On one level, I find myself horrified by what's transpired over the past year or so of the campaign. Two odious individuals have risen to the heads of their respective parties. Politics has been openly reduced to reality television; the veneer of civility and gravitas has been stripped away and the sensationalism and vapidity of the process and the candidates have been laid bare in a way that manages to shock and revolt even those of us who have long been disillusioned with American democracy. There is ample reason for alarm: the presumptive Democrat nominee is a walking scandal who has moved almost effortlessly from disgrace to disgrace for the better part of the past three decades, a person who by any other name would surely face indictment and federal prosecution, the epitome of everything that's wrong and everything that's been wrong with Washington Establishment politics for a good long while. The Republican nominee is quite different, but hardly better: a man better suited to the tabloids than high office. If Hillary Clinton is everything that's wrong with American politics, Donald Trump is everything that's wrong with the American culture: arrogant, entitled, wealthy in large part from inheritance and shady dealings, he substitutes bravado for strength, ostentatious displays of wealth for class, blustery rhetoric for a substantive analysis of the issues.
But I do think there's a reason for people of a broad range of political persuasions to be optimistic about what this election portends for our country, even if we are appalled by the "options" before us. The Establishment Consensus, the narrow range of political and philosophical approaches allowed a seat at the table or a voice in the debate, seems to have broken wide open. In both major parties, the energy and organization was in insurgent campaigns whose defining features were a departure from politics as usual, from the narrow range of thinking that has circumscribed American politics in my lifetime and for awhile before that. Candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and even Donald Trump all offered radically different visions for what the country was and what it could be. Despite a certain measure of despair at the names appearing on the ballot in November, I'm glad to see energy flowing outside the two parties and the tired ideology they both represent; I'm glad to see people of both parties saying that they don't just intend to Support the Nominee, or vote for the next guy in line.
If Trump (or if Bernie Sanders on the Left) represents a departure from politics as usual, then at least it can be said that he departs from a thing worth abandoning. More than at any time in my memory, it seems to me that there are a lot of possibilities before us: we have had credible candidates in people who alternatively advocated a reversion to Establishment politics, a socialist political and cultural revolution, a return to constitutional republicanism, or authoritarian nationalism. If I have some issues with each of those candidates and each of those visions, at least I can find some cause for hope in their variety, in the movement of the public debate beyond the incremental and towards the fundamental. While the latter chafes a bit at my conservative temperament and presumption against radical change, an inescapable fact I think is that what we're doing right now isn't working. To the extent that millions of people of a wide range of beliefs can be united in at least that conviction, it seems to me that we've made some progress. Now of course there's plenty that I don't like about this election, and I think the bad dramatically outweighs the good. But for my first post back here in a long while I figured that it would be best to start with a silver lining.
