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Joking with my students, at Princeton University or Datalab Luiss, I tell them that the first American election campaign I covered as a journalist was the one that saw Republican Abraham Lincoln oppose and former Democratic General George McClellan, 1864. Historic Election, Democrats They wanted to end the war with the South against slavery, immediately for the radical wing of the Copperheads, after a negotiation for the moderates, but the idea of destroying the Confederate South, as Lincoln planned with his Generals Grant and Sherman, was disputed. Lincoln won by 2,218,388 votes against the arrogant McClellan’s 1,812,807, the country was still small and only a small minority had the right to vote, because African Americans were also expected to vote on the 14th amendment to the Constitution, in 1868, women they played later, with the 19th Amendment, in 1919. And, historians say, assigning victory to Lincoln was perhaps only the conquest of the southern city of Atlanta, which restored enthusiasm to the Republicans, otherwise the anti-slave emancipation party might have prevailed.
Just kidding, more modestly my first live election was as a student of the Master of Journalism at Columbia University, 1984, Republican President Ronald Reagan, like this year, competing against a former Vice President, Democrat Walter “Fritz” Mondale . Legendary Professor Donald Shanor took the children from his seminary to New Hampshire, where the primary schools began after the Iowa caucuses. He divided the area around Manchester with a pencil on a map, and each of us, block by block, we had to knock on the door of the rural houses and ask “Excuse me sir, who do you vote for?” A great lesson in American politics that in my life has served me more than many academic seminars and articles from solo think tanks. In the reliable rubber boots of the duck hunter, LL Beans, wallowing in the sleet and mud, we saw the door slam shut in the face, threatened with a shotgun, explaining that the “Misters” voted so or not for sophistication. . Cold War Strategies from a brilliant geopolitical magazine, but because taxes on the crop were increasing, the governor did not listen to them in certain dam to repair, the oil for the tractors was too expensive. Since then I have seen so many, and perhaps once worth telling you, Gary Hart, who wins surprise in New Hampshire “Confidence, confidence and then victory!”, Reagan, who invites Republicans to focus on values, not on the fear in 1992, his father’s young Bush trusted adviser who, just a few years earlier, drunk, instead wanted to hit the Clinton plane, a kind of mobile party in the air, the passion and courtesy of John McCain , Hillary Clinton’s illness, Trump’s victorious chaos.
The questions were many: “Why don’t Americans vote?” the scholar Frances Fox Piven wondered“Why isn’t there a socialist party in America?” urged the historian Martin Lipset . “Why are two California counties, Orange and Marin, identical in class, ethnicity and society, one conservative and the other progressive?” asked political scientist Bill Schneider. And to each question we sought an answer, with the effort of a chronicler, often marveling at the blissful indifference of so many Americans who, while foreigners were delighted with the Reagan-Mondale television duel, with the historic Reagan joke, accused of being an old man to reply laughing “I’m not going to raise the issue of my rival’s youth and inexperience …”, entertaining Mondale himself, the Americans fell asleep unaware..
That dream was, in reality, not a feeling of mistrust or alienation, but a feeling of deep trust in the system. We started voting late, after 35, when we were children we thought about studying, at work: still in 2016, in my class at Princeton, asking how many had voted in the morning, I only saw a pair of hands go up. For many, the economy counted more than politics, for emancipation, as an individual and as a community. It is not that there was no militancy and commitment, when I had to read, signed by the eternal holographic trombones, that the Conventions were “American”, I went crazy, they were a laboratory of platforms, new leaders, ideals, interests, each group full of ferment, ideas, agreements, although in the roar of the bands and the smell of hot dogs and poor birraccia (what nostalgia, this year everything online, frigid, not even a sandwich with chorizo and peppers, thinking about the weather, Korea , NATO). But of course a large chunk of the population didn’t even bother to register at the polls, Democrats, Republicans, independents to vote.
Sunday night so my faithful 1010 win radio news, the taxi drivers, he informed me, a caravan of Trumpian militants blocked the Garden State Parkway, towards the bridge dedicated to the former governor of New York Mario Cuomo and nobody really knew why, protest, demonstration, rally ? A few days ago, through Central Park in Manhattan, a group of “Jews for Trump” paraded with flags and megaphones, I had not seen one in years, against the closure of Covid 19, raising insults and reactions from leftist militants. , with former mayor Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, blowing the fire. A bus carrying Joe Biden’s election campaign leaders was intercepted in Texas, from San Antonio to Austin, by a convoy of Trumpians who, by some accounts, attempted to stop, perhaps even pull the convoy off the road. from the opposition, to the police intervention: the FBI has opened an investigationbut the president tweets “These patriots have done nothing wrong, the FBI investigates the anarchists” and in the last meeting he jokes “They escorted them, they protected them, we are good people… ” .
