As the election lurches toward us I find myself in a deep sadness, even a depression. Probably Mrs. Clinton is going to win. If she does, it will not give her a mandate or even a reasonably good chance of proving herself as President. She will be wounded from the moment she declares victory. If you think the conservatives did what they could to cripple President Obama, just wait until they begin their endless campaign against the Clintons. I meet people every day–some of them my close friends–who say they would rather vote for Charles Manson than Mrs. Clinton, that nothing could ever make them vote for her, no matter how distasteful they find Donald Trump. For the life of me I don’t know why Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to be President of the United States. Jefferson called it “splendid misery.” It’s going to be mostly misery for Mrs. Clinton, I believe. She will win the election, but she will never get the chance she deserves to develop a 21st century progressive program for the people of the United States. How can it be good for America for the opposition to prevent a duly elected President from using that endorsement–the imprimatur of a great nation using its well-developed distilling process to elect officials–to try to improve the lives of the people who legitimately elected her?
I don’t want four or eight more years of scandal, chants of “You Belong in Jail!,” persistent claims that the election was rigged, echoes of “email,” “Benghazi,” “Juanita Broaddrick.” And Bill.
Is it so “utopian” to wish for a new Era of Good Feelings (1817-1825), a period when we all find a way to agree on the major questions, to enjoy each other’s company, to love our country more than ourselves, and use our politics not to destroy each other but to differ about the precise fashion in which we decide to address public problems? What would it take for the country to calm down and cheer up? Or, to put it in a more useful way, why are the angry ones so angry? I’ve racked my brains for the past four or five years to try to understand why people are so angry with America, or with their government, or with the “establishment,” as Donald Trump puts it? I get that we have an appalling public debt, that our medical system is still highly imperfect, that the current folks who run America have been unable to prevent some terrorist incidents, that our borders are porous, etc. But that doesn’t make me want to buy an arsenal, vote for liars who pledge to shut down the government and “repeal Obamacare the day I take office!,” or speak of Hillary Clinton as the anti-Christ.
In almost every way, we’ve never had it so good. Like most Americans, I have a decent car, a good home, quite a bit of discretionary income, lots of nearly miraculous electronic gadgets, access to my friends and kin via FaceTime, access to good medical attention, a great deal of spare time, virtually unlimited intellectual and religious freedom, mobility, and more real security in my person, my place, and my nation than any people who have ever walked the face of the Earth. In addition to which, the U.S. Postal System can still deliver a letter from me in Dakota to my friends in San Diego in three days for about fifty cents.
Can we please calm down and be grateful for the almost unbelievable abundance and freedom of American life? Really, we think we need “second amendment solutions” to our puny problems?
But here’s what depresses me most of all this October. Think how frustrated and enraged approximately 60 million Americans must be that they are going to vote for Donald Trump in spite of everything they have learned about him. Most of them know that he is a towering narcissist, who probably doesn’t really give a damn about average people in Wadena, Minnesota, or Broken Bow, Nebraska; that he talks about women in a way that no decent man ever would and apparently gropes and fondles them, too, against their will. We know that he doesn’t pay much in the way of taxes, that he has cheated people to whom he owes money, in addition to using the U.S. Bankruptcy laws liberally to cut his losses (i.e. cheat other people and companies) in order to protect his own core assets. We know that he belittles people with disabilities, stereotypes a wide range of ethnic groups, bullies those who question his majesty, and wishes to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Shall I go on? Is it not clear to all of us, no matter how we intend to vote, that Trump is stuck in some prison of “rich man’s son-bully-frat boy-sex for power-anger management-brat” syndrome? And that, other things being equal, he is profoundly unfit to be the President of the United States? Is this how you want our President to behave at the G-8 Summit? Mugging about people’s foreign accents, either saying at a joint news conference that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is “only a four, maybe a five on a good day,” or copping a feel?
Look, even most of Trump’s supporters know that he is a brash vulgarian who violates virtually every standard of human decency, public and private morality, and statesmanlike demeanor. I’m guessing that many of his supporters, including ardent ones, wonder how conservative he really is–or perhaps he is just a man of gargantuan ambition and vanity who found the formula to tap the Great Anger in American life. I’m guessing that many of his supporters, including ardent ones, wonder if he will really follow through with his big vows (the wall, NATO, China, the special prosecutor for Hillary) if he becomes the President of the United States.
That’s my great sorrow. How angry do you have to be with the American system to cast a vote for a man that even those who wind up voting for him are embarrassed by, when you are privately unsure that he is a good man, much less a man worthy of the highest trust America can give one individual? The vote for Trump is not so much a vote for Donald John Trump, 70, NY, as for ANYTHING BUT THE WAY THINGS ARE AND IF THIS BUFFOON IS OUR BEST WAY OF SAYING F.YOU TO THE SYSTEM, SO BE IT.
Finally, I am disappointed in Mrs. Clinton (among other reasons) for failing to respect the tens of millions of Americans who are “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore,” the tens of millions of people who feel that their beloved country has gotten away from them. I’m frustrated by my country too, but I’m not hoarding ammunition clips. The candidate who is going to get my vote is going to respect the “deplorables,” sit down with them to try to understand their rage, to show and express respect for their rage, and to deal them into a vision of America that finds a new center, a new consensus, a new Era of Good Feelings.
