The Most Important Election...Not

By Crispin Sartwell

"This election is the most important in my adult life": thus spake more or less everyone, Democrat or Republican, Pulitzer-prize winner or maintenance man.

And I see why they say it. It really does feel like a crossroads in American history, where not only are we at war but our definition of ourselves - our freedom and our decency and our role in the world - are at stake. And the activity around the election is correspondingly frantic.

There's a fantasy in which a nation reaches a rendezvous with destiny, and a leader appears with the guts and intensity to bring us through the crisis. This would be the moment for that sort of thing.

What it is, instead, is a moment of unadulterated bathos, a moment of absurdist theater in which you issue the war cry even as you run away as fast as you can. To come to this moment and not have the choice of a candidate who stands for peace or freedom or truth - to reach this moment in our history and face a choice between George Bush and John Kerry - is a refutation not only of the Federalist Papers or the two-party system, but of ourselves.

The closest analogy is 1968: a country at war and a nation divided. And a choice between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, both enthusiastic and incoherent prosecutors of the war in Vietnam. The Democratic party and its voters could have nominated a peace candidate. Then as now, they were restrained by nothing but sheer cowardice.

Then as now: a nation in crisis, an absolute failure of nerve.

Millions of people were profoundly alienated by that choice and that process. The riots connected to the Democratic convention were wholly appropriate: had they fried the party of cowardice in its hall, it would have been a richly-deserved fate that might have helped save the people of Vietnam and pre-empt the ridiculous spectacle of November 2, 2004.

The Democratic party courts such a fate now. Of course, they may well lose, which I guess is the only thing, finally, that they actually care about. But they also invite or rather demand the utter alienation of anyone with any sort of ideas or ideals. I pray that the division that now expresses itself as a division between parties quickly mutates after the election into a schism of both parties against people who value freedom, despise lies and equivocation, and denounce American expansionism and its cost in human life.

If that's the outcome, this is an important election. But as it looks from here, it's a battle of evil against cowardice, stupidity against mediocrity, speaking a lie against being a lie, war against war. Insofar as it's not sheer delusion, this election is trivial.