Election Ponderings

As I write this the res­ults of this year’s U.S. elec­tion are not yet known. There are reports of long lines to vote, of people vot­ing who haven’t voted before, this all adds up to a sense that this year is his­tor­ic. Part of it is prob­ably that blogs and the appar­at­us around them (searches, aggreg­at­ors, microb­logs) are so much more pre­val­ent now that the voices of many dif­fer­ent people are com­ing through in a way far more access­ible to those of us who don’t live in the U.S. than they were four years ago.

And so many of those people sound as if they’re con­vinced that if their side does­n’t win, the U.S. will fall off a cliff and nev­er be able to recov­er, a view some­what at odds with the view that the U.S. is a great and robust coun­try. Maybe it’s just elec­tion­eer­ing, as some Amer­ic­ans have said to me when I raised the issue, maybe not. In Canada the res­ults of elec­tions make the coun­try veer one way or anoth­er, but not change dir­ec­tion rad­ic­ally; there isn’t the fight over who gets to appoint the supreme court judges, for example, that there is in the U.S.

The bit I have found most dis­con­cert­ing in the whole pro­cess, which has been going on for months now, is the demon­isa­tion of each side’s sup­port­ers, the assump­tion they’re not intelligent/patriotic/… enough. The level of vit­ri­ol hurled around is astound­ing, not only at the can­did­ates them­selves, but at their sup­port­ers, and I’ve found myself won­der­ing how the U.S. will cope after this elec­tion, when (or wheth­er) the tribes will talk to each oth­er again, how soon they’ll start up again with the pre­par­a­tions for the next con­test. One of the few writ­ings I’ve seen that have explained it to me is from Chris Lott; read the com­ments as well. I guess I tend to live in coun­tries where the polit­ics mostly fall with­in the realm of what I find reas­on­able; were I to live in anoth­er coun­try, my reac­tions to the machinery of polit­ics might be dif­fer­ent. This elec­tion is show­cas­ing the jost­ling of the fed­er­al and the state, the clash­ing of the world views, and the con­front­a­tion of the tribes with the oth­er tribes.