Tag Archives: Politics

On the verge (Election Day)

8 Nov 2016 By in Special days Tags: , , , , , , ,

The shadow of a man and woman standing under a tree in autumn along the shore of Lake Michigan.
Today is Election Day, and we are each and all on the verge of something new.  Something unknown.  The campaign has been a time of trial—a time of bad dreams, friction, and more than a few out-and-out breakdowns.  Charisma, in the form of Donald Trump, has ruptured fault lines in the Republican Party and the nation that existed already.  Because of his candidacy, we as a nation and as individuals have gained some self-knowledge the hard way, which is how self-knowledge is always gained.  He has tested us, exposing our weaknesses, our normally veiled resentments, our various gnawing dissatisfactions.

Americans need.  Some truly live in a state of want, but others are fearful of the future, sensing decline and the increasing challenge of securing work and access to opportunity.  Others, not in need, want something other and better than what they already have, and, for that, they’re ready to trade something away.  Certainly, this is true of Republicans who have enjoyed considerable political power but insist the political order should be delivering something better than what it has managed to create so far.

Twitter sometimes delivers thought-provoking jewels, such as a tweet this morning quoting Gerald Ford: “Truth is the glue that holds governments together. Compromise is the oil that makes governments go.”

Hillary is not an innocent, but someone who has winked at the order herself and at acts within her province that are immoral or unseemly.  She is a tarnished political heroine, this ‘First Woman’—the other choice that all our earlier choices have made.  Many will vote for Hillary as a symbol of something she doesn’t really stand for, then expect her to wring something better from federal government and the political establishment.  She is the good-enough candidate, particularly in the eyes of those who feel no urgency about political change, whose hearts may have stopped bleeding some time ago.

 Whatever we stand on the verge of, it is best to acknowledge our complicity.  Whichever future we’re on the verge of, it will feature a world of political work that the republican model calls on ordinary people to perform.  My hope is that the election will usher in a period of broad ideological ferment and political reorganization, necessary precursors to restoring what is unifying and wholesome in American culture.

One Day More: The Ground

7 Nov 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Washington DC (Low aerial), © 2016 Susan Barsy

We set back our clocks, adding an extra hour to an already interminable election cycle, suspending for just a few more minutes the climactic process that will end tomorrow.  At last, there will be an end to a certain kind of theorizing.  Election Day will produce a snapshot of national sentiment.  A new political adventure will begin.

The presidential race has generated abundant evidence pointing to the topsy-turvy condition of the country, its leadership and parties.  On the PBS NewsHour, Mark Shields noted the strange inversion that’s occurring: whereas ordinary blue-collar Americans used to tip the scale Democratic in national elections, the Democratic Party has become the ‘upscale’ party, while blue-collar America is flocking to Trump.  David Brooks noted that the nation was already divided at the outset, but that those divisions have become more calcified in the campaign.  He went so far as to say that ‘people are just going with their gene pool,‘ an unfortunate measure of how ‘identity politics’ and a growing reliance on demographic categories (common in the social sciences) are encouraging evenly highly intelligent people to adopt an essentialized and racist view of American voters.

Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, captured the incipient re-alignment that appears to be happening.  She argues eloquently that the people Trump represents are not a ‘wing’ of the Republican Party, but a huge constituency that has broken off from the Republican Party already.  The Republican Party was living on borrowed time even before Trump came along, with events of the past fifteen years rupturing the identity of belief that used to unite the party’s base with its leaders.  The party will either have to reunite around a new constellation of ideas or end up in pieces.  Meanwhile, the Democracy, formerly the party of change, is now the party of cozy continuity.  While Sanders’ challenge to Clinton should have been a wake-up call to the party, it’s difficult to imagine its ideology changing much under a Clinton presidency.

Whether Trump wins or not, his candidacy has established that voters who want to stick it to the establishment and ‘the system’ are nearly a national majority.  As my husband put it, a ‘Republican revolution’ is happening.  Whatever Trump’s personal destiny, his views on trade, immigration, terrorism, and the need to push back against an overreaching government will likely be taken up and refined—in fact, if Politico is to be believed, they already are.  Ideologues who have the patience to tune ideas to the times should be listening to the electorate, which is clamoring for a form of small-state protectionism that neither the Republican nor the Democratic party currently affords.

Image: Aerial of Washington DC in November
by Susan Barsy

Day 16: Revamping Presidential Selection

23 Oct 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , ,

Up in the air, © 2016 Susan Barsy
How can the US improve on the way it selects a president?  What process could the nation use to move toward a system that is more efficient, less disruptive, and that produces presidents of the highest caliber?

Personally, I would be in favor moving away from our current system, which essentially abdicates most of the decision-making to extra-constitutional bodies, a. k. a. the political parties.   I would love to see a movement to increase our reliance on the electoral college.  That is, let political delegates selected at the state level get together in the electoral college, consider a range of their favored candidates, and vote until one attains the Constitutionally mandated number of votes.

Over the centuries, Americans have moved farther and farther away from the nation’s original method of presidential selection.  We have moved toward an ever greater reliance on the two major parties and on the results of direct votes in the primaries.  The results on the Democratic and Republican side this time around have hardly been satisfactory.  On the Republican side, the winner is a figure who has never held public office and will not command much influence with other national politicians.  On the Democratic side, we have a more seasoned candidate who might well have been supplanted were it not for the machinations of the national party committee, which makes direct voting seem like a sham.

If the states’ citizens delegated this power to electors, could they not perform the work well on the public’s behalf, perhaps producing a better and more efficacious result?

Day 35: Political Intelligence

4 Oct 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , 4 Comments

After the rain, before the fall, © 2016 Susan Barsy

Five weeks to go before Election Day.  The dearth of certainty about voter sentiment is excruciating.  I check for new polling information on the presidential race several times a day, knowing it’s pointless yet hungering for some bit of  ‘intelligence’ with conclusive authority.

This, in the face of a media blitz whose narrative is Clinton’s brightening prospects in the wake of her first presidential debate ‘win.’  (If only the election were more like a World Series.)  Judging from the New York Times and some other northern urban news outlets, Trump’s negatives are destroying him and his campaign is in a near-fatal decline.  Editorial boards and leading figures from the President on down are insisting to the electorate that ‘nobody’ wants Trump.  His election would spell disaster: a message that will heighten the nation’s problems should the unthinkable come to pass.

Day 39: The Campaign Will End

30 Sep 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , 2 Comments

Great Lake Campaign, © 2016 Susan Barsy
On Wednesday I came out to Michigan, and this afternoon I went to the dunes.  I’m happy to report that, while visiting the lakeshore, I was oblivious of politics.  The beach was notably empty of anything newsworthy.  I was beyond the reach of the candidates and their endless campaign.  The water of Lake Michigan thudded and surged against the sand, seeped in instantly, and roiled itself all over again, rather like a lung or a heart, the vital system of our country, deeper than the body politic.

For many months, the campaign has engaged and fascinated me; yes, sometimes I felt anxiety, but only this week did I begin to see the end of it, the certainty of a result, and with that vision came disillusionment.  Yes, in a little more than four weeks, the election will end, and even if it is so close the victor has to be decided by some unusual process, either Hillary Clinton or Donald J. Trump will become the next American president.  And there was something so disappointing about this to me that for a moment I lost all interest, and wished desperately to be somewhere else, somewhere untouched by the colossal sprawl of American politics.