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The 2020 Election: A Plebiscite
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2020-03-09 22:14:39
We were a family divided. My son, his wife and I supported Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary until she dropped
out last week while my husband and daughter plan to vote for Bernie Sanders. Despite these differences, we’ve all pledged
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to “vote Blue no matter who” in the general election. fter the GOP-
controlled Senate refused to hear witnesses and remove the president from an office he has abused, the president
subsequently fired subpoenaed House witnesses along with their family members and imposed collective punishment on the
residents of New York State by rescinding our Global Entry eligibility. And I’ve come to believe that the November 2020
election is fundamentally not a choice between one candidate or another but an up-or-down vote on the very existence of
democracy. In other words, a plebiscite like the one in Chile in 1988, when the people voted between keeping General
Augusto Pinochet as supreme dictator for ten more years or beginning the 18-month transition to a democratically-elected
government. I’d like to focus on one of the measures imposed by an abusive leader allowed to remain in office to continue
his abuse — the punishment of the entire family for the perceived misdeeds of one member. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman,
who testified in the House impeachment proceedings following a subpoena, was dismissed one day after the Senate vote,
and his twin brother, Yegveny, who had nothing to do with the impeachment, lost his job as well. Tyrants and totalitarian
governments punish entire families because it generates fear and enlists the family in keeping each individual in line. Who
would become a dissident, or defect to a freer land, if they knew parents, siblings, and children would pay the price? Kim
Jong Un, a dictator the president admires, executes family members of defectors; this is how he maintains the cooperation of
North Korean slave laborers shipped to other countries to raise hard currency for his economically isolated and flailing
regime. When Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes defied the Salazar dictatorship to sign 30,000 exit visas for
Jews and others in France in 1940 following the Nazi occupation, his brother’s property was seized and all 15 of his children
were blacklisted from education and employment. Facing lives of restriction and poverty, most of his children left Portugal.
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ama ’ Bik Many commentators concerned about the assault on democracy in the United
States have pointed to the president’s models — Russia under Putin, Turkey under Erdogan, Hungary under Orban, Poland
under the Law and Justice Party. Certainly we are moving in that direction, and 2020 is our last chance to stop our slide into
dictatorship. But I’d like to invite another perspective, that of the brave people of Chile who contested their dictator’s rule in
a plebiscite with a joyful, funny, forward-looking campaign. The Democratic candidates have policies — things like
Medicare for All that some of us would like to see while others are concerned about its cost or the repercussions of
rebuilding the health care system from the ground up — but the 2020 election isn’t about that. It’s about whether the
imperfect democracy that we’ve worked to perfect through the various movements for civil rights will continue, or whether
we will replace it with the kind of regime against which our ancestors fought and died nearly seventy years ago.