Today we vote in the United States and the passion, this time, would have shaken even the rational Professor Shanor: in Manhattan, as in many cities, the windows, from the luxury boutiques of Madison Avenue to the family-owned wineries of the Bronx, are barred by boards of wood. wood, there are fears of riots, violence, after those of the last few months. Right-wing militiamen in arms would be willing to take to the streets, on the left in the chats that are evoked by the opposing police services, the peaceful eve of the past, when millions of Americans went to sleep, asking their wife sleepily in the morning or husband. “Who then won the White House?” is a distant memory.
However, in the 19th century, Europeans saw US politics, punching, fighting, gangs of mobsters yelling, yes Jules Verne, to stop their intrepid British knight Phileas Fogg, hero of “Around the World in 80 Days “Creates the showdown between MPs Mandiboy and Kamerfield.” The shouts echoed everywhere. Long live Kamerfield! Hooray for Mandiboy! “I suppose it’s a contest, a ‘meeting’ as they call it here, for the election of some senior military or civilian official, or even a member of Congress, judging from the animation you see “… Around therethe turmoil reached a paroxysm. All hands were in the air; some stiffly clenched into fists rose and fell rapidly and frequently, as screams erupted around them and the number of black top hats visibly dwindled … two noble champions facing each other, Mr. Kamerfield and Mr. Mandiboy. The “cheers” seasoned with insults doubled. The flagpole became an offensive weapon. No more hands – bumps everywhere. From the top of the blocked carriages and buses there was an exchange of insults and a launch of blunt instruments: boots and shoes described very tense trajectories in the air. Even a few revolver shots were mixed with the deafening cry that sounded like the voice of the rough sea. ”
Verne’s fantasy, electoral America as the Far West, is back today. The Axios site fears that Trump will not wait for all the ballots sent by mail to be counted, for example in the crucial state of Pennsylvania, but will proclaim himself the winner, according to Tuesday, by open voting, which will trigger a serious crisis institutional. The Republican campaign denies the Axios scoop and ensures that Trump will abide by the rules, but with the judges having assigned various deadlines, deadlines, to complete the dispossession, doubts, uncertainties, chaos are possible, unless an avalanche of voting in favor of one of the two contenders that few polls, so far,let us foresee. The president threatens to unleash a mob of lawyers, expecting a defeat in the appeal to the Supreme Court, where he has a comfortable majority of 6 out of 9 judges and announces that he will not allow the classic peaceful transition between parties “Maybe they gave me a transition peaceful? -Learning your loyal crowd- No. Obama and Biden spied on my campaign, why should I leave them alone? ”The White House has appointed a respected professional, Chris Liddell, to lead the transition that traditionally has ensured the smooth transition of power. Liddell already held the post in 2012, representing Republican Senator Mitt Romney, defeated by Obama, but the cautious Mormon Romney is not Trump. A Democrat involved in the “transition” process explains to the Huffington Post that “Trump has already threatened to fire Dr. Tony Fauci, director of the Institute of Infectious Diseases who contradicts him on Covid 19, and could dismiss ministers who have not They have been fully supported, including the Defense. We have hired a legion of lawyers to thwart the Republican maneuvers. After the polls, the courts ”.
Two irreducible Americas clash today and the losers will long ponder the fraud, the clique, the conspiracies. You know the polls, Biden has an 88% chance of winning, Trump a dozen, narrow but viable path. Or the polls, for the second time in four years, could be wrong again, proof that the thermometer has been broken and there are blood spirits, passions of Kamerfield and Mandiboy, that the ruling class, the media, the experts can no longer. detect.
If reelected, President Trump will feel empowered to move on down the harsh and disparaging path of his even more populist and nationalist election campaign.. Biden, if successful, will try to take some united steps, but it will not be easy for him, facing the Republican wall against the wall in and in his own wingfromdemocratic path.
I look at the barricades in peaceful New Jersey, whose sky plates on Saturday nights are ridiculed by Manhattan thugs as provincials, “Go back to Joirsy” in the tough talk downtown, I look at the barred windows of once gleaming Manhattan, I read About Walmart department stores pulling guns and ammunition off the shelves, an old friend, daughter of a diplomat, complains “My husband bought a gun, for the first time,” I wonder, as in Rome 1978, if I will write about politics this night. or from shootings in the streets, I perceive that Europeans, Italians at the helm, have not fully grasped, due to cynicism, provincialism or provincial cynicism, the 2020 American tragedy and I do not dare to extinguish 1010 Victories even tonight, not even after from the last vote, tricking me to see the latest news, even asleep.
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