Day 240.

2016. Almost everyone was convinced his candidacy was a farce. He could never win. Sure, people weren’t in love with Hillary, but surely, surely, America would not be so clueless, heedless, blind, sexist or backwards enough to actually elect him. Right?

Well. Life is full of disappointments.

While I hoped to be wrong, I had a persistent foreboding that he would win. I understood why some people would be Trump-curious. Sure, he’s a blowhard and a wildcard and an unapologetic asshole and Jesus, did he really just say that, but maybe the shift away from polished, focus-grouped politicians would be a good one. Or an interesting one at least. Really, what could go wrong?

I didn’t agree with that perspective, to say the least, but I understood it. When he was elected I’d hoped he’d mostly bloviate and annoy and achieve little else besides the rapt attention of an amused and appalled populace. I comforted myself with the notion that he didn’t have the intelligence or the attention span to inflict any true damage. That was swiftly proven to be delusional; I clearly hadn’t counted on his army of yes-men and sycophants, the Republicans who carried his water for access to his office and the power and influence that came with it. I clearly hadn’t anticipated the fact that our institutions and norms were far more fragile than I had ever considered they could be.

And here we are again, on the deja vu cusp of another presidential election. With three days to go, that cursed hope has been rising among Democrats and Progressives. Hope that the polls are not as heartbreakingly wrong as they were in 2016. Hope that this particular story arc in the ongoing national nightmare is perhaps near its messy conclusion. Hope that Biden will win by such a margin that Trump and all who support him will be indisputably defeated and repudiated. But we all learned our lesson in 2016: hope can turn on you, kneecap you, face-plant you into a shit pile of uncontrollable, abominable events, and all you can do is watch in horror from the gutter where you landed. Beware the cruelty of hope.

Indeed, we’ve been watching from our increasingly COVID-ridden American gutter, horrified and besmirched, for four years as he has brought all the nuance, sensibility, intelligence, and insight you can expect from a sociopathic toxic narcissist to the most powerful office in the world. But while it’s totally obvious to me he is a walking talking apocalypse in it above all for the massive ego-stroke provided by his adoring base and his spineless Republican enablers, and for whatever money or influence he can gather and wield for his own interests, there are millions—millions—of people who think he’s just fine; sure they don’t love some things he says, but hey, tax cuts. Millions more who love and admire him, who think he’s done a great job. And millions more or so who flat-out idolize him. Some of these folks are educated people. People who voted for Obama. Even some people who voted for Clinton in 2016. People who likely consider themselves circumspect and reasoned humans.

I have generally been a person who peaceably accepts political differences. Historically, I have not become incensed when confronted with ideas I find abhorrent or backwards and usually feel not contempt but curiosity about the people who have them (Why do you care so much about who marries who? What made you this way? Etc.). It takes all kinds, as they say.

But increasingly, it’s impossible not to be mystified and infuriated by anyone who looks back at the chaos of the last four years and thinks, yep, give me more of that. What country have you people been living in?

I so much as glimpse a Trump/Pence bumper sticker and my blood pressure goes up. Because how, how? I truly don’t understand. There are limited explanations now as to why you would vote to continue on this mad path: You’re either a racist who’s deeply relieved you can finally fly that flag (in which case, fuck off, there is no reasoning with you); or you’re basing your decisions on a set of “alternative facts” that don’t reflect the very real reality the rest of us are living in.

Alternative realities are springing forth, convincing many formerly rational people that Democrats are part of a cabal of human traffickers passing young children through the Wayfairer furniture website, selling them into sex slavery; or making educated, formerly cautious, critically minded individuals disbelieve the simple mechanics of wearing a mask or doubting the seriousness of a novel virus that has killed 230,000+ of their countrymen, convincing normally well-meaning people that Antifa is a powerful organization of anarchists controlled by Black Lives Matter and/or the imaginary Deep State. All this and more. Beliefs pulled from the internet and Fox News like they were the word of god, convincing these people they’re doing good in the world, fighting for America. I think they feel so existentially insecure—for any number of reasons—that they’re desperately seeking a sense of purpose, a sense of control. If they think they’re freeing children from sex slavery, then they feel like they’re helping something in the face of helplessness. If they carry an enormous weapon or three into the Starbucks while they’re buying their non-fat half-caff venti whatever, they feel like they have some control.

I’m very willing to concede the left has its own kind of crazy, and both sides’ crazy is bizarre and frightening. But the right’s crazy is in Congress. In the Justice Department. In the police department. In the White House. Their crazy has access to the halls of power and state-supplied weapons and leverage over the citizenry. The left’s crazy is mostly still stuck on the internet and in their mom’s basement. The right’s crazy is heavily armed and verbally abusing Costco employees on the regular.

There are millions of those people. And let’s not even get into the red-meat MAGA opinions about Black people, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and any number of other marginalized minority groups. Opinions that are, yes, sometimes tangled in the conspiracy bullshit but also are just the products of straight-up bigotry.

Millions of these assholes. And they are also voting.

There are millions of us too, us liberals, leftists, progressives, Democrats, etc. who are also terrified, also feeling powerless. But we react to that uncertainty with mask shaming and overly long, strident Facebook posts and clever protest signs and regular donations to the ACLU. Our coping mechanisms aren’t guns or made-up political pedophiles or actively working to suppress the votes of our ideological opposites. And we are also mobilizing, voting early, volunteering, donating. If fundraising were the election, Trump would’ve already lost. If polls were real and the last word, he would have already lost. But the last word is yet to come.

And here I am, courting that hope we had in 2016, that confidence (possibly, overconfidence) that our country will not succumb to this madness any longer. The pendulum swing is due, isn’t it? We are ready to go the other way for a while, to have another chance to show the electorate that moving forward is better, that change is empowering, that we can make things better for everyone in our society and not just the lucky white folks.

That hope is a terrifying thing though. To even visualize, for a moment, a landslide, a blowout for Biden and Harris, an electoral map with some surprising blue spots alongside the unusual ones, oh, how it makes me bubble with hope, a palpable hope that brightens a road forward. That shows that our country is not full of racists and dumbasses who have misguided or absent critical thinking skills. That our country can repudiate the ugliness he has wrought in it, the lack of humanity and intelligence, the bald rejection of science, common sense, the notion of the greater good. The hope that we can make some amount of progress before the pendulum swings again, that we can move forward enough that the inevitable backwards step won’t take us this far back ever again.

That hope is warm and sweet. Also, as we’ve all experienced, that hope can gut you. He wins the electoral college again; he gets a last-minute landslide; he loses but barely and is able to contest it to the Supreme Court who will throw out just enough ballots to tip it over toward him. There are officially too many ways to murder that hope.

America will likely never be a perfect union. But the striving for it is the important work we need to do. Hope you voted already. Hope we finally step on the path toward sanity. Hope we elect the people who will acknowledge and address climate change, the pandemic, the laughably low minimum wage, all the pay gaps, all the inequity, etc. Let’s all bravely hope the hope for this next step, so we can hope for bigger things down the road.