There is one answer to the question of what issue is the most pressing this election cycle: Terror at the threat to what remains of the American democratic experiment should Donald Trump return to office.
Having taught about the United States Constitution for almost 50 years (44 of them at the University of Texas), I am especially sensitive to the fact that Donald Trump — and, sadly, the entire Republican Party with the all-too-few exceptions of people like Liz Cheney and her father, the former vice president under George W. Bush (who, of course, remains resolutely silent) — regularly expresses utter contempt for the basic principles underlying the constitutional order. I’ve watched the Republican Party become the willing agent for packing the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, with Trump surrogates rather than traditional “conservatives.”
Given that Texas is widely viewed as a “red state,” it’s not surprising that the national campaigns are only minimally attentive to our genuine problems. No one should be “satisfied” with the national campaigns produced by the perverse incentives of the electoral college, where almost 90% of the candidates’ attention is focused on half a dozen “battleground states.”
As an elderly professor with tenure, I feel relatively insulated from the actual consequences of the disasters likely to face us in the future, especially with a Trump presidency. But, given that I strongly believe that the Constitution itself is radically defective and is in its own way killing the possibility of a desirable collective future, I have no illusions that a Harris presidency would be the cure for what ails us.
What concerns me far more than my own future is that, particularly, of my grandchildren, i.e., people the age of UT students (and younger). Donald Trump is in many ways a fascist, even if he is certainly not so bad as Adolf Hitler. But he has basically the same contempt for any semblance of truthful analysis or argument and the same commitment to a particular “volk” within the polity. I take seriously the commitments in the Pledge of Allegiance to “liberty and justice for all” and in the Preamble of the Constitution to “establish(ing) justice” and “secur(ing) the blessings of liberty.” We are far from being a “perfect Union,” but Donald Trump and his enablers might well destroy even the possibility of any movement toward those admirable goals.
So every likely reader of these words, far younger and less insulated from adversity than I am, should vote as if their futures depend on preventing the fascist takeover of the White House and the unrestrained exercise of the remarkable, even “dictatorial,” powers held by the modern American President.
Levinson is a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and is the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School.
