About a year ago, David Rothkopf posted an article (“About That Asteroid Hurtling Toward Earth…Everything Seems Fine Until It Doesn’t”) which really made an impression on me, and I wanted to revisit it in light of disturbing signs I’m seeing with just 9 days until Virginia Democrats hold important primary elections for Lt. Governor, Attorney General and – in several districts – House of Delegates candidates. But first, what struck me from Rothkopf’s piece was these observations:
- Walking through his “bucolic green slice of suburbia” last June, Rothkopf noted people doing normal “bucolic green slice of suburbia” things – “bleary-eyed men and women in matching Lululemon clothes walking their dogs, see families packing their kids off to school, and just around every gentle bend in the road, you could hear the soundtrack of American prosperity, a chorus of leaf blowers shrieking as they helped ensure none of my lawyer or government official neighbors had an out of place blade of grass on their front walkway.” And, he wrote, “the whole spectacle gave me the creeps.”
- And why, exactly, did this spectacle give him the creeps? Because, “this peaceful, comfortable, banality was foreshadowing some sort of doom—that we were living through that moment of blissful obliviousness that inevitably precedes catastrophe…Everyone was acting as though there were no great threat on the horizon. Everyone was behaving as though their lives might not be radically changed, upended, possibly worse, in the blinking of an eye. Here where I live, about four miles from the White House, it seemed that my neighbors just did not have a clue that life in America as they had known it all their lives could end in just a few months.“
So now, a year later, I’m feeling the exact same “creeps” as David Rothkopf felt a year ago. For starters, the “catastrophe” that Rothkopf (and many others, myself included) warned about last June has, sadly, come to pass, with Trump getting elected, being inaugurated, and immediately setting out to do what he said he’d do – get revenge/retribution; be a dictator “on day 1”; wage war on the environment, on immigrants, on minorities, on the constitution, on the rule of law, on the federal government; implement the extremist Project 2025 agenda; ditch our allies and instead do Putin’s bidding; start ruinous trade wars; you name it. And yes, we were warned – many, many, many times.
But did people listen to these warnings? Some did, but for sure. But a lot were tuned out of the news entirely, getting their (dis)information mostly from right-wing “echo chambers,” more interested in watching TikTok videos or whatever – anything but focusing on our democracy. And, bottom line, as David Rothkopf put it a year ago, many people are “more inclined to accept whatever fate might hold than prepare for it—that our society might be doomed by apathy or the numbing effect of creature comforts or a collective failure to imagine how bad the dark future that may await us could be.”
The latest evidence of this: with just 9 days until important primaries for Virginia Lt. Governor, Attorney General and also several House of Delegates districts (plus a few local offices, like the Arlington County Board), are you hearing your neighbors and friends spontaneously talk about those primaries? Are you sensing any excitement out there for said primaries? Based on the early voting numbers, it’s certainly not looking promising – with just 107,701 votes cast in the Democratic primaries as of June 4. Now, maybe we’ll see a surge of voters on primary day (June 17th) itself, but so far, it’s looking more like we’re going to see pitifully low turnout – maybe 400K? 350K? 300k? (a fraction of the 1.6 million votes for Terry McAuliffe in November 2021) – despite the fact that it’s quite possible that these primaries will determine who the next LG and AG of Virginia will be, and also despite the fact that this is our democracy at stake, plus of course the fact that this will be our first chance to vote since Trump came into office and started demolishing the federal government, etc.
Of course, super-low turnout won’t be anything new for primaries in which there’s no “marquee” race (e.g., a governor’s primary, such as between Tom Perriello and Ralph Northam in 2017 or between Terry McAuliffe, Jennifer McClellan, Jennifer Carroll Foy, Justin Fairfax and Lee Carter in 2021). For instance, I remember walking in to my polling place in June 2005, a few months after I got heavily involved in Virginia politics with the blog “Raising Kaine,” to vote in the Democratic LG primary that year (between Leslie Byrne, Viola Baskerville, Chap Petersen and Phil Puckett), and noticed that the polling place was super quiet, sleepy even, as almost nobody was coming to vote. In the end, that impression was correct, as turnout statewide in the 2005 Democratic LG primary was a pathetically low 175k. Or look at turnout for the 2013 VA Democratic primaries, the last time there were both Democratic LG and AG primaries – but no Democratic governor’s primary – on the ballot; that’s right, just 145k voters showed up to decide between Ralph Northam or Aneesh Chopra for LG, Mark Herring or Justin Fairfax for AG.
So this time around, turnout will almost be certainly higher than 145k or 175k, but you’d expect that for at least three main reasons: 1) early/absentee voting was made a LOT easier by Democrats, when they had a governing “trifecta” back in 2020; 2) the fact that Virginia voters now can automatically receive an absentee ballot for all future elections; 3) you’d think that Trump in the White House, and everything DOGE has done to federal employees, would have raised interest in voting among Virginia Democrats a LOT compared to 2013, when Barack Obama was in the White House and things were mostly normal. And yes, again, turnout almost certainly WILL be higher than the pathetic 145k voters in 2013, but still…seriously? Out of something like 1.6 million potential Democratic voters for these primaries, maybe we’ll only see 300k-400k (20%-25%) of that show up on June 17 to select, quite possibly, our next Lt. Governor and Attorney General? Seems crazy, but that could very well be what happens.
By the way, the lack of interest that I’m seeing and hearing about is ubiquitous. First of all, there’s anecdotal information, such as what I saw at the Falls Church Memorial Day parade – mostly blank stares as LG candidates introduced themselves to voters. I’m hearing the same thing from others as well, that when they mention the primaries to friends, family, acquaintances, etc, they mostly get “blanks stares” as well. And I’m also noticing it in that nobody – neighbors, people I run into at the dog park or whatever – is bringing up the primaries. Or, as Levar Stoney noted the other day, “there are still probably roughly 50% of the voters out there who still don’t know who any of us are” and “I think you could consider this will be a low-turnout affair.” As for polling, there hasn’t been anything public recently, but as of late March, around half of voters hadn’t really focused on the LG race…or the AG race (where 60% were undecided).
So anyway, the main point here comes back to what David Rothkopf wrote last June:
“I just want to shout and shake them and say, AREN’T YOU PAYING ATTENTION? This is not business as usual! Democracy can effectively end in five months. There may not be another fair election in this country. Your neighbors could be dragged from their Range Rovers and hauled off to the slammer on the thinnest of pretenses. He and his supporters have promised concentration camps. They have promised to deport protestors whose views they don’t like. They have promised to throw their opponents in jail. He has promised to be a dictator from day one. He is desperate. His freedom depends on holding office and controlling the justice system. What is more he is an ally of our worst enemies and enemy of our best allies. He has already shown his contempt for our national security, stolen nuclear secrets, committed crimes. But sure, water your damn lawns!”
And no, I’m NOT arguing that American democracy will end if only 300k or 350k voters show up for the VA Democratic primaries on June 17th. But what I *am* arguing is that this pervasive apathy, ignorance, lack of engagement, etc. is at best corrosive for our democracy, at worst disastrous. Because, in the end, without an informed and engaged citizenry, you end up with Donald Trump as president, the potential demise of the rule of law and civil liberties, etc. in this country. But sure, as David Rothkopf says, don’t worry about any of that, just “water your damn lawns!” and keep thinking that you’ll be ok if you just keep your heads down, stay out of politics, etc…ugh.
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