As I sat down at my local coffee shop the other day, I had an epiphany.
As I swirled a $3 house brew in a ceramic mug and waited for my friend Eric to arrive, I looked at the worried faces in the packed store and saw an America in a state of uncertainty. Emboldened by a decade of economic and political uncertainty, technological and social change, and surrounded by an ever-growing list of existential threats, we are like the cat in the famous thought experiment about quantum physics.
You know the cat I’m talking about.
Schrödinger’s cat
The wait for Election Day 2024 has been its own kind of hell, with uncertain rules and dire consequences. We cannot rest easy on the polls, as most prognosticators consider the contest to be a dead heat.
It was two weeks before Election Day when I sat in a coffee shop on Commercial Street in Emporia and searched the faces of my fellow Kansans. They were young and old, rich and poor, and many of them wore their political allegiances on their sleeves.
An elderly woman in a four-wheel walker wore a black sweatshirt emblazoned with Trump’s image, first held in protest shortly after the July 13 assassination in Pennsylvania. I didn’t know the woman and decided that asking about her clothes would be intrusive, if not unpleasant.
One person I knew, a middle-aged man with a beard, hurried past the store, probably trying to avoid the woman in the Trump shirt, but I don’t know if he saw her. He was posting several hundred-word articles on Facebook daily about his fears of another Trump presidency and his concerns about the future of democracy. He was also busy inviting others to unfriend him instead of arguing in the comments.
It was a beautiful fall day outside, but inside the coffee shop the election hung over like a toxic cloud that made it hard to breathe. At least, that’s what I thought. Here we were approaching our favorite holiday. Halloween! – but my joy is hampered by polls with margins that have become so close as to be practically non-existent. Not that I trust polls, mind you, but I’m afraid there’s no way to make sampling the modern digital lifestyle work. A wrong poll is worse than no poll at all.
No election is guaranteed, but not so long ago (let’s define it as between 1960 and 2016) there was a reasonable expectation that whichever party won, the republic would survive. Now, there is strong evidence to suggest that the American experiment in democracy could end if Donald Trump wins.
This is not hyperbole.
Recently, Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley both called the former president a fascist. Trump recently doubled down on his pledge, if elected, to use the military against his domestic rivals and to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport millions of immigrants. He has called the January 6 uprising in the US capital a “day of love”, ignoring the destruction and deaths and the conviction of more than 700 people for criminal activities on that day. Trump himself is a criminal, convicted of 34 counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying a porn star.
In my 100th Reflector column in March, I reflected on Americans’ growing fascination with fascism. I’ll repeat something from that column here, because I can’t say it any better:
But ultimately, Trump is not the problem.
The problem is us.
We have allowed ourselves to forget the lessons of 80 years ago that the fascist path ultimately leads not only to death camps for perceived enemies, but to self-destruction. We are breaking with the political and cultural norms that have held Trump’s despots for life and are now flirting with the idea that maybe disruption and violence are good things, creative things. Injustice and contempt for others and satisfying the death wish is an integrated strategy for gaining and maintaining power.
The November 5th election is not so much a battle between two candidates as it is a referendum on American democracy. According to polling, we as a nation are teetering on the brink of indecision, a troubling testament to an identity crisis of national proportions. Who are we as a nation? What truths do we still take for granted, and do they really belong to everyone or just to the few and influential?
The coffee shop scene, full of the everyday and yet so heavy with the weight of future history, made me think of scenes drawn by artists in the distant past. Missouri painter George Caleb Bingham’s “The County Election,” painted in 1852, is a picture of democracy in action. Citizens of all walks of life (well, white citizens) rub shoulders on the courthouse steps to cast their votes, though some are obviously drunk or recovering from fist fights. The original is on display at the St. Louis Museum of Art, which notes on its website, “Bingham reveals what every pro-suffrage American understands: that the democratic ideal must be embraced, even if (uninformed).” Votes can prevail.”
