The Most Important Election Of Your Lives

The mid-terms will determine whether Donald Trump's two-year assault on democratic norms will be repudiated or validated. No pressure.

- David Corn

You hear it almost every time: This is the most important election of our lives. And there’s usually an element of truth. Ronald Reagan defeating Jimmy Carter led to an orgy of tax cuts for the wealthy and a blitz of deregulation that altered the US government and American society. The 1994 election brought Newt Gingrich to power as House speaker and a so-called Republican Revolution that ensured a national health insurance program sought by Bill Clinton would stay dead. George W. Bush’s Supreme Court-imposed victory over Al Gore placed in office a man who would launch the disastrous Iraq War that claimed the lives of more than 4,400 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Elections are always crucial. But this year, it really, really is the most important contest in decades. Or at least since 2016.

The most recent election ushered in not only a president who has pushed an extreme policy agenda—handing out huge tax breaks to the well-to-do, reversing climate change action, engaging in trade wars, assaulting the social safety net, nominating die-hard conservative judges, and undermining health care protections—but one who adopted an erratic and destabilizing approach to, well, everything. It created a political crisis, because Donald Trump has waged a war on norms of governance, the rule of law, productive discourse, and the media, as he has set a record for uttering false statements, overseen a regime riddled with corruption, given comfort to racists, misogynists, and wacko conspiracy theorists, and displayed a disturbing affinity for autocracy.