Fred Weinberg: Even if Things Go Bad in November, the Republic Will Survive Joe Biden
Every presidential election year, regular readers of this space hear me say that this is not the most consequential election in our history, that the only certainty in our world is that come Feb. 14, 2021, at the Daytona International Speedway, the national anthem will be sung, 40 cars will start their engines and the 63rd Great American Race will begin.
That no matter who wins in the championship showdown between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the end of the republic is not nigh.
Of course, given the most recent mad cow virus politicization, the race may run without in-person spectators, as did last week’s postponed Indy 500 — the other great American race.
We will have already sworn in our president and he will be busy fixing (or continuing to fix, depending on who wins) the wreckage left over from the mad cow virus, the morons who think a republic can exist without law enforcement and the so-called antifa, which is actually so fascist that both Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler surely must be spinning in their graves.
But with all of our problems, no matter who wins, the republic will endure, just like the Daytona 500.
Now before you run howling to your keyboards to tell me how dare I trivialize the most important election in our times, let me continue a few paragraphs with what I have to say.
Every election cycle, about this time, someone tells me that the end of the republic is nigh if so and so wins, and I have to sit them down and tell them that the American political system has something in common with the Daytona International Speedway — self-cleaning banks.
For those of you who are not even casual NASCAR fans, Daytona — and, by the way, Big Bill France did build that without any help from the government — is banked so sharply that when there is a wreck, the cars tend to slide down into the infield; hence the term “self-cleaning banks.”
America declared its independence on July 4, 1776. We were the product of a revolution fomented by 56 angry white guys, one of whom signed his name so big that the British king could see it without his glasses.
We have never been (and may never be) a perfect nation, and we struggled for a fairly long time after the revolution to find a formula that worked for the long haul. Our Founding Fathers found that formula in a form of gridlock.
Much of the genius in the Constitution is that our Founding Fathers came up with a three-pronged solution that does not allow anybody to drive the nation too far too quickly, even if they think that one race is somehow more important than the rest.
That formula has allowed an otherwise imperfect nation, filled with the likes of, well, us, and our ancestors, to survive as the longest-lived experiment in self-government.
In short, our political system has developed self-cleaning banks. Push us too far in one direction, get us into a wreck, and the system has the capacity to right itself.
It’s not a perfect system. That three-pronged solution has calcified to the point where there is way too much self-interest amongst the players and this presidential election has become so ugly because of that.
The political parties deserve much of the blame. They have become something of a wannabe shadow government and are no longer well-received by the average voter. The almost-success of Bernie Sanders should not be taken lightly by anyone.
Trump was qualified to do the job on day one because he was already successful in business, not politics.
If there is one thing this campaign has done, it is to make the average voter — you and me — very aware of what is at risk. Every election is the most important election on the day it is held.
But it will take a whole lot more than Donald Trump or Joe Biden to destroy the republic. Barack Obama proved that.
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