I think it's good if we can discuss politics, so I appreciate the linked article about the forthcoming election, and the responses from Steve and Darlene. My approach is to try to find a sweet spot for constructive discourse, where we can share impressions and learn from one another.
I agree that "it will be a mess" and "a very challenging environment". On the hopeful side, perhaps such an environment will be an opportunity to change the national trajectory.
I am generally a humanist, and my personal priorities are to lessen tribal and identity politics in both domestic and foreign affairs. We are all in this together, regardless of race, geographic region, ethnicity, or nationality. Of course, I am closer to Americans than to people in other countries, and closer to my circle of friends, family, and church than to the Trumpian universe. But I think the road to success involves broadening our base of support and trust. (The main other thing I worry about is technology combined with capitalism destroying the human environment. We have weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying human life on earth if we're not careful. And we're disrupting the earth's carbon cycle by releasing hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.)
So how can we take advantage of the unfolding mess? My idea is to be constructive. As Michelle Obama said, 'When They Go Low, We Go High'. For those of us who dislike Trump, the danger has been to overreact as described by Matt Taibbi in The Press Cries Wolf (full article behind a paywall). Excerpt:
By this week, images of mailboxes became synonymous with voter suppression, and the postal service supplanted the Muslim ban, “kids in cages,” Muellermania, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, the campaign to save the job of Jeff Sessions, the Ukraine whistleblower, and a dozen other episodes to become the latest all-consuming Media Fire That Never Dies.In the Trump years, the news has been covered as an ongoing emergency, borrowing from techniques pioneered by Fox News and perfected through episodes like Benghazi. That story was blown into a frenzy for years, as Fox created the impression that litigating every detail of the Libyan mission narrative was at least 95% of what the average person should be caring about at any given moment.CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post are now following the same script with the Trump panics. The pattern is consistent. Day one involves spectacular claims of corruption. By day two, placard-bearing protesters are hitting the streets (“You can’t fire the truth!” a protester in Times Square proclaimed in the Sessions affair), celebrities are taping video appeals, and experts are quoted suggesting Trump is already guilty of crime: OPEN TREASON in Helsinki, “bribery” in Ukraine, or in this case, election interference (some are already speculating that Trump could get a year for the mail slowdown).
Almost always, by day three or four, key claims are walked back: maybe there was no direct “promise” to a foreign leader, or the CIA doesn’t have “direct evidence” of Russian bounties, or viral photos of children in cages at the border were from 2014, not 2017. By then it doesn’t matter. A panic is a panic, and there are only two reportable angles in today’s America, total guilt and total innocence.
The problem with all of these round-the-clock, crash-style coverage schemes is that commentators end up reaching for rhetorical extremes early. Trump’s genuinely abhorrent “zero tolerance” border policy right away morphed into the Holocaust (“Trump’s Concentration Camps,” as Charles Blow put it); revoking John Brennan’s security clearance made him a “dictator”; for making that phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, pundit after pundit insisted Trump was guilty of treason, a death penalty offense; it was the same for the Helsinki summit, where Thomas Friedman said Trump’s buddy-movie act with Putin marked a “historic moment in the entire history of the United States.”This is another technique borrowed from Fox coverage of Barack Obama, who was constantly compared to Hitler and derided as a fascist with “third-world dictator-like arrogance.” The strategy initially galvanized audiences for some shows, but ended up fracturing the conservative audience overall. This type of coverage exhausts audiences, who either become addicted to the cycle of rhetorical highs or repulsed by the relentless maximalist formulations.
As I've said before, I'm not a fan of "both sides do it" in general, such as in comparing Obama and Trump. In my opinion, Obama genuinely tried to reach out to Republicans and broaden the base. I could do another post on why that didn't work, using Getting to Yes as a framework. For now, I'll just say that separating the people from the problem can be useful. Trump's narcissistic personality, in my opinion, is a real and important problem worthy of discussion and criticism. (The same could be said about Biden, who is truly comparable to Trump in a number of respects.) Perhaps the coming crisis will enable more of us to join together in addressing substantive issues, in addition to problematic personalities and media outlets.
It's easy to imagine the election becoming a constitutional crisis, with the Supreme Court becoming involved. (This would be a continuation of the 2016 election where many Democrats refused to accept the result, and various investigations and legal battles have played out over the last 4 years.) It's also easy for me to imagine the military getting involved with the support of a bi-partisan group of leaders who realize the need to ensure an orderly resolution of the constitutional issues. The rules of the game may change. Politics makes strange bedfellows (adapted from Shakespeare). Ultimately, I pray for a peaceful resolution of issues and win-win relationships with as many fellow Americans and fellow humans as possible.
Hugs,
Dan
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