Careening
The New Hampshire Republican primary, by all indications, will offer former South Carolina Governor and former Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, a final but unsuccessful attempt to detail the Trump train as it steams towards the presidential nomination while President Biden runs unopposed on the Democratic ticket. The only mystery at this point is who Trump selects as his running mate.
I have no better certainty than any of you who we will call Mr. President 365 days from today when the inauguration occurs. I do know we are in for a rough campaign with mudslinging that approximates the 1800 presidential experience, arguably our previous low point.
I also think the nation, regardless of our individual beliefs, needs ask itself how the two candidates for this office can be eighty year old men, one with no interest in governing (based on his time in the White House) while the other clinging to a belief in a long dead, functioning bipartisanship from half a century past? The choices are something we made rather than those two individuals and it is not credible or pretty.
Further, are we interested in a nation or regional, seemingly sectarian tribes? Our record has us divided narrowly—neither side should pretend otherwise unless next year’s results are fundamentally different from 2016, 2020 or 2022 where the margins were razor thin. Indeed, since Bill Clinton’s re-election almost thirty years ago presidential election popular vote counts showed a marked preference only twice under Barack Obama; the Bush, Trump, and Biden results were relatively close. So, we are definitely split on a number of topics.
But it is the growing hatred of each other according to partisan identification that I find most troubling. We seem to dismiss or embrace someone based on associations without ever hearing the individual opine on anything. We acknowledge, actually revel, that chasms exist between policy perspectives as if that is the objective. How is that supposed to work?
We have become a nation looking for retribution, though the Trump vision is overtly more dramatic than that of the left. Retribution does not guarantee governance but does endorse the growing apprehension around the world about who and what we represent. It is seductive assume other nations, including the evil Russkies or Chinese, respect us for our good intentions but not everyone sees us having good intentions.
Even if we were to somehow awaken tomorrow to see the damage we are inflicting upon ourselves and our image, it would take a long while to rebuild trust. Certainly the Civil War, with 600,000 deaths, was more extreme than our current condition but I am not sure we have ever entirely recovered from that horror.
Presidential elections are not just quadrennial spending festivals to put one person on top of the nation’s Executive Branch. They are our opportunity as citizens, if we participate, to register our preferences for the nation’s path ahead. If we don’t agree with the choices available, they similarly are our opportunity to articulate and mobilize others to run. Instead, we have allowed the two primary parties to stagnate and ossify, much as the Venezuelan political parties did before Hugo Chavez Frias became a radical destroyer of institutions and a nationalist voice for the victims in the 1990s. I am not sure how he evolved into a socialist but he original credentials were as a destroyer of the ossified system. Sound familiar?
Where are you and I willing to compromise? I keep asking because it matters. How do we move this country forward? Or, are we better off to chuck away two and a half centuries of the world’s most remarkable and successful experiment, surrendering to other political systems amd self aggrandizing leaders as will occur, because we all feel so unhappy and unwilling to do anything with our situation? Curiously, billions of people around the globe would give the right arms to be American citizens but we are so despairing of what we have built. And other governments no longer assume we are interested in fixing our problems so they are adjusting their stances.
Don’t tell me we can’t change the system. Evidence overwhelmingly shows that is rubbish. But it won’t be easy or simple as it is 340+ million of us.
I welcome your thoughts. I don’t believe in surrender on something that matters so greatly to us all but we all must play a role in extricating ourselves from our current car careening over a cliff.
Thank you for your time. Please circulate if you find these thoughts worthy. I thank the subscribers for their commitments.
Purple combines red and blue.
Be well and be safe. FIN