Important but not interesting: On the experience of waiting for the results of the election

Journal entry on the day after the election:

I know someone who says he watches professional sports because of the drama of wondering about the outcome. I always thought that sounded like a poor man's movie. But the election is like that. Most of us care about the outcome, just as sports fans care about their team winning, and are joyful if it does and sorrowful if it doesn't. Awaiting eagerly the outcome of the presidential election is like a ball game with more important consequences. And you thought it mattered whether the Yankees beat the Red Sox. This has all the weightiness to the results you could want, and about as much intellectual interest as a detective story in which you wonder whodunit, or how the person you know did it will get nailed by the detective. All of the reasons each of us had for voting, and now wishing, are as interesting and important as they are, or were, but we already did that. Voting is a curious kind of statement. It's choosing not a statement or argument but a person associated with all kinds of such.

I imagine I'm a student in an essay competition, like when I was studying in France. Actually, there you are not really competing against the others, for you could theoretically all get any grade, from the highest to the lowest. But suppose there is one winner, and it goes to person who made the best argument. Well, our candidates make a few arguments, and their supporters make others, and all this happens some time before election day. It's really kind of like an afterlife. Like religious Christians who think that people are sorted out by divine judgment into heaven and hell. The winners go to heaven and the losers to hell. You had better therefore not just have the right opinions (though many evangelicals seem to think that is what it is about) but do the right things. So you live your life and you have those opinions and do those things. And .you hope God likes it. Now you're in the afterlife. All election day is: you go vote along with everyone else, and then in the long night after, or now, several days, we wait to find out one key piece of information. I would say that here the intellectual interest of the matter hand and the importance we all place on the consequences are in inverse proportion to one another. It's actually far less interesting than watching a ball game, because all the plays have been made, and we're just waiting on the umpire machine. It's not interesting, but it's important, and maybe exciting in its way.

Of course, the logic of this is that of a decision, which itself is based on a statistical aggregation of some millions of decisions. Those component decisions are made for reasons, though the reasons don't appear in the votes, which are merely the result of them, and any of them may be a good or bad reason; they all count equally. That is part of the meaning of democracy: all preferences are equal because everyone’s will is of equal value in the end, which makes their thinking of equal value in its consequences. And recognition of this equality of value is also recognition of the absence of value. This is democracy’s nihilism. All arguments are equally likely to be true or false, or at least they are so indifferently to anything directly connected to their meaning and substance, when it comes to who, and thus which set of opinions, deserves to win. The cause of the decision on who wins the election is not an argument but a counting operation. This is because democracy does not turn on thinking but will. I think that is the most curious thing about it. Because of this, democratic societies can involve thick or thin discussions. That might even be both their strength and weakness, at least from the point of view of anyone who thinks a good decision is not just one that you want or will, but one that is made in a good way, on the basis of good thinking, and thus more likely to be correct. And the decisions are actions, not thoughts; they are important but not interesting. Or their interest lies in their importance.

Thus, after several hours of watching the New York Times not changing its lead article, with the headline that includes the count of 253 to 214 electoral votes, I find that I am both very eager for the new news and equally bored.