They Are Attacking Us

I have never worked as an election inspector (poll worker), but I have known several in the various places I have lived. They were/are my neighbors. I know the local Elections Clerk and Registrar of Voters. He lives in a nearby community.

I have sat on juries—one a horrific murder trial years ago in Baltimore and another in Yolo County, where I live now—that case was too bizarre to summarize in a sentence or two. Everyone on both juries lived not far from my home—they held a variety of jobs, and in a few cases, I got to know them personally in other ways after the trials were over. They, too, were/are my neighbors.

The “neighbor” part is important here. These people, be they election inspectors or jurors, are people pretty much like me. People who live, work, raise kids, and contribute in many ways to the well-being of the community of which I am part.

They are not members of a faceless bureaucracy or political operatives. They are citizens roughly committed to the same ideals I have. They want a safe place to raise their kids. They want to be fair. They want the best for their communities.

So, when I see Republicans (and let’s not dance around this one—they are, at least at this point in our history, all Republicans), when I see them attacking jurors because of where they live or the decisions they make when I see them attacking elections as rigged and suggesting that those whose job it is to ensure fair elections are corrupt or involved in some ill-defined conspiracy, I take offense.

And I am not alone.

Conservative (using perhaps an outdated meaning of the word) political theorist Patrick Deneen argues that the failure of liberalism (not political liberalism but the “western liberal project), is a function of a too great focus on individual autonomy at the expense of commitment to local community.

Wendell Berry, who I would also argue espouses essentially traditional conservative views (he writes exhaustively about “conserving”), emphasizes in nearly all his writing the importance of place-making, of sinking deep roots in a locality, and of fostering the deep interconnectedness that can only take place in a defined community.

An attack on election integrity—because all our elections are managed locally by people who live in the communities where elections occur—is an attack on our neighbors. It is an attack on the value of the local. It is an attack on the conservative values of place and the people who collectively inhabit it for the common good.

An attack on jurors (or their decisions) is an attack on my neighbors. Juries are tricky things, but having sat on two (cases that lasted over one month each), I can say that there is a sacredness to the process that transforms participants into deeply serious and committed community members (whatever they were before they were selected for that role). I have seen jurors cry out of fear that they would make the wrong decision. I have seen them agonize over the profound implications of the decisions we would collectively make.

(I remember an older white male juror in the murder case—the accused was a young black gang member—balk at making a finding of “guilty” because he did not want to be the one who altered a young person’s life forever.)

The point I want to make is simple: people who claim the moniker of “conservative” but attack elections and juries are not conservative. In their defense of a soulless man, they have abandoned the basic tenets of conservatism. In attacking the base of the local, they have revealed their commitment to attaining power by any means necessary. Whatever that commitment is, it is not a commitment to community, to the local, to the neighbor. And it is time that we articulate the truth that they are attacking the foundations of what creates resilience and meaning in our lives.

They are attacking us.