Who will heal this our broken republic? It’s not very likely to be Hillary Clinton, in my view; but it sure ain’t Donald Trump.
Clay Jenkinson
Oh, dear. You seem to have fallen into the trap of believing, or at least behaving as if, everyone who dislikes Clinton is a Trump supporter. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I find it hard to believe that you don’t know that.
I find it hard to believe that a smart, well-informed guy like you hasn’t noticed that people are concerned about our lack of a social safety net in the US (including lack of a publicly funded healthcare system), that people are concerned about fossil fuel use and extraction and other environmental problems, about climate change, about the lack of good jobs, about the way banks and large corporations wield power and a number of other issues which do not put them in the Trump camp, but hardly give them any faith in Clinton either. Choosing between Trump and Clinton is like being asked whether we want Coke or Pepsi, when we are just dying for a glass of good clean water. Both are opaque, you don’t know what they’re made of, but you’re pretty sure they’re not going to be good for you.
On the existential issue of our time, the Global Climate Crisis, Trump says ‘its a hoax,’ and Clinton wants to address it, if inadequately. I believe she is persuadable and has to be pushed, just as the abolitionists pushed Lincoln, to move away FROM Carbon Trading/Cap and Trade, which turns the Global Atmospheric Commons over to Wall Street as market maker and is considered by the developing world to be economic colonialism or the way for the top half of the U.S. to continue to live big and rich while they continue to live small and poor, TO an International-agreed upon carbon tax with dividend (could be 100% returned equally across-the-board within a country). This is the basic framework that scientists (James Hansen, Steven Chu, Naomi Oreskes, Kevin Anderson…), economists (Nicholas Stern, Jeffrey Sacks…), Angela Merkel, Benito Aquino, Ca Gov Jerry Brown, Pope Francis, World Bank president Dr. Jim Yong Kim, International Monetary Fund director Christine Lagarde, and number of oil companies, and numerous others say is needed.
I’ve felt equally moored in the doldrums of swirling hate and disgust stirred by the train wreck that is this election.
While I’m not prone to depression or fear, I must admit current events have set me in a sad and slightly frightful state. I don’t need to go into detail as to why, as you have already summarized what I and so many others are experiencing quite well.
But I write because of the positive element of this article, which was to hear someone else affirm that we Americans are not in such a shabby state as many would want you to believe. We have much to be grateful for. I hope we do not squander it.
I wonder if the progressively-escalating vitriol rising to a new fever pitch has anything to do with the increasing usage (and accompanying anonymity) of social media. It’s easy to win an argument when you’re not limited by the facts, and we’ve seen just how desolate the internet can be when it comes to substantive and honest information.
Sure, there are a great many wonderful resources – but the issue is that they’re just no titillating enough for the person who wants to believe the worst.
May I recommend Morris Berman’s trilogy (“Twilight of American Culture,” “Dark Ages America,” & “Why America Failed”) as well as Joe Bageant’s writings, for starters.
Others have commented that we’re more in “parallel” to the 1850s than the earlier decades you mention.
I’ve come to believe that the anger is rooted in a sense of occupational and economic abandonment. Through no fault of their own, the millions who were trained for semi-skilled manual labor in factories and on assembly lines have been unable to keep up with our society’s evolution from Industrial to Digital. While public education of the mid-twentieth century taught them to follow a process, it did not teach them to think analytically and solve problems creatively. While Clinton tinkers at the edge of this great divide, Donald blames all the “out-group” and establishment politicians.
First of all, the Clintons are neoconservatives, not liberals (or rebranded progressives).
The two party system is just two sides of the same coin. It’s called divide and conquer. Either way, the same people are in charge.
Remember what happened to the last president who took on the establishment… he was assassinated. If I was Trump I would be very fearful.
Ahh, Clay. [Sigh] You cannot appease racists. Those who would vote for Trump are white and long for the days when white men were not marginalized and power was promised to those white men with the most ambition.
If Hilary wins, we will go from eight years of the first black president to likely 8 more years without a white man leading our country. The demographics of this country after HRC’s presidential reign is over will likely be such that we may never see a white man in the white house for the rest of our lives.
That is what fuels the anger, pure and simple and it is deplorable. If you want to heal our country, confront the deplorables, do not appease them. Tell them to love our country or leave it
Because a demographic shift in America does not make America a disaster. White men and women can learn to get along and thrive alongside the rest of America. The fear is real in North Dakota and the rural south. Confront that fear, do not appease or accept it. Together we all can continue to thrive in America and be an example for the world. But not by appeasing the fear and rage of the deplorables with the most deplorable viewa of America.
