When my generation was growing up, people couldn’t vote until we reached the age of 21. Accordingly, my first time was in 1968, one of the most chaotic election years in U.S. history up until then. Two major figures, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the latter of whom was a leading candidate for president, were assassinated.
Demonstrations in Chicago during the Democratic convention turned violent that summer when the city’s notorious strongman mayor, Richard Daley, dispatched his police force. I knew a number of the demonstrators who were beaten in the ensuing confrontations.
At that point, the country felt as if it might come apart.
I was initially among those who doubted whether voting even mattered, but I voted anyway. And over the ensuing decades, in election after election, I have voted again and again.
Sometimes the candidates and measures I supported won; sometimes they lost. Gradually over the years, I developed a deep respect for the process, even though it has been weakened by dark money and the purveyors of extremist propaganda.
Maybe that’s why I hold out a ray of hope that a majority of voters will continue to reject election deniers in upcoming elections, helping to preserve the integrity of the voting process.
Because once we no longer trust that our votes will be counted accurately and honestly, we no longer will believe this is a democracy, however imperfect.
The cruel irony, of course, is this is exactly what has happened to those who buy the myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen — that Trump did not lose — even though there is absolutely no shred of evidence whatsoever that that was the case.
Such is Trump’s stain on history. He lied and cheated and then, when he lost anyway, he sold his supporters the big lie that the other side had been the cheating side.
Thanks to this tyrant, we now stand at a crossroads. With this in mind, every citizen should vote accordingly.
(An earlier version of this essay appeared one year ago.)
Read also: “The Warnings About Trump in 2024 Are Getting Louder” (New Yorker).
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