It was the bitterest of election campaigns, one where things as ugly as racism and hate had front-row seats, and if you were judging solely from the parts of the campaign that made it to air, you might well wonder how our neighbour to the south could survive, regardless of who won.
The new tools of the campaign? Everything from echoes of totalitarian rhetoric to manufactured scandal, from the most basic of dirty tricks to two campaigns clearly eager to pile onto any fact, fiction or story they could use to discredit their opponents. This was not a campaign of voting for candidates — it was voting against them. The first Barack Obama election slogan was “Hope.” This election could easily have been “Nope.”
It was far from the finest hour for democracy.
But however frightening the aftermath might look, I don’t think it’s hopeless.
During the election campaign, I was in 11 different states: the farmlands of Wisconsin and Illinois, the hard industrial riverside of parts of Missouri, a touch of Iowa and Kansas, a longitudinal march through the cornfields of Nebraska. Through a corner of Utah, but much more of Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada and down through California.
In many places, the election was a thing not to talk about: in The Griddle, a crowded, elbowroom-only diner in Winnemucca, Nevada, I overheard one of the only unprompted election conversations I heard through weeks in the U.S., and it was hardly a conversation: a man explaining to his girlfriend all the reasons why neither U.S. presidential election candidate can be trusted. That’s the sort of talk that set the tone: two bad choices, and a general resignation about the options.
But even in a Winnemucca laundromat, the kind of place where you’d expect politics to be a main topic, the socks and underwear whirling in the big industrial driers were the background to conversations about the weather, about the lack of water in the nearby Humboldt River. The only politics was municipal, talk about permitting for septic tanks and municipal water quality — and this in a crucial swing-state.
On the whole, it was very much the way the election seemed in its waning days: everybody already so much in one camp or the other that there was nothing left to talk about. Instead of debate, an unspoken agreement not to engage in rancorous and useless argument.
It was bigger in the media; bright lights always seem to bring out the worst behaviour. If your experience of America is solely from television, you can be forgiven for thinking that that country is on the brink of civil war. (I’m still not completely sure it isn’t.)
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.
But something else: through all the states, even in the poorest towns, it’s hard to overstate the openness and generosity of the average American — right down to the woman in the Casper, Wyoming, Walmart pitching discounted windows, who, when we refused her coupons, saying we were from Canada, gushed, “You’re so lucky.”
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.
Russell Wangersky is TC Media’s Atlantic regional columnist. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @Wangersky.
