A democracy at a boiling point: The view from a U.S. swing county

A Donald Trump supporter is about to march across his street to confrontsomeone who likens the U.S. president to a quasi-demonic biblical figure.

It's a late-summer Saturday morning in a suitable spot to take the temperature of American votersthis election year: Grand Rapids, Mich., in Kent County, a swing county in a swing state.

And the temperature is approaching a boiling point as twomen on the sidewalk seem on the verge of coming to blows.

It's a neighbourhood feud involving Brian Silvernail, theTrump supporter, who is white, and Justin Stewart, a local barber who is Blackand who compares the president to a figure from the apocalyptic Book of Revelation.

It's a classic American cocktail: old grievances, embittered by politics, laced with the potent element of race.

Silvernail sharesthe backstory of their spat with a reporter in a mask-free monologue at close range, shrugging off the pandemic asoverhyped, media-driven hysteria.

Trump campaign signs hang in the window and door ofhis home office.

Silvernail is an industrial real-estate agent who credits the president with an economic boom he's benefited from in Michigan's second-largest city.

"He's a businessman," Silvernail says of Trump. "He's an asshole, but that's the kind of guy I want representing me and negotiating [for the country]. If I'm in trouble, and I'm going down, I want a good attorney."

Silvernail is aprecinct delegatefor the Republican Party in his neighbourhood in the Nov. 3 election.

Stewart, on the other hand, sees cruelty in Trump's treatmentofmigrants at the Mexico-U.S. borderand moves to strip health protections in the Affordable Care Act, and sees incompetence in Trump'sresponse to the coronavirus pandemic.

Silvernail strides across the streetas his neighbour eyes him coldly.

A glance at Kent County

The two men livein a county that feels like a postcard-sized snapshot of the U.S., cramming several political cultures into one tight space.

Kent County voted for Barack Obama once, thenMichigan native Mitt Romneyand Donald Trump,before swingingback to the Democrats in the 2018 gubernatorial race.

It has a vibrant, racially diverse downtown core think yoga studios, craft-beer shops and sushi joints, with Pride flags fluttering over doorways.

Yet just a few minutes' drive away, outside Grand Rapids, past the suburbs, it's the other America: winding gravel roads, endless skies, farms and lots of Trump signs.

That microcosmic American mishmash is how you wind up with neighbours on the same street, in a different part of town from Silvernail's,hoisting a Black Lives Matter sign next to a Confederate flag.

NBC News has been regularly sending correspondents here in the belief that, as Kent County goes this fall, so goes Michigan, and as goes Michigan, so does the presidential election.

"It's a very good sample of the country," said Joel Freeman, head of the Republican Party chapter in the county, a traditional hub of moderate, establishment conservatives, such as the late U.S. presidentGerald Ford,and mega-donors, such as the DeVos and Van Andel families.

The area has been trending toward theDemocratsover the past generation.

The neighbourhood spat: A backstory

The idea of Democrats winning this election fills Silvernail with terror.

"I fear for my life if Biden wins," he said of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. "As a businessman and a white person."

Silvernailrecently moved into a fast-gentrifying African-American neighbourhood, which is becoming wealthier and whiter. He says a Black tenant was forced to leave the building when hemoved in,so that he could rent theapartment and adjoining commercial space together.

Meanwhile, the barbershop across the street has been a neighbourhood staple for 46 yearsand is still serving the area's longtime residents.

Stewart is one of the barbers at that shop andsays the real people to fear in the U.S. these days are the white, armed militia types showing upcarrying weapons to protests outsidestate legislatures including inOregon,Kentuckyand here in Michigan.

"With rifles," Stewart said of the armed individuals."And they say a Black man is violent."

Stewart says someone recently called the police on him just for milling near a commercial doorway when all he was doing was sitting with his children.

Then came the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neckfor nearly nine minutes.

Silvernail says tensions escalated afterward.Then he put up his Trump signs.

Right after that, Silvernail says, his car was badly smashed in an overnight hit-and-run. The next morning, he says, he found two things: the damaged car and, a few metres away,a note taped to his office windowlisting cases of anti-Blackracism dating back to the 1921 Tulsa massacre.

He doesn't know whodamaged his car. But he's about to cross the street to demand whether anyone at the barber shop has any information. He's considering broadcasting the confrontation on his Facebook page, which is filled with political messages and references to QAnon-themed conspiracies.

At the shop, patience with the vocal Trump supporteris wearing thin.

Stares followSilvernail as he crosses the street.

"You're a broken soul," Stewart shouts. "God has a plan for you. You may think you're winning now but you're going to hell."

Friends try pulling Stewart away, to steerhim from confrontation, but he keeps daring his neighbour to come one step closer.

Over at Democratic headquarters

Speaking of sweltering infernos, in an old wooden warehouse across town, the Democratic Party's local campaign office lacks air conditioning.

Gary Stark comes to the office early on this August Saturday morning before the place gets too hot.

The Democratic Party's county chairman is also anxious about this election uncommonly so, far more than in a typical election year.

He leads teams that have trained volunteers and prepared 10,000 packages with information about mail-in voting.

It's a far cry from his previous work.

Stark is a retired university dean. After the 2016 election, he felt depressed, and a tad remorseful, when Trump won Michigan by a mere 0.3 percentage points. Stark wondered if he could have done more to help elect Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton.

He got involved as a party volunteer.

During an interview, Stark ran through a list of things he finds disgraceful about the president.

They include personal behaviour"the narcissism...the lack of empathy" and policy, such as the intentional separation of migrant parents from their children.

