Nov. 3, 2020: The moonshot referendum on America
The 2020 election has been touted as a referendum on President Trump. It’s no such thing. This vote will be a survey of our tolerance for intolerance, our bandwidth for bullshit. It’s nothing less than a referendum on ourselves.
“Elections have consequences.” Those three words, deployed with acid and venom in recent years by loyalists of either Democratic or Republican parties, convey a truism that’s run through the length of our national history, by turns for better and for worse. You can imagine that sentence, or something like it, being said in 1860 by northerners and southerners alike when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency –- each for vastly different reasons. But the phrase itself has a punitive modernity that makes it, more probably, an invention of the last twenty years, some earlier period preceding the high dudgeon of our current politics in the Age of Smashmouth.
For America, one consequence of the 1960 presidential election — the choice of the young, vibrant, Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy to be the 35th president of the United States — was a willingness to indulge the nation’s new chief executive in his quixotic expressions of seemingly impossible dreams. Like the one he expressed in a timely, and ultimately timeless speech that began our serious flirtation with space, that final frontier.
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The address by President Kennedy at Rice University Stadium in Houston, Texas, in September 1962, has long imprinted itself on the American psyche, reflecting as it does the gung-ho, national emotional trademark. “The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard,” Kennedy said on that warm day in Texas. The Rice speech was a gauntlet throwdown, exactly the mile marker of American audacity required to jolt the slightly nervous, still-indolent era in which it was uttered.
The word “moonshot” has, and rightly, attained its main usage in the context of the apparently improbable. Everything from cancer vaccines to the tunnel under the English Channel has been tagged as a moonshot venture; the term’s been most recently used in the hopeful context of the development of a coronavirus vaccine.
Consider the word, its power, its recognition of that ratio of reach to grasp. The word is structurally aspirational (like its older brother phrase long shot, but bigger, wider by orders of magnitude). The word is astronomically optimistic by definition; there’s no way to use it without invoking hope against very long odds.
There may be no more appropriate time for a new moonshot, an effort to, as the late Georgia congressman John Lewis put it, “redeem the soul of the nation.” It’s a time to reflect on the vote not as a theoretical exercise of democracy but as a proven, reliable means to ensure and advance democracy — if we use the damn thing.
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Using that lever of change this year means embracing the risk of changing our national leadership, a leadership whose demolition of norms and traditions, its toxic, behind-the-hand endorsements of the exclusionary spirit of white supremacy, have taken this nation a long way from its founding ideals and principles.
Just as President Kennedy called the nation to summon the collective spirit to close the distances of space in order to better understand the mysteries of the universe, John Lewis performed that role for a similar but vastly different undertaking: To close the space between ourselves as Americans.
To do that, to close or narrow that gap between our sacred aspirations and our quotidian realities, requires an investment in the civic machinery that’s available to us. In our participatory democracy, that means using the vote as a practical, reliable means of effecting the change we want. And this, the willingness to use it, to pay it more than lip service — the willingness to show up — is the moonshot we’re each responsible for.
To vote means walking away from the fashionable, reflexive cynicism that privately captivates us. It’s a commitment to announce oneself as present and accounted for, to stand as part of the grand scheme of things. Even if the grand scheme of things doesn’t go your way.
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All due props to Kennedy, but his Rice University speech might have gone further in its scope, its daring, and its reach. His oration fell short, if marginally, of the wellspring of aspiration that inspired it. An achievement like that proposed by JFK in 1962 could never be effectively motivated merely by the metrics of degrees of difficulty.
We chose to go to the moon and to do the other big, Sisyphean, seemingly impossible things not because they were easy or because they were hard. We did them because they were necessary — because the pursuit of the grand and unimagined objective is central to who and what we are as human beings; because the pursuit of progress is written in capital letters on the human genome; because the pursuit of discovery is as basic, as existentially foundational, as you drawing your next breath.
And that indomitable aspect of our character didn’t stop with multiple journeys to our nearest satellite body. It continues in our everyday pursuits, in our various unending efforts to live lives that matter.
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Today, those efforts include saving this nation from its worst, most atavistic impulses, and putting in the hard work of moving our ideals into realities, making real the Idea of America in a way we never have before.
The election now underway has been tirelessly touted as a referendum on Donald Trump. It’s nothing of the kind. We’ve been having referenda on President* Trump since the day he took office. The most recent formal referendum on the president came in 2018, when Republicans lost majority status in the House of Representatives, in a vote that soundly repudiated Trumpist beliefs and views, undercutting the Trump agenda and ethnically democratizing the People’s House in one shot.
The vote this year will be something else again. The names of Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be on the ballots still being processed (never mind the 101 million ballots cast before the election), but a frank assessment of the political landscape shows what’s really on the ballot, sight unseen but apparent just the same.
This presidential election will be a survey of our tolerance for intolerance, our capacity for self-dealing, our bandwidth for bullshit. This election will be nothing less, and nothing other, than a referendum on America. A referendum on ourselves.
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And with good reason: There’s so much available evidence. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” Maya Angelou once observed, and now we can see we weren’t paying enough attention to the self-revelatory Donald Trump. For years he’s told us his true nature, revealed his true self. From the late 70’s to the moment he began his descent on that Trump Tower staircase in June 2015, we’ve internalized his gilded braggadocio, the relentless aggression that’s basic to his style today.
We’ve known for years he was a bully and a grifter with an indifferent allegiance to the truth, a reflexively intolerant showman who didn’t pay his bills … and we elected him anyway.
Over the years, we discovered he was a wanton racialist firebrand willing to seek the execution of innocent men despite their exoneration; we witnessed his womanizing, his appetite for porn stars, and a general perspective of women and their lives that was straight from the locker room; we watched him become an ardent birther trafficking in the charlatan exercise of objectifying Barack Obama as a foreigner.
We knew all of this … and we elected him president anyway.
With what we’ve learned about Donald Trump over decades of his profligate, bellicose, bankrupt life in the public sphere — and considering our decision to elect him president of the United States in spite of all of it — how can the current election be anything except a referendum on our state of mind as a nation (as opposed to his state of mind as a president)?
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We’ve long gotten inured to the idea that (with few exceptions, and only when provoked by exceptional events and circumstances) America will never change. In doing that, in adopting that thinking, we make absolutely certain that America never will. This election, that perspective isn’t really a luxury.
Moonshot thinking is no longer an option, a go-for-broke nicety, an indulgence of visionaries. Confronting myriad challenges to our health, our health care, our environment, our peace of mind, our identity as Americans, we now face what happens when a moonshot is not so much a choice as an imperative, not so much a decision as an existential necessity.
We launch that rocket, we take that shot, when we vote. Exercising the franchise is to resist that narcotic of stasis, the paralyzing status quo. Choosing to vote is what made this nation viable; its viability is reinforced whenever you stand in that line, or return that ballot in the mail. It’s as necessary of this nation in 2020 as the literal moonshots that preceded it in the ’60s and ’70s, and just as central to the country’s identity and its future.
And using the vote, in this and every election, is to engage in what John Lewis called “necessary trouble,” the ultimately benign social action that brooks no compromise of its existence, or accepts any walk-back of the scope of its intentions; the civic agitation that advances our society and fosters our commonality. And like the predecessor moonshot, our votes are events within the process, the journey that irrevocably, inevitably transforms the United States of America.
