We met Barbara, Frank, Chad, Joey, and Patty canvassing at the polling place. A few things are clear from interviewing them.
The belief that Democrats somehow sullied the 2020 election for their favor is not only widespread, but mainstream among Republicans. Frank encouraged me to watch D'Souza's 2000 Mules. They seemed confident it would convince me of wrongdoing. (The movie traces the paths of cellphones around cities past several ballot boxes, and reviews some footage of people dropping more than one ballot in a dropbox, or dropping a ballot with gloves on, or photographing the ballot box, and presents this as evidence of election tampering. It never links the paths to individuals in the footage and never shows an individual dropping ballots in more than one box. D'Souza remains an unimpressive douche canoe who makes bad faith arguments that Democrats are white supremacists and lazy arguments for the existence of God, and who did not deserve the pardon that Trump granted him.)
The Republican Party of John McCain and Dwight Eisenhower no longer exists. Frank named Brian Kemp, Brad Raffensberger, and George W. Bush as Republicans in name only (RINOs). There is no more fair play or good faith. They want officials who will protest, obstruct, and overturn undesirable election results. They want officials who will throw the rulebook at opponents when convenient and throw it in the fire when expedient. They want brutality and hegemony for their theocratic and parochial ideals.
I spoke with Chad about fetal personhood. I will admit that the one point he got me to pause was when i said that a fetus cannot form memories or anticipate pain, and he asked if it would be okay to kill a blackout-drunk person. I realize why this tripped me up: it would be more merciful to kill a person while intoxicated than when sober and alert; everybody hopes to die in their sleep. But it would still cause insurmountable distress for the people who count on and love that person. At a societal level, a society that permits murder of highly-intoxicated people would descend into chaos, while a society that provides healthcare to women thrives. He did, when i asserted that many women seek abortions when other forms of birth control fail, stoop to the level of slut-shaming, though he did it in an endearing way.
These people do not think at the societal level. Everything is conceptualized at the individual or family level. Joey, a self-described anarchist who had wrapped the spare tire on her Jeep® with a cover that reads "Taxation is Theft," frustrated me with her virulent anti-vaccine sentiments. She refused to see the benefits at the level of public health that justify many vaccination campaigns. She got me to say "What the fuck?" when she asserted that the manufacturers of the Covid vaccines wrote in their applications for approval that the vaccines do not prevent Covid.
Talking to these people was exhausting. But the saving grace was that we were able to talk about other things. Barbara knew a lot about trains, and Chad seemed to have worked on or around railroads. Both Chad and Joey were into mushroom foraging. I was able to walk away with a personal respect for most of these people. My anger is reserved for disinformation networks, bad faith leaders, and motivated reasoning.
—Lucas