Not Because It Is Easy, But Because It Is Hard
Thoughts on the 2016 Presidential Election and What Lies Ahead
On Sunday afternoon, as this Amber Alert of a campaign lurched toward a close, I took a break from my part-time job obsessing over election polls to do some actual paying work. The video project my department is finishing includes profiles of several astronauts and a clip of John F. Kennedy’s “To the moon” speech urging America to embrace space exploration.
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be
gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people … We choose to go to the Moon! … We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwFvJog2dMw
As I reflected on the distance between Kennedy’s grand aspiration and the guttural tone of the 2016 campaign, I couldn’t help but feel that we’ve been cheated. Or more likely, that we’ve cheated ourselves. For our sins, we’ve been rendered unwilling participants in the world’s longest Black Mirror episode.
When this grotesquerie of an election is decided tonight, I expect that Hillary Clinton will be named the 45th President of the United States and the first woman to hold the office. That’s reason to rejoice. It’s not reason to forget that just shy of half the electorate will vote for a candidate who is openly misogynist, racist, and xenophobic, who has copped to sexual assault (and will be on trial for worse next month), who has courted the influence of adversarial nations in an American election, who publicly mocks everyone from disabled veterans to POWS, who jokes about the assassination of his opponent, who demonstrates only the faintest grasp of basic facts and no inclination to learn them, and who has a long history of treating with remarkable disdain the very people he’s pledged to help.
This is what an existential crisis looks like. It’s a threat to the republic and it won’t disappear even in the unlikely event that Trump somehow does. Outrage, alienation, nihilism, and hate are not moderated by electoral results. On their own, neither candidate is likely to make inroads on the legitimate grievances that are entangled with these darker motivations. There are bona fide reasons to burn it all down, but when a man so degenerate as Trump is your tribune, it’s not a calculated decision, it’s an act of desperation.
A desperate man is a dangerous man and there are many dangerous men in America today. I only hope that we can pass through this election without bloodshed and through the subsequent days without insurgency. I have more hope than faith in this regard. The state of the nation is disheartening to contemplate and the fractures are the deepest of my lifetime. Yet, while I’ve upgraded my estimates, I don’t believe that half, or just shy of half the country, is motivated by blind hatred. I do believe that at least half the country is motivated by fear — fear of irrelevance, fear of modernity, and the fear of others.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim developed the concept of anomie to describe social instability resulting from a lack of purpose and the collapse of common standards or values. America is afflicted by anomie (a point made convincingly by the journalist Chris Arnade) and it’s manifesting in pervasive and unattractive ways that deserve the same level of critical analysis as any other pathology — including a real attempt to understand the root causes and social context.
Like many nations, America has experienced rapid economic, technological, and cultural changes that have upended communities, threatened conventional ways of life, and caused people to come unmoored. The United States has also seen the fraying of the best and worst parts of its social contract: that part which allows for upward class and social mobility and that part which reserves the highest social status for a narrowly defined category of (white male) America. Diminished prospects and the surrender of once restricted ground has engendered hostility that will long outlast Trump. Trump is an imperfect vessel in the extreme, but despite a massive fundraising disadvantage, a laughable field operation, and a closet full of skeletons, he staggered to the doorstep of the presidency and dragged the specter of fascism along with him. A smarter, more disciplined Trump could do better.
As the most visible symbols of the (ever so slow) changing of the guard, Obama and Clinton have been subject to unrelenting abuse and endured it with remarkable composure. In light of this, it would be easy (and fun!) to punctuate Election 2016 with gloating and recriminations on their behalf. Yet, we can help Clinton more, and help ourselves, if we spend that energy confronting the hollowing out of America, emotionally, socially, culturally and economically. We can help ourselves more if we stop demonizing difference and diminishing the social and cultural touchstones in which people and communities take pride. We can help ourselves more if we acknowledge that hatred must be fought wherever it exists, but exercise generosity of spirit when disputes arise not from malice but from misunderstanding. We should do this, in Kennedy’s words, not because it easy, but because it is hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.
