Why Evan McMullin Is Importanthttp://observer.com/2016/08/why-evan-mcmullin-is-important/
Last week, former CIA undercover agent Evan McMullin got confirmation that he will be on the ballot in Colorado. He is officially a candidate for President in 2016.
Pundits have said that one more is too late, and not enough—that backing someone other than New York tycoon Donald Trump or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is “throwing away your vote.” But this is a special election at a special moment in history.
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The two-party system is much like the Ford guys and the Chevy guys, before other cars—better cars—appeared in the streets. The two-party system is a generic model of politics for a generic model of culture, personality and citizenship. Throwing in with the Ford guys and Chevy guys would be throwing away your vote. One has more inspired and humane options in this remarkable time of new political beginnings.
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I said a year ago that Trump was “the Trickster who churns the ages, and the others’ fate depends on where they stand in relation to the Trickster. He is the one necessary component in the campaign so far. Without Trump, there is nothing.”
Other commentators made a similar observation: Corey Pein in The Baffler, “I propose that Donald Trump is the personification of a Norse god named Loki.” And Esther Goldberg in The American Spectator says Trump is best explained and illuminated by Friedrich Nietzsche in an allegory from Thus Spoke Zarathustra of a tightrope walker moving intrepidly between the ages.
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The Trickster destroys the past. But without the Trickster, there is no possible future. And when his work is done, Trickster returns to the forest. Or, as Trump says he might do if he does not achieve his White House goal, he then takes “a very nice long vacation.”
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McMullin appears to have come to us from nowhere, having emerged out of the darkest corners of the collective unconscious, that otherworld which undercover CIA agents inhabit. And he comes alone. Those of us outside the Beltway know little about him, but first impressions bring intuitive hunches. A 16-minute TedX talk at the London Business School, “Why saying ‘never again’ to genocide is not enough,” reveals an astonishingly singular man, fearless in his daily walk and resolute in a kind of personal piety that we rarely see in our time.
McMullin is on the ballot in Colorado, and will be in Utah, along with many other states, as he lays out his 50-state strategy.
The presence of McMullin opens a path which will widen in October. He makes the fledgling Greens and Libertarians suddenly irrelevant—now they won’t get the 15 percent needed to be on the stage at the debates with Trump and Clinton. McMullin will. He may even have his 15 percent by summer’s end.
