It's OK to admit it: You're sick of the election, aren't you? Many of you reading this have already voted, whether by mail or at an early voting site, but the commercials are still running, incessantly, on your TV.
If you are sick and tired of this election, you are not alone. Law.com is running a survey (through October 23) seeking to measure just how this election is impacting your mental health.
What worries me most is the rising fear, indeed a rising expectation, of violence from persons disappointed in the result. Whatever the result may be. The Chicago Police Department is reportedly canceling days off and preparing for 12-hour days immediately after the election. I wrote last month about the Transition Integrity Project "war-gaming" scenarios assuming that President Trump will contest the result of the national election by legal or extra-legal means. Of course, that assumes Trump can't actually win. Most of us assumed that Trump couldn't win in 2016, too. I did.
If Trump loses, there may be riots, commotion, and chaos. If Trump wins, there may be riots, commotion, and chaos. If the result is not clear for days after the election---and, given the unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots in this Year of Never Ending Pandemic, this seems a safe bet---there may also be riots, commotion, and chaos.
It's one thing to have a hotly-contested election. It's quite another to have a hotly-contested election where both sides take pains before the election to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome. As is happening here and now. And then to add the likely prospect of political violence -- well, current events can't help but put one in mind of the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic.
The Roman Republic lasted a long time, dating from 509 B.C., when Lucius Junius Brutus drove the last Roman king, Tarquin, into exile, until sometime after March 15, 44 B.C., when Marcus Junius Brutus, a descendant of that first Brutus, helped to murder a chap by the name of Gaius Julius Caesar.
Some historians date the end of the Republic to 27 B.C. when Julius Caesar's grandnephew Octavian (adopted as Caesar's son by his will) consolidated his power as Princeps, Augustus Caesar, and Imperator, but vestigal Republican forms continued for some time thereafter: Caligula may or may not have sought to appoint his horse as consul, but the office still existed at that time.
But the point is that political violence increasingly plagued Republican Rome in the decades following the final destruction of Carthage and the conquest of Greece, both in 146 B.C.
Roman politicians arose who placed personal ambition ahead of the needs of the State. The courts were increasingly used by election winners to prosecute their predecessors and/or their political opponents. The legitimacy of election outcomes were challenged. When elections were not postponed, or cancelled outright, because of unfavorable auspices (conveniently allowing time for GOTV efforts), violent mobs were increasingly employed to intimidate opposing voters at the polls. The progressive (or radical, depending on which side you were on) legislative proposals of the Gracchi, both eventually victims of political murder, were soon followed by the rise of Marius and then the civil wars between Marius's supporters and the supporters of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Sulla won, and political violence became state violence, as Marian supporters were "proscribed" (murdered wherever they could be found, their properties forfeit to the Roman State). (Young Julius Caesar was a nephew of Marius; he lost his priesthood and his inheritance, but Sulla was persuaded to spare his life, allowing Caesar to embark on his military career.)
Are we entering the last days of our Republic? The Romans of the Late Republic were bedeviled by rising income inequality -- vast gulfs opened, and widened, between the richest citizens, who became masters of huge latifundia, and the poorest, who became increasingly dependent on bread handouts just to survive. Immigration became a vexing problem as the population of Rome swelled and politicians became increasingly embroiled in the question of just who was entitled to claim citizenship. The inability to find peaceful, political solutions to those problems doomed the Roman Republic -- and those issues are eerily echoed in our own. It is easy to lose hope.
But my son, Jim, a middle school history teacher in Markham, recently loaned me a biography of Henry Clay (Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be President, by James C. Klotter). And it has somewhat revived my flagging spirits.
I assume that Clay -- elected Speaker of the House in his freshman term in Congress, 1812 War Hawk, Senator, Secretary of State, advocate of federally-funded internal improvements, opponent of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and of the Mexican-American War, a founder of the Whig Party, and unsuccessful presidential candidate -- needs no introduction for most FWIW readers. If nothing else, Illinois residents should know Clay as Abraham Lincoln's political hero and inspiration.
Reading about Clay's bitter presidential campaigns -- the media disotrions and outright lies, the slanders, the partisan fury and hatred-- helped me remember we've been through this before. Vote fraud, too. In the 1844 election, one Louisiana parish had fewer than 400 registered voters -- and cast well over 1,000 votes for Clay's opponent, James K. Polk. There were contentions that the Democrats were harvesting votes from improperly naturalized Irish immigrants in New York City. There were allegations that new Irish immigrants were being allowed to vote for the Democratic ticket without even bothering with citizenship formalities. Polk narrowly carried New York State, too.
In the election of 1824 the Electoral College really failed -- it not only failed to deliver the victory to the top vote getter, it did not decide the race at all -- and the election was dumped into the House of Representatives, which had to choose among the top three vote getters. Having finished fourth, Clay was not eligible to win. But he helped engineer the victory of John Quincy Adams over William H. Crawford and Andrew Jackson. When Clay was appointed Secretary of State, Jackson supporters claimed Clay and Adams had engaged in a "Corrupt Bargain" and Clay and Jackson, already bitter rivals, became implacable foes. Clay was certain that Jackson would become an American Caesar. But he was wrong. Thankfully.
The point is that, as bitter and vitriolic as politics are this year---and they are---we've been through some really awful national elections before, too. And the nation survived. And we will again.
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