History Intervenes

Beer is a delicious, delightful diversion, and it has been providing us comfort and community for ten millennia. In those long years, humans have witnessed a lot of tragedy and trauma, from war to plague to famine. Throughout it all, beer has offered a splash of liquid joy to brighten dark times, provided soothing relaxation during stress, and given drinkers a reason to come together and heal. Yet it is a diversion, and as we enter an election week in which the country is more divided than any time in my 52 years, it feels a bit off to blog as if larger currents aren’t about to rock our world. So before we get back to the joys of Citra hops or the sins of “innovation,” let’s just acknowledge what’s going on.

This is going to be a rough week for the United States. Voters will cast ballots for a slate of candidates from city councils to the presidency, and in record numbers. With a little bit of luck, those votes will determine the winners. Unfortunately, they won’t “decide” anything. Even in the rosiest scenario, either Joe Biden or Donald Trump will win the presidency outright, but given the rancor and mistrust on both sides, half the country will consider the winner illegitimate. The feelings of anger, mistrust, and betrayal that have been building for decades aren’t going to go away in a few hours or days. We will just enter a new phase where we have a new context to vent them. No matter what happens tomorrow, reconciliation and healing just aren’t in the cards.

Things could, in fact, get a great deal worse. There’s a very real chance of a disputed election, and our brittle democratic state is not well-positioned to deal with that. When something similar happened in 2000, both parties acceded to the judicial review and Al Gore later conceded the election. Partisan Democrats were hopping mad about the process, but George Bush took office amid uncontested legitimacy. It didn’t have to go that way. Democracies are extremely unusual arrangements in which citizens agree to acquiesce to their political rivals. Power is exercised not in spite of the minority’s will, but because of it. It’s a great system so long as everyone agrees to these terms. It is very much more difficult to imagine voters and politicians acceding to the legitimacy of any process that involves the other party this year, however. If there’s a contested election in 2020, no one will trust the fair play of the courts. If we don’t get lucky with the vote, we’re going to be very unlucky with the aftermath.

No one promised Americans an enduring, stable, and happy democracy. Quite the opposite: empires always fall apart. Despite the myth of our “more perfect union,” ancient racial and religious fractures have perpetually undermined our unity. From the first settlements of foreign colonists, this soil and its rule has always been contested. In the best of times, our diversity was our strength. In the worst, it sent our governments teetering. I don’t want to overstate the danger tomorrow represents, and yet it’s also foolish to understate it. The chance of national fracture may only be 1%, but when we’re talking about national fracture, that’s a scarily high risk.

I won’t blog about the election here, and I hope things are normal enough that I never mention it again. I want so desperately to return to a time when hazy IPAs are the most contentious issue before us. Given the stakes and the emotional energy, we’ll desperately need beer and all it provides to manage and heal the damage this election will almost certainly inflict. I’ll be back to decoction mashing and double dry hop beers soon enough. In the meantime, I want to express my best wishes to all of you, whatever your political stripe. Being a citizen in a democracy can be hard work. We’ll need to find a well of grace and goodwill to get through the next week. And beer. Lots and lots of beer.

Hang in there, folks—