But, really, his overridingfear involves what he sees as the steady strangulation of American democracy.

Namely, Stark takes issue with Trump:

• Using the justice system to pardon alliesand repeatedly pushing to punish election opponents,both at home and abroad;
• Makingcabinet appointments outside the legal rules;
• Suggesting the election should be delayed,or that people should try voting twice, which is illegal;
• Suggesting the winner should be declared before all mail ballots get counted; vowing to block money to the U.S.Postal Service;
• Firing federal auditors;
• Using the government to target media company owners;
• Anddrawing revenue from foreign and domestic governments at his family properties.

He now fears Trump can operate without guardrails because Republican lawmakers have made italmost universally clear they'll always defend him.

There's clear evidence close to home about what happens to a Republican who criticizes Trump: a member of Congress from this area, Justin Amash,leftthe partyafter calling Trump's conduct impeachableand sits as an Independent and will soon be out of politics.

Eroded institutions

After the interview ends, Stark raises something else about his biography: as a professor,his academic specialty was German history.

He said he feels like he's witnessing patterns familiar from the collapse of Germany's Weimar Republic, that bitterly divided, doomed democracy that dissolved into fascism

Stark doesn't hesitate when asked if he fears American democratic institutions are at risk of collapsingif Trump wins a second term.

"I'm convinced they are. They've already been eroded," he said.

He has plenty of company in articulating this fear. Just a few days earlier, at the Democratic convention, Barack Obama and others warned that American democracy could be on death's door.

In apopular book, How Democracies Die,Harvard political scientists arguethe U.S. is experiencing a long-term democratic deterioration merely accelerated under Trumpand is losing the two conditions necessary for a democracy to survive: forbearance, meaning self-restraint from leaders;and mutual toleration,or treating political opponents as decent,equal patriots not existential enemies.

The book suggests both these pillars are crumbling in the U.S., and one of its co-authors, Steven Levitsky, said in a recent interview he's even more worried now than when the book came out in 2018.

Voting for Trump but quietly

Kim Giese is getting ready for a walk with her kids at a waterfront park uptown.They're a conservative-leaning family, some of whom plan on voting for Trump.

She avoids discussing this at work.

Things got too uncomfortable after the 2016 election, said Giese, who voted for Trump.A colleague burst into tears and kept sobbing after Trump won, which drew a rebuke.

"Another worker just said, 'Cut it out, because some of us voted for him,'" Giese said.

"I think [theClinton supporter] was flabbergasted that any of us voted for Trump that anyone he knew voted for Trump."

She doesn't know if many people are changing their vote this year.Polls do suggest Trump islosing some centrist voters, and NBC's unofficial focus groups here in Grand Rapids have heard from a few.

This week, the former Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, who racked up monster vote marginsin 2010 and 2014 in this county, wrotean op-ed announcing he'll vote for Biden.

'Fear beats anger'

Giese's family members share some misgivings about Trump.

Her 18-year-old son, Josiah, now entering university, calls the president "generally evil and self-serving" and"unfit."

He says Trump has few policies helikes except perhapshis toughrhetoric on the international stage.

So, who's he voting for? Probably Trump, he says. So is his sister, Kel, who fears Democrats are becoming too radical and blames them for recent rioting.

Josiah sums up the election dynamic in three words: anger versus fear.

The left, in his view, is running on anger toward Trump's authoritarianism, and the right is running on fear of left-wing radicalism.

"I think fear beats anger," Josiah said, predicting a Trump win.

His sister predicts a Biden win. Their mother isn't sure who'll win.

"IfI was going to vote Republican, it would be out of fear for the radical change the left would bring," Josiah said.

When asked to elaborate, hementions the violence seen at some of the protests against police brutality and says some Christian friends of his fear they can no longer express opinions on issues such as same-sex marriage.

Others fear the reparations for slavery that have long been debated might actually come to pass if Democrats get into power, and they'll be taxed as punishment for historical wrongs.

'Fixing it? I don't know'

The Grand Rapids street where Silvernail and Stewart confronted each otherlast month tells its own story about modern American politics.

It's like a long piece of connective tissue that unites factions of the modern Democratic Party: upper-class whites, young college-educated progressivesand visible minorities.

As the neighbourhood shifts, the barber shop has survived.

But Stewart says he notices that some white neighbours walk faster as they pass the shop: "Like we're going to rob them, like we stink or something. I catch the vibe."

He adds: "We're good people."

Later that day, the shop is at peace.Customers fill the chairs and waiting area as a basketball game flashes on the television overhead.

The shouting endeda few minutes after it beganwithout a punch being thrown, and everyone retreatedto their corner of the street.

Stewart says he would never have thrown the first swing. He was ready, however, to throw the secondand the third.

Asked whether things might ever be normal again with his neighbour, he answers: "We can be cordial, but fixing it? I don't know."

WATCH | In another swing state, Wisconsin, Trump and Biden both tried to address the recent bout of racial tensions and violence in visits to Kenosha this week:

Trump wades into racial tensions with Kenosha visit

4 years ago

Duration 2:05

U.S. President Donald Trump made a controversial visit to Kenosha, Wis., on Tuesday in the aftermath of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. CBC senior correspondent Susan Ormiston is on the ground and unpacks the mounting conflict between the fight against racial injustice and the presidential race.

Susan Ormiston on Biden's message to Kenosha

4 years ago

Duration 2:34

CBC senior correspondent Susan Ormiston reports from Kenosha, Wis., on U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's visit on Tuesday to the beleaguered city in the aftermath of the police shooting of Jacob Blake.