With less than a week to go before Election Day, let’s talk about expectations, specifically the common expectation that this shouldn’t be a close race. 

The idea usually comes from liberals and Democrats, who believe that Donald Trump is such a uniquely dangerous threat to democracy, liberty and the rule of law that it boggles the mind to see him running dead-even with Kamala Harris.

The foremost problem is that liberals and Democrats presume too much. They presume that all Americans, by dint of being American, believe in democracy. They think that if Trump and the Republicans would stop “playing politics,” they’d snap out of their rightwing fever. 

They won’t, however, because they are not “playing politics.” This is their politics. They look at other human beings, but do not see other human beings. They see something less than human, animals perhaps, or vermin, that deserve not respect as much as annihilation. Cheating is acceptable. Violence is, too. Anything’s permissible when you are convinced that your enemy’s victory threatens your very existence. 

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This is not to say that they do not believe in democracy. They do, but it’s an exclusive kind, one just for them – a democracy for white people. This is not to say that they don’t believe in equality. They do, but it’s an exclusive kind – an equality between men. Women have their place in society, but it’s always subordinate to a man’s place.

Where liberals and Democrats make a mistake is in presuming that universal democracy is the rule of American politics and that “playing politics” is the radical departure from it. It isn’t a departure, because universal democracy isn’t the rule. It’s one kind of politics, the good kind, that is necessary in the fight against the bad kind of politics.

The bad kind of politics didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It won’t end with him either, not even if Kamala Harris defeats him. Millions of people in this country are going to vote for him, because they want what they believe he represents, and that’s not a shame in the way some liberals and Democrats say. It is, rather, just the way things are.

What Trump has done is bring out into the open the bad politics that had previously been hidden under the surface of the Republican Party. As long as it lay hidden, where Republicans could plausibly deny its existence, the good kind of politics could be deprived of a good fight. 

But now that the bad kind of politics is out in the open, and now that it’s on brink of destabilizing nearly 250 years of democratic progress in America, the good kind of politics has a chance to settle the score, and establish a new national consensus in which universal democracy is, if not the rule, then the political norm against which the bad kind of politics will face a serious numerical disadvantage over decades. 

More than 20,000 people showed up for Donald Trump’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, the site of the last major fascist rally in 1939. But more than 75,000 people showed up for Kamala Harris’ rally last night at the Ellipse in Washington, the starting point of Trump’s attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government in 2021. 

It’s a pattern in our history. Whenever the fascists come out of the shadows, anti-fascists stand ready to face them. Heather Cox Richardson wrote that, “in 1939, as about 18,000 American Nazis rallied inside Madison Square Garden, newspapers reported that a crowd of about 100,000 anti-Nazis gathered outside to protest. It took 1,700 police officers, the largest number of officers ever before detailed for a single event, to hold them back from storming the venue.”

Trump wanted a show of force with a rally in the media capital of the world, said Jonathan V Last. But then Harris turned out nearly four times as many. “This is the kind of power Trump understands,” Last said. “And I suspect that when he saw her crowd, he lost his shit.”

I don’t want to make too much of crowd sizes, but the difference between 20,000 people and 75,000 people is probably similar to the difference between the public’s perception of the election and the reality of it, which is to say: It’s probably not as close as it seems. 

It looks close, because national polling averages make it seem so, and they make it seem so, because rightwing pollsters game the polling averages by manufacturing numbers favorable to rightwing politics.

The election looks close, moreover, because the Washington press corps habitually plays along with rightwing politics, thus giving the impression that Harris is doing worse than she actually is. (Consider the dust-up over Joe Biden’s “garbage” comment. He didn’t say what he’s said to have said, but Harris is being forced to deny it anyway.)

And the election looks close because the waves of disinformation and lies that have been coming from the Kremlin are amplified by Trump, the Republicans, the rightwing media apparatus and the world’s richest man, who has himself reportedly met with Vladimir Putin. 

If the race is indeed close, liberals and Democrats would benefit from reassessing their assumptions and realizing that they may be taking for granted past victories over the question of whether democracy should remain the exclusive kind or be expanded to be universal. To say the race shouldn’t be this close may sound savvy and sophisticated, but what it actually does is overlook the necessity of political combat. 

No one in power ever gave freedom. 

Freedom has always been taken from those in power.

It’s a pattern in our history.

“Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant,” Harris said on the Ellipse Tuesday night. 

“Across the generations,” she said, “Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing, proved to the world that a government of, by and for the people is strong and can endure.” 

She added: “The patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall, on farmlands and factory floors … did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms … only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.”

No, they didn’t. 

I hope we will rise to the occasion again.