Summer Park County Fair Moon
Right now I’m watching the polls, reading analysts, following stories of both campaigns. A political junkie since age 5, this is by far the strangest, the most bizarre Presidential election I’ve ever seen. It may also be one of the most profound.
Not for the candidates. Hardly. Hillary does not represent my politics, nor my vision of the Democratic party. I don’t find her untrustworthy so much as I do unlikable and too centrist. I will vote for her and happily though. Not because she’s not the Donald (sorry about the double negative), but because a Democrat in the Whitehouse is better than a Republican.
Trump represents a worrying trend in contemporary politics: the strong man, the anti-politician, the glib hand, the one whose supposed virtue is in having no political track record. Then there’s the not small matter of his character. He’s a blowhard, a know nothing, petty and mean. Aaaccchhh!
Why profound then, if not for the candidates? Because this election season has laid bare so many fundamentals of our polity, so many fundamentals that have lain unaddressed under Republican and Democrats alike. Wealth and wage inequality of a dimension unseen in decades. The shrinking middle class. The erosion of working class jobs, an erosion so severe that their jobs often no longer exist. The fear of white, uneducated men and women about their economic future. The awful rat-a-tat-tat of violence of all kinds, done by guns of all kinds, by homegrown terrorists, cops, angry African-Americans, garden variety punks and thugs. The still strong pressure to hold women out of real power. The role of immigrants in this land filled by immigrants.
These are not our only issues, but they are ones so stubborn, so apparently intractable that they have been ignored or stalemated. It may be morning in America, but the sunlight isn’t hitting every home. Many people remain in the shadows, their lives contracted and miserable.
As in medicine, if you can’t diagnose a problem, then you’ll have real difficulty trying to solve it. This election, by boiling these issues to the top, and, paradoxically, by handing us two candidates ill suited to the times, underlines the critical importance of the electorate as problem solvers. Now that we’ve seen the fractures in our common bond, we can begin to hunt for solutions and for politicians who can help us implement them.
