The Great American Circus
Another strange election season in the United States introduces a familiar sensation that our country is frozen on the brink of calamity
A crescendoing drumbeat begins to sound around Labor Day every four years. It accelerates in tempo until the day of the election — until the results are announced, finalized, and the new leader assumes office. Already-hectic news cycles mount and mount until the dam breaks and the country devolves into full-throttled, “Fire!”-screaming lunacy. Yet so many of the calls are warranted. Our theater is on fire and we’re watching the embers coalesce in slow motion.
Even as the speed of the race picks up, time only seems to dilate. The notion that Trump’s assassination attempt took place merely 40 days ago is something that both sides of the political arena can agree is shocking. The pandemonium in the days that followed felt like it might never cease. Seeing the photo of that triumphant, blood-covered Trump for the first time, many pundits and observers were quick to throw in their hats and call the race for him then and there.
But all of the turmoil that emerged from that hectic day has diminished into oblivion faster than any of us could have anticipated. The shock value of that notorious image has rapidly dwindled. Even Biden’s decision to drop out and turn this race on its head feels like old news.
The frenzied pace of it all lends credence to the idea that, when the clock ticks past July every four years we reenter the same cycles anew. We drive ourselves mad within the timeless space that sprawls out before each election day. There’s something bizarrely liminal about it, as though we each exist inside a bubble waiting to pop. Signs for candidates are placed on lawns and we wear a terrible tribalism on our sleeves. Political disagreements between friends that lie dormant for three of every four years reach a fever pitch. In the slow-roiling agitation, we see the very most vile, bitter, and resentful of ourselves paraded proudly in attack ads and slow-boiling vitriol.
The chess game stretches on interminably, and each voter and politician is a player on the board.
To look back at the events of only a month ago, it’s hard to grasp that we’re the same people who watch yearly New Year’s recaps on TV and reflect, “Wow, I can’t believe that last Kanye West anti-semitism debacle took place a whole eleven months ago; that feels like it was just yesterday!”
But during election years, as slow-moving August days give way to an autumnal array of colors, the leaves cling desperately to trees, apprehensive to hit sidewalks until election results are announced. Time slows to a crushing halt. Our worst ills are on display for the whole world to see.
We hurl horrible insults across the aisle and in-fighting can dominate even our own parties. We play a game infused with more strategy than a sports franchise full of coaches. We devise plays so complicated that they stretch out for the better part of years. Campaigns begin before they’re even announced. The chaos of a circus kicking into gear can be heard well before the first of the debates.
Once our candidates line up on stage, the cries rise and don’t settle until they reach an uncontainable cacophony. It wasn’t always this way.
Of course, it’s no recent occurrence for us to protract our political seasons to last for years rather than weeks. In each of the elections that I’ve witnessed, the insanity has begun well before we lined up outside of voting booths. In the hotly contested aftermath of the George W. Bush vs. John Kerry race, I stood beside my parents at waist-height before we took a train into the city to protest Bush’s dubious electoral college win. I was given the smallest sign to carry. Arriving downtown, we stood within the crowd and I held that sign I was just barely old enough to read.
They knew that I didn’t understand what I was protesting for, but they believed all the same it was important for me to have those early memories of political engagement — and civil disobedience. But the issues we faced as a country in those days feel banal by comparison. The protests were warranted, but the dissension of years since has had an unfortunate way of diminishing those concerns of the past. The issues we fought for were real, and our disagreements were significant. Yet they weren’t insurmountable.
It wasn’t every political dispute between members of opposing parties that deteriorated into epithet exchanges and irreconcilable disagreements. It wasn’t the case that veritable majorities of each party believed their opponents were irredeemable, treasonous threats to the nation. It wasn’t the case that these strong-held beliefs often had a disconcertingly real footing in reality.
Trump’s Republican party is a threat to Democracy, and he’s been allowed a millionfold more leniency than he deserves when we consider the marijuana misdemeanors that have routinely landed people with lengthy prison sentences in this country. Trump has 34 felonies, and even while he would not be allowed to run in a state or local election with these crimes weighing against him, the founding fathers simply never anticipated a candidate could circumvent those low government restrictions and rise to the country’s highest office anyway.
In short, our nation’s forefathers never made rules against convicted felons running in presidential elections because they never believed that convicted felons would run in presidential elections.
The minds behind our constitution never expected that a president would incite an insurrection by leveraging social media and sowing misinformation. They believed that, should such a perilous time in our country emerge, that our other branches of government would step up in their duty and impeach the leader responsible. They didn’t believe that senators would shirk that weighty, patriotic onus, openly admit that same leader’s culpability, and exonerate him of wrongdoing nonetheless. Even while Trump may still have retained his right to run in this race if he’d been charged with felonies in a peoples’ court, the Senate could have ensured that such a high criminal was unable to go anywhere near the office of presidency ever again.
When half of the voting public within this country believes in this tyrant’s return to power, the Democrats are justified in both their fury and trepidation. That isn’t to say that their adversaries deserve to have all of their grievances downplayed or dismissed entirely, only that those supporters have been by and large deluded into believing that a weird, nearing 80-year-old, proven conman offers viable solutions for their problems. Their fears about inflation and the most fervent progressives’ agenda aren’t baseless. They do present their fair causes for concern. But Trump is the blunt object that will beat the nation’s nose to a pulp to spite its face.
There are Republicans in office today who present meaningful arguments for why they disagree with Democrats about the path forward for our nation. Some of them build cases that I would have a difficult time refuting myself. But it isn’t all of them who believe in the fire and brimstone path forward that Donald Trump represents.
A comfortable majority of lower office Republicans in this country have the sense, compassion, and know-how to comport themselves with basic human decency. Donald Trump does not. They have more diplomacy than to spend the wee hours caps-lock ranting and raving on social media platforms they created. They have established ideologies. They don’t treat political campaigns as weapons, but as platforms to champion ordered debate and reason.
There is a path forward for the Republican party. But it demands a retreat from this extremism they’ve introduced into our politics in allowing insurrection-inciting felons to run for our nation’s highest office. It demands a night-and-day restructuring that may be beyond what we can reasonably expect to occur in the next few months. But there will come a day when the political movements that reign supreme within this country will die. They may evolve into something different. Trumpism functions largely as a cult of personality and a nearing 80-year-old man can only stand in the limelight for so long.
It’s a dire truth that transcends personal politics that Donald Trump is unfit to be the president of the United States. If the country can’t come together in that reality soon, fracture is all but inevitable.
Well said, I wish I had the command of the written word laced with the humility you do sir. I usually devolve (in my head) to a lowest common denominator of fury. That even counting to ten doesn’t seem to help. And in this current political climate it seems even worse. It would surely send our forefathers into seizures if they saw what’s been occurring in their name. Heavy sigh 😔
Excellent points. I feel like both Harris & Walz are really trying to avoid most of the mudslinging & ugliness that’s dominated politics in this country for so long, which is a sweet change of pace. And I certainly don’t fault the founders of this country for not foreseeing the current insanity, because I remember thinking that at least republicans in Congress would be there to rein Trump in as recently as 2016 myself. I really hope they can get it together for the sake of this country, but sometimes I think he’s the logical conclusion to what “conservatism” has become in the US