It’s been three years, but it feels like a lifetime.
In November 2016, the American presidential election was just over, and I wrote a column about the election that had been.
“Hopefully, this isn’t the new normal. While the U.S. may have exported democracy, let’s hope it doesn’t now export the use of lies, xenophobia and racial hate as available tools in elections. Bringing racism squarely into the mainstream is hardly a win for anyone,” I wrote. “Maybe they can put it all back together afterwards. Maybe with the campaign over, people on different sides can talk to one another about something new. I hope so. I have more faith in the average American than I do in anyone’s notion of America. But this was a dirty fight that left many, many bruises.”
Well, if I thought things were bruised then, now we’re into gashes and broken bones. There are open wounds, and many of them look like they are infected.
In the days leading up to the impeachment vote in Congress, watching U.S. news and social media was like watching a nation unravel.
I’m afraid we’re seeing, right before our eyes, how great nations fall apart. It’s certainly not anything I’d ever thought I’d see in my lifetime.
The lead-up to the impeachment vote was vicious. The fallout afterwards, I’m afraid, will be even worse; “divisive” is a nice, clean tidy word. Hearing some individuals talk about the need for taking up arms isn’t divisive, it’s terrifying. People on both sides are taking their cues from political leaders, and no one at the top seems to be afraid of the very real violence they may be promoting. And no one seems willing to turn down the volume, either; everyone is just amping things up for their own benefit.
I’m still hoping for the resilience and individual integrity of Americans, the ones who aren’t out there speaking in extremes.
I’m also afraid that the extremism is making people back away from political involvement, and politics in general.
Two days after the third anniversary of Trump’s election win, I heard a crucial point made in the clearest terms by a bartender who’d made his way from Alaska and was working the 10-seat bar at the Miner’s Club in Gerlach, Nevada, on the edge of the Black Rock Desert.
The Miner’s Club is tiny bar, with the requisite ranks of liquor, and, high on the wall, an old Hamm’s Beer wall clock with a faded picture of a canoe and waterfall, the hands of the clock stopped dead at 5:03 — you see clocks like that for sale on the internet sometimes, with asking prices over US$800, sought after as the key decoration in someone’s man cave. This one wasn’t bought for atmosphere; the atmosphere at the Miner’s Club wasn’t rolled out by designers, but by time itself.
I’m afraid we’re seeing, right before our eyes, how great nations fall apart. It’s certainly not anything I’d ever thought I’d see in my lifetime.
The bartender, a tall, lanky bearded guy with light blue spear earrings, was quiet while the four or five bar patrons talked politics.
Then, he said he was unlikely to actually cast a vote in the 2020 election.
“I want someone to vote for,” he said, “not just someone to vote against.”
That’s something we should all think about, even in Canada as political parties jockey back and forth in the current minority Parliament.
Attack politics and fear campaigns may well work once or twice. The problem is, they engender doubts about the political system that run the risk of putting it in the hands of the extreme few, while the more rational and reasonable decide to sit things out.
Start thinking about it now, political parties. Give us something more than reasons to vote against.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire publications across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky
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