By Chris Satullo
– 30 –
Any journalist of sufficient age can tell you what those four characters used to signify.
– 30 – is what reporters, back in the newsroom days of Underwood typewriters and gluepots, used to type at the end of their copy. That let the composing room know their articles were done; no more sentences to be set into hot type.
– 30 – equals End of Story.
When you vote on Tuesday – and you should vote on Tuesday, if you have not already done so – remember this:
There is only one major political party on your ballot that is eager – avid – to write – 30 – to the story of America as the world’s greatest experiment in representative democracy. There is only one party that wants to write -30 – to the concept of majority rule, to toss it onto the ash heap of history and replace it with authoritarian rule by a self-righteous minority.
There is only one political movement that wants to scribble -30- to the tale of America as a unique nation of immigrants, a tale that has always been fraught with spasms of nastiness and nativism but whose arc has always bent towards acceptance, progress and greater national vitality.
That movement is Trumpism, backed by the no longer Grand Old Party that now has surrendered meekly to its clutches.
I know, I know: The issues that customarily roil and decide our national elections are still very much with us. The economy is scary. I, too, wince when I see what the register at the supermarket tallies once I’m done packing my grocery bags. I, too, groan when I hear how Wall Street – and thus my 401(k) – has done that day.
Gun violence is appalling. I mourn, too, when I learn that another burst of pointless gunfire within miles of my home has taken another human life.
Our public schools do fail kids. For most of my career as a journalist, I covered those cascading failures of wit, wallet and will.
Americans will – and should – have those problems on their minds as they vote. But never in my memory – and I’ve lingered on this American turf for seven decades now – has this topic also been on the ballot:
Do you want this to be the last time your vote for any federal office – for president, for senator, for congressperson – will really count?
My words sound hyperbolic, I know, but this has become the glaring, agonizing fact:
Those running the current Republican party have made it vivid that, if they succeed in these midterms at the state and federal levels, they intend to set up matters so that their candidate for president can never, ever lose again. They also will work as never before to tilt the playing field through voter suppression and gerrymandering so that they will never again surrender the majority in Congress and in red or purple state legislatures. They’d also love to create a way to toss out any gubernatorial election result they don’t like.
(Granted, this crew has a record of incompetence in pursuing their schemes, but their intent is clear. Do you really want to risk that the next set of anti-democracy schemers will be more adroit than the 2020 version?)
All political parties and their politicians shade the truth at times. They all promise things that deep down they know they can’t deliver. They all hype the flaws of the other team while slathering pancake makeup on their own.
But this – the Big Lie about the 2020 election and the toxic stream of follow-up lies it has spawned in this year’s election – this is different.
I’m old. I’ve been around for the Bay of Pigs, for Vietnam, for Watergate and all the -gates to follow, for Iran-contra, for Whitewater and the stained blue dress, for the Iraq war and the Katrina disaster, for Fast and Furious, and the astonishing roster of grifts big and small by the Orange One in his four short but seemingly endless years in the Oval Office.
Nothing in all that compares to the bold, blatant, reckless and relentless lying about the fundamentals of American electoral democracy to which the GOP is now fully committed. Nothing else poses the same existential threat to our democracy – surely not another bad day on the stock markets.
Despite all the hyperbole, all the accusations, all the bogus commissions, all the rejected and defeated lawsuits, all the evidence that whatever infinitesimal level of voter fraud did occur in 2020 was as likely to favor Trump as it was Biden, Republicans still stand on a platform that no election where their guy loses (and it usually is a guy) can be trusted.
So, wherever they hold the power, they intend to put in place unconstitutional machinery to ensure that their governors, their election officers, their state legislators, and their members of Congress can conspire to discard any crucial result where the Democrat got more votes than the Republican.
Yes, they sort of tried that for Donald Trump in 2020, in a bumbling, half-hearted way. They failed. But failure can be a crisp lesson. They don’t intend to be so incompetent the next time. They don’t plan on allowing judges who retained a quaint respect for the Constitution and the rule of law to thwart them.
That’s why they are so fierce in their telling of the usual election-time lies about their opponents – about Biden and Pelosi and Fetterman’s aphasia and inflation and critical race theory and a crime rate that’s actually about 60 percent of what it was in Ronald Reagan’s America.
And that’s why they double, triple and quadruple down on the ridiculous, nihilistic Big Lie that the last election was stolen by massive Democratic vote fraud.
They just have to win this election – so that they can rework the machinery of democracy so that they won’t lose the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Deep down they know they are outnumbered. They know that demographic changes in America – the continuation of its inspiring story of attraction, arrival and eventual acceptance (after turmoil and pain) – are a slow-tolling death knell for the kind of country they prefer.
They know that their old pet ideas – dismantle Social Security and Medicare, let corporations do whatever they want while cutting their taxes – are not popular even with their own voters when put into practice. They know that, while they are tremendous at complaining about government, they are terrible at actually running one, so all their victories tend to be short-lived.
Simply put, they know their days of winning fair elections are soon to be over.
So they’ve decided, the hell with fair elections. The hell with democracy. The hell with pretending that all the Americans whose skin hue or place of origin differs from their own are legitimate Americans with rights and a sacred electoral franchise. The hell with accepting the will of the people and surrendering power.
This is their new idea: Let’s just pretend that the other side is just so evil and violent and un-American and illegitimate that we are justified in shouting any lies, in perverting any election law, to ensure we can grasp power this time around, so that we never have to cede power ever again.
Like the authoritarian regimes around the world they have come to so admire, they hope to play it this way: One person, one vote, one time…then, we’re in charge. Forever.
This is what many Trumpist strategists and candidates believe – with other, milder Republicans somehow numbly, culpably going along.
Yes, the economy is scary, pandemic trauma lingers, gunfire is too common, and the planet just seems generally haywire. The question in this election, however, is not whether you’re thrilled with how the world is going, or how Joe Biden is handling his challenges. The question is whether you’re OK with this being the last election where your vote will actually count.
If you’re not, then swallow whatever qualms and quarrels you may have with Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and vote for the candidates of the only party that, for all its maddening flaws, has proven it’s willing to accept a losing result, the only one that’s OK with letting American democracy proceed on its sometimes messy, sometimes disappointing, but ultimately inspiring path.
Don’t let the liars and schemers write -30- to the Constitution.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia