JEWISH WORLD

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN A ccording to one Jewish news website, a Canadian immigration lawyer’s busi- ness is booming thanks to the U.S. presidential election. While talk of moving to the Great White North if the candidate you don’t support wins is a staple of pre- election chatter every four years, it may very well be more than that this time around. The lawyer is quoted as saying that many of a record number of inquiries she’s been fielding are coming from American Jews. Chalk it up to the impact of a steady diet of over-the-top hysteria and fear-mongering masquerading as political commentary that Americans have been consuming for the past four years. Most of the Jews heading for Canada or Israel believe that they are living through the moral equiva- lent of the last days of the Weimar Republic before President Donald Trump installs a dictator- ship. But some on the other side of the political aisle are just as apocalyptic about their future if a D e m o c r a t i c Party, which is allied to the radi- cals of the Black Lives Matter movement and left-wing anti- Semites, seizes back the reins of power in November. Suffice it to say that if Trump somehow wins, Democrats — Jewish or otherwise — are going to be extremely unhappy. The same is true for Republicans if former Vice President Joe Biden retains the lead he’s currently holding in the polls. Many Americans are starting to think that one of the basic elements of democracy — the obligation to grin and bear it when your oppo- nents win an election —may not be something they are willing to accept. More importantly, many on both sides are increas- ingly convinced that their opponents won’t respect that principle and are suc- cumbing to dark specula- tions that heretofore have been limited to the imagi- nations of those who dwell in the fever swamps of American politics. O urs is an era in which politics has largely replaced the role that reli- gion once played in the lives for many, if not most, Americans. That means political opponents are now largely viewed as not so much friends, relatives and neighbors with differ- ent points of view, but as bad people without morals or ethics who want to destroy the country. As a result, the angst of the losers about what their opponents will do once in power is no longer mere partisan hyper- bole but genuine terror. The dread that so many peo- ple feel is all the more pitiable not only because their worst fears are largely unfound- ed, but because they are insensi- ble, if not com- pletely unaware, of the fact that their counterparts on the other side of the political divide are feeling just as threatened. The first to write in a serious way about this sense of panic was Michael Anton, whose pseudony- mous essay “The Flight 93 Election” appeared in The Clare- mont Review of Books in Sep-tem- ber 2016. In it, he explained why so many Republicans were willing to fall in line with Donald Trump. A critical mass of conservatives believed that another four years of Democratic rule would not only be disastrous for the country. They feared that the Left’s continued conquest of the administrative state, as well as popular culture, would undermine individual liber- ty and the rights of religious believers in ways that would trans- form the United States into some- thing unrecognizable and alien to basic republican principles. Anton tapped into the metaphor of the plight of the passengers on Moving If Lose Election? Ridiculous and overdramatic continued on page 30 JEWISH WORLD • OCTOBER 16-22, 2020 25 Though their rights are intact, liberal Jews are in hysterics about Trump. His opponents blame him for everything. Black Lives Matter demonstrators angrily protesting the death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement. Michael Anton wrote the essay “The Flight 93 Election” to explain why there were so many Republicans throwing their support behind Donald Trump in September 2016. He sees their attempts as a last resort to save the country. PERSPECTIVE