Nearly a century later, regionalist Thomas Hart Benton photographed members of the hooded Ku Klux Klan at a rally with an American flag. Part of Indiana’s social history, Indiana University’s Bloomington campus was the target of student protests in 2017. Although the space along the mural would no longer be a classroom, wise heads recognized that the art was authentic social commentary and the university chose to keep the mural.
Instead of a Bingham or a Benton, what we have now is an endless stream of self-produced digital photography. Selfies and memes dominate political discourse on social media, representing a narcissistic and reductive and perhaps toxic kind of discourse. We still have news images, of course, and the occasional bit of citizen journalism that shapes history, like the Darnella Frazier video of George Floyd’s death, but as Americans in the second decade of the 21st century, our Live experience is mostly done. Exposed We have documented our lives as never before possible, but have missed out on meaningful examination.
Seeing the faces in the coffee shop that day, I wanted to start sketching, to try to capture the mood, to memorialize that feeling the day before the 2024 election so that I could promise myself and others. Let me remind you—or the folly of it
But it would take a portfolio of sketches to try, even if I could draw.
Things change daily. Much of the news is so far removed from the norms of past elections that it all has a dystopian edge, as if our reality had been imagined by Eric Blair or Aldous Huxley.
Of all the things I could cite, none is more mind-bending than the fact that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, a Trump supporter, gives $1 million a day to registered voters in swing states. have been signing petitions supporting the former. and other amendments. The Justice Department has warned Musk — or rather his PAC, which runs the lottery — that the activity could be illegal under federal law.
In addition to the legal question, there is the moral risk for registered voters to hit the lottery and hand out big checks at a partisan rally. This is the Hunger Games equivalent of civic duty. Where are the people, including our own Kris Kobach, who claim to be so concerned about voting integrity, and yet remain silent on such stunts?
At the coffee shop, between electric guitars and a new round of COVID shots, Eric says he feels the same kind of weight I feel about the upcoming election. But, he says, he is confident Harris will win. When I express my doubts, he reminds me that he’s the one who told me Trump would win again in 2016, even though I thought Trump was a joke.
I tell Eric I hope he’s okay.
But here in deep red Kansas, my vote won’t make much of a difference.
As Kansas Reflector opinion editor Clay Weirstone recently pointed out, the Electoral College’s win-all nature would effectively nullify Harris’ half-million votes. Six of the state’s electoral votes will surely go to Trump. The last time Kansas played a role in electing a Democrat to the White House was in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson won by a landslide.
The fact that a handful of undecided voters in seven swing states have come to decide the presidential election is just another absurd aspect of our dystopian reality. Who can be indecisive at this point? What else do they need to learn about candidates? We are held hostage by the least informed and the most indecisive among us, giving the laziest reader in your high school English class a copy of “Ulysses” and their book report. It is equivalent to having a basis for each grade. Or, to put it another way, it would be like asking me to explain the rules of tennis.
While there is no suspense over the presidential election in Kansas, there are plenty of state and local issues on the ballot. Voters could also break the veto-proof Republican supermajority in the Kansas Legislature.
So the cat may still have some surprises in store.
In a 1935 thought experiment, physicist Erwin Schrödinger imagined a hypothetical cat in a sealed box whose fate depended on nuclear decay. The box contains a radioactive material that has a 50% chance of decaying within an hour. If a Geiger counter in the box detects any decay within a set time, a hammer will break a vial of poison, killing the cat. But you don’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box at the end of the hour.
The point of this “ridiculous” experiment, as Schrödinger called it, was to illustrate quantum superposition – the cat is both alive and dead until you look inside the box and the probability waves become reality. I would ask my physics-minded friends to give an overly simplistic explanation of the experiment. Also, I should make it clear that no cats were ever harmed (or eaten by refugees) through Schrödinger’s mental exercise.
By the time this column is published, the election will be just nine days away. There are only 216 hours left in the indefinite stay. Advance voting has begun, with tens of millions of cats locked in boxes across the country awaiting an observation to turn the possibility into reality.
We don’t know ourselves as a country yet. But soon we will.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of those affected by public policies or excluded from the public debate. Find information here, including how to submit your own commentary.