Last Sunday, our pastor called the church to prayer, and not for victory on either side in next week’s election. No, this solemn assembly sought to raise the level of our congregation to something approaching the stakes confronting us on November fifth, a stark reality that some have called the most consequential choice in our long and sometimes uncertain past. If that seems over-stated, recall that our only Civil War began after Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860. In recounting the tensions leading to Fort Sumter, historian Erik Larson ascribed that long-running tragedy to “The Demon of Unrest.” https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Unrest-Hubris-Heartbreak-Heroism/dp/0385348746/https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Unrest-Hubris-Heartbreak-Heroism/dp/0385348746/ref=sr/

To drive out today’s demons, our pastor first prayed that God’s purposes would be fulfilled in this election, that it would be decided not on the basis of race, party, gender or corruption but for the welfare of our brothers and sisters. He even prayed for our stewardship in choosing who to vote for, that no corruption, plot or misadventure would play any role in that decision. Praying for life and safety, he even invoked Isaiah’s ancient words “That no weapon formed against you shall prosper…(Isaiah 54:17, NKJV).

When early voting started in Texas this week, I was still pondering that invocation in an odd mixture of hope and skepticism. For many years, the “old soldier” in me has worried about the steady decline in the number of Americans willing to serve in our armed forces – now hovering at less than one percent. Does such a country even deserve to remain free? Would we respond as bravely as the Ukrainians and Israelis when they came under attack? No sooner had those mental gyrations calmed than my business-warrior psyche began pondering the tightly integrated cyber-military-economic-espionage/AI-whole-of-society onslaught now arriving each day courtesy of the People’s Republic of China. I had barely finished Calder Walton’s magisterial history of Russian and Soviet intelligence, Spies, only to discover that his final chapter is a thoroughly alarming thirty-page coda detailing “The New Cold War” with China in which we are currently engaged! Who knew?

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/spies-epic-intelligence-war-between-east-and-west

In contrast to my mental calisthenics, our trip to the polls this week was uneventful, even encouraging – although I admit to watching too many Hallmark movies. It only took a half-hour on a bright, sunny day but the crowd seemed happy - except for the malcontent who bemoaned the poor performance of the Dallas Cowboys. My standard uniform for the polls is strictly non-political (Go Army! Beat Navy!) but a surprising number of people came over to thank me for my service. A one-time draftee, I thanked them all for exercising the rights that every soldier, sailor, airman and marine was privileged to defend.

That warm glow of self-congratulations lasted only until mid-week when, like a fool, I turned off Hallmark and started watching the news. Having spent nearly a decade as an on-air military analyst with the networks of NBC News, I should have known better than to watch MSNBC  - now little more than an electronic message board for Democrats. Having known her father and her younger brother, I always looked forward to appearing with Mika Brzezinski. But 30 years ago, we adopted my daughter, who is now the mother of my three beloved grandsons: Any idea how little patience I have when listening to a well-paid “analyst” like Mika talking about the “reproductive freedom” women should enjoy? Clearly, those freedoms do not include the unborn baby brutally torn from its mother’s womb. How exactly are we morally superior to the perpetrators of the Holocaust or, for that matter, those benighted heathen sacrificing their infants to the Canaanite fire-god Moloch?

My colleague Charles Lipson, as he so often does, made exactly the right points about the disgusting “lack of decency” in our public discourse, from Donald Trump’s alleged “comedian” at Madison Square Garden to President Biden’s unbelievably crass labeling of his opponents as “garbage.” As Professor Lipton correctly points out, such tactics “weaken two central pillars of a stable constitutional democracy: The legitimacy of opposing candidates, (and) if they are elected…peaceful contests to choose them, followed by peaceful transfers of power.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/10/30/america-is-sinking-into-the-muck/

In short: Remember that this brief commentary began by recalling our linkages to the Civil War, still our most destructive conflict after all these decades of bloodletting. Are you political and media idiots blind as well as stupid? Or don’t you even remember those lessons we learned so recently back in Bosnia: That civil wars are frighteningly easy to start but the Devil’s own nightmare to stop.

Colonel (Ret.) Ken Allard is a former member of the West Point faculty, Dean of the National War College and on-air military analyst with NBC News.