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If only…
A great many ideas have been proffered explaining how Donald Trump came to become the president of the United States. And when this scourge is over—with luck next year and likely by his own undoing—historians and academics will settle into the study of this question for decades.
The explanation that resonates most for me, however, is that too few Americans bothered to vote in 2016. When it mattered most, voters failed to show up.
There were approximately 250 million eligible voters in November 2016. Only 138 million voted. 112 million voters didn’t. Just 63 million chose Donald Trump. (65 million chose Hillary Clinton) That means that only 25 per cent of eligible voters made him president.
Many voters had come to believe what happened in DC didn’t matter in their lives. It has taken the mayhem of this presidency to demonstrate that notion was terribly wrong.
Democracy, it turns out, requires participation. We have witnessed in recent years too many examples around the world where apathy and a weary electorate are producing brutish and illiberal thugs as leaders. Poland. Hungary. The Philippines. Brazil.
Once in power, they work swiftly to alter the state apparatus to stay there. Perhaps with the exception of Trump—who appears to lack the guile of a barnyard animal—when demagogic strongmen take power they move rapidly to reshape the institutions created to ensure democratic continuity into self-serving machines cored out from the centre in order to entrench their illiberal purposes.
It is surely a small mercy that Trump lacks the capacity or faculties to enact such a coup d’etat, yet it is clear it is where he would like to take his country. It ought to serve as a caution of the fragility of liberal democracy.
Many will be quick to contradict this thesis— that it was the failing of the electoral college, the gerrymandered districts, voter suppression etc. etc. that caused Trump. And there is undeniably truth in these assertions, yet these arguments tend to let 112 million voters off the hook.
It is a simple job. Show up once every couple of years at a community centre or town hall and mark a choice. In most elections now, we can simply vote online. Or use advance polls. It is as convenient as it possibly could be. Perhaps this ease is part of the problem.
Voting is our duty. A solemn responsibility— we ought not be looking to the state for further convenience. If the sacrifices of old wars are too abstract, or the images from northern Syria currently too grotesque, consider then how easily the US sleepwalked into Trump’s arms. How it may still turn out in that country.
In an extensive survey in 2018, Pew Research found that the vast majority of nonvoters those who were eligible but didn’t vote) supported Hillary Clinton. This trend flowed through religion, race and class. If only a few more folks had shown up to vote in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in November 2016, the world would be in a different place today.
We are just a few days before we elect a new government in this country. To be clear, I do not believe any of the choices before us next week are as loathsome or as destructive as our American neighbours faced in 2016.
To put a finer point on it, I believe all three leading contenders for the job of prime minister would serve ably, with honour and in furtherance of our liberal democracy. Our choices, thankfully, are smaller, more quotidian. Taxes. Housing. Energy. Environment. Mending the holes in our social safety net.
Despite the noise and fury of the past few weeks, none of the choices in front of us represents an existential challenge to democracy or to the institutions that make it work. Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats will all, in their own way, strive to respect and promote these principles. It is too easy to allow complacency or a negative and uninspiring campaign to induce apathy.
All the more reason, I suggest, to go and vote. This isn’t entertainment. It’s not sports. Let us learn from our neighbours. It can all slip away.
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