by Barry Goldman
About thirty years ago my wife and I rented a car in London. The experience is seared into my memory forever. The steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car, and I was expected to drive on the wrong side of the road. It took all my concentration, but I was able to manage, more or less, until we came to a roundabout. I had never seen a roundabout before. Didn’t know what it was.
There was no GPS in those days. We were trying to follow a paper map. And we weren’t on some sleepy country road. There were several lanes involved, and we were moving at a pretty good clip. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what I was doing. All my driving instincts were giving me bad information. And people were honking at me. I don’t know how many times we went around that thing before we finally got off.
Over the next few days, I learned to get in the car on the correct side, but it wasn’t easy. I had to consciously override twenty-five years of experience. At first, I automatically went to the usual side. Open the door. No steering wheel. Ah yes, we’re in England. The steering wheel is on the other side. Go to the other side. In the next phase, I was able to remember before I opened the door. I was able to say to myself, “Wait, stop, you’re about to go to the wrong side. You’re in England. They get in on the other side. Go to the other side.”
Then came the moment I want to talk about. I’m walking to the car with the key in my hand. I remember that I’m not supposed to get in on the usual side. I’m supposed to get in on the wrong side. But now I don’t remember which side is the wrong one. Both sides feel wrong. That moment.
I get a similar feeling writing these columns. Sometimes I get to a who/whom decision and they both feel wrong. “Who” feels ignorant and “whom” feels pedantic. Same thing with the subjunctive case. If I were to use the subjunctive, it reads fussy. And if I was not, it sounds illiterate.
Time for one of my favorite jokes. This guy is on the Harvard campus. He stops a tweedy-looking fellow and says, “Excuse me, can you tell me where the library is at?” Tweedy says, “Here at Harvard we don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Would you like to try that again?” The guy says, “Sure. Can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?”
But what I really want to talk about here is politics. And what I want to say is that we seem to be stuck at a moment when all the possible ways forward seem wrong. I’m going to assume everyone reading this agrees Trump and Trumpism is a malignancy that has to be removed. Nothing is more important. But what is the right way to do that? Who is the candidate?
If we go with the moderate, centrist, establishment Democrat the party leadership will no doubt recommend, a large number of people will be too bored to vote, and we lose. If we go with the exciting, young lefty with charisma and genuinely new ideas, he will scare away the moderate centrists, and we lose. If we have a big primary and let everybody duke it out to see who gets the nomination, we get a circular firing squad, they all mortally wound one other, and we lose. If we try a third party, we split the vote and we lose.
Here in Michigan there are two candidates running for Senate in the Democratic primary. Haley Stevens is supported by Chuck Schumer and the rest of the establishment Democrats. Abdul El-Sayed is the charismatic lefty supported by Bernie Sanders and AOC. Mallory McMorrow was somewhere in between – and was supported by Elizabeth Warren – but she dropped out. I’ll take either Stevens or El-Sayed over the Trumpist Republican, of course. The question is who can win the general election?
According to Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times, Gary Peters, the senator whose retirement created the vacancy, urged McMorrow to drop out so she didn’t split the vote and allow El-Sayed to win the primary. No one denies that he is an impressive candidate, MD, DPhil from Oxford, Rhodes Scholar, etc. etc. The concern is that he is too far left and that a guy named Abdulraman Mohammed El-Sayed can’t be elected senator in a purple state.
In their recent televised debate, Stevens said Republicans are contributing to El-Sayed’s campaign because they think he will be easier to beat. There is no question that if El-Sayed wins, Republicans will come for him with everything they’ve got. On the other hand, as Michelle Goldberg wrote, “Many Democrats, disgusted by their party’s failure to contain Donald Trump, want representatives as furious as they are, and they no longer trust their leaders to tell them who is electable.” Some of the people I read or talk to say failing to look a move ahead and act strategically is inexcusably stupid. Others say the focus on electability is a self-defeating distraction.
I don’t know what I think. I know Michigan is key to control of the Senate, and control of the Senate is key to the survival of our democracy. But I feel like I’m back in England trying to figure out how to get in my car. Or back in that roundabout getting honked at from every direction.
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