevation of ideologies of race, gender and other “identity” issues consciously pits Americans against one another in potentially ruinous ways.

So admit it. It’s not a rich choice. On the one hand, a flawed man who may yet do more damage to the nation’s frayed fabric. On the other, a party that seems committed to tearing it up.

Most readers of these pages will have made a reasoned judgment and decided the risks associated with four more years are worth taking given the alternative. But acknowledging the uncertainties associated is not only intellectually and morally mature. It will help us all to learn to live with a result that so many will find unpalatable.