It is not racism that feeds my anger and that of many others about the current state of affairs. I have always and still have friends who are not necessarily, “white”, citizens of the United States, or even of my political persuasion. My anger is directed to the professional politicians and elitists such as Hillary and Obama who have no respect for the working class or even the history, principles, and traditions of this great country, the United States Constitution and our founders. Their interest is not in the welfare of the people. They care only for what the position of power gives them. Once in office, they spend the majority of their time fund- raising and seeking ways to stay in office. That leaves them little time to do the work of the people even if they care about doing that. They continually seek to erode our rights and freedoms to avoid any interference with their objectives. If you really want to understand why people are angry, look at our economy, our position currently in the world, the neglect of our security , the diminishing strength of our military and the clearly demonstrated corruption that has and is occurring under our present administration of which one candidate has been a part.
James,
Let me just say, if you will vote for Trump, you are fueled by racism. It is an easy litmus test. If you want to discuss the economy, state of the military, elitists, and freedoms, I am open. But, it is useless to debate with a racist. So, what say you? Are you angry like many of us can be at times and rightfully so? Or, are you using your anger to justify your voting for Trump?
Andy,
I don’t recall saying for whom I would vote. We do still have the freedom of a secret ballot. I served my country in the military for six years and in other ways for numerous more. I do have a stake in this country and regret seeing the United States turning into a third world country because of the actions of leaders who show no leadership and are interested only in lining their own pockets. We know who the real racists in this country are. They are the liberals who want to keep the minorities dependent upon welfare, with no opportunity for education, jobs or advancement in order to retain their vote and keep the politician in office. They are the same ones who decry gun violence when they seek to deny second amendment rights, yet ignore the hundreds of deaths that occur yearly in Chicago as well as other cities among the minorities, including innocent children. I have traveled in many countries of this world and lived among many diverse people. I do not need to prove to you that I am not a racist. My Native American, Black, Chinese, Indonesian, Korean and other ethnic group, friends and relatives know who I am and they are the ones that count. Further, I do not care to discuss anything with some narrow-minded, ignorant somebody who finding disagreement can only resort to playing the race card because they have no other argument. In addition, I do not need to justify my vote for whomever I wish to anyone.
America. Love it ir leave it racist.
Well said, Andy.
“Like most Americans, I have a decent car, a good home, quite a bit of discretionary income…” Mr. Jenkinson, I have tremendous respect for you but you might be living in a bubble. I don’t mean that to be critical. It sounds cozy in that bubble. I wish I could crawl in there with you, but the items you cite (national debt, healthcare, etc.) aren’t the reasons people are angry enough to vote for Donald Trump. They are contributing factors but many people have more immediate needs that have been completely ignored for two or three generations. Yes, many of his supporters are just some mix of petty, mean spirited, selfish, tin-foil-hat-wearing retrograde racist, The Rabble if you will, but many of them are people that have worked hard their entire lives and have no prospects of attaining the things you say most Americans have. That reality makes it difficult for them to just “cheer up.”
You’re one of my favorite people out there but I strongly disagree with your opinions on Hillary.
Her own people think she’s a disaster and not a progressive.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/wikileaks-hilary-clinton-progressives-230009
https://www.rt.com/usa/363293-wikileaks-podesta-emails-12/
After reading the Wikileaks drops and all the corruption that’s come out around the Clintons, I think we need to bring back the guillotine. We don’t have a free or a legit system anymore. History dictates that means violence is coming soon. And these white liberal marks who are crying about racism or whatever is hurting their fee fees today are the reason it’s coming.
I’m not enamored with Trump but am I supposed to vote for the candidate who’s owned by this country’s enemies and is the very embodiment of everything that is wrong with modern American politics? Not to mention she’s just fucking crazy. Sit there and listen to her talk about her economic policies and try not to insert a mental rimshot after every line. She says she isn’t going to have a radical immigration policy… and yet she doesn’t have any sort of proposed immigration policy. Her links to our enemies around the globe both through taking bribes through her foundation and taking direct contributions is disgusting. Everything about this woman’s career is disgusting.
On top of all the lovely corruption, she’s classic Alinskyism which is cancer for this country.
You’re entitled to your opinions. I used to be a naive liberal Obama voter too. I want to treat you all with respect. But I can’t take anyone who has anything positive to say about her seriously. Liberals have turned into everything they were against during the Bush Administration and I’m disgusted with the whole thing.
Jefferson cautioned against concentrated wealth as a means to an end, or worse – as an end in itself. Working class interests in this country have been sidelined by mega-powerful special interests, including the oncoming onslaught of AI and real robots! Propaganda has been legalized, insidiously addictive drugs run rampant in the schools and on the streets and our ecosystem is being slowly but steadily sabotaged (not to mention destroyed). In other words, the barn is on fire and the henhouse is starting to rot as idly employed card games continue unabated. While Trump’s claim that, “the election is rigged,” just may be the most revolting statement he has recently made, literally and figuratively, the fact is that people have every right to question the provenance of “Shadow Governments” i.e., Bilderberg Groups, etc. While I would love to see an “Era of Good Feelings” and admire you for bringing it up, American government needs to seriously get its house in order. One only wishes it could do that with an attitude of grace, humility and with an upbeat, positive attitude of optimism. Thank you for all you do.
Oh look at that, knocked the fuck out weren’t you? XD