Given two terrible choices, a depressing number of voters have responded in the worst way.
Yes, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are terrible presidential candidates, but not all of the blame for this thoroughly depressing election year can be placed at their feet. The primaries gave the general electorate two bad, disliked, dishonest, vindictive options . . . and in far too many cases, the general electorate responded appallingly, making a crummy situation worse.
Let’s start with the violence. A GOP office was firebombed in North Carolina. A threatening if ultimately non-hazardous white powder was sent to Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn. There were violent attacks on Trump supporters in what was accurately called a riot in San Jose in June. There were headlocks and punches thrown at a Clinton rally in Charlotte. Anonymous death threats have been depressingly common. Some cretin sent a video of a strobe light to a reporter with epilepsy.
Even when the hostility is confined to threats rather than actual violence, it’s an un-American infringement upon the rights of others to speak their mind and peaceably assemble. In Minneapolis, “some fundraiser attendees were pushed and jostled, spit on and verbally harassed as they left the convention center.” In Denver, “a man grabbed pro-Trump bumper stickers from a woman selling them outside the city’s convention center, ripped some and threw them in her face.”
In this atmosphere of perpetually frothing disdain, our friends and neighbors who disagree aren’t merely mistaken; they’ve taken a stand that requires anonymous or not so anonymous vigilante deterrence. An Iowa cop took pictures of himself mooning and pointing a gun at a Hillary Clinton campaign sign. In Waco, Texas, a Democratic couple found their Hillary Clinton signs defaced and “Benghazi,” “NO. TO. Corruption,” “Lies,” “NO Trust,” and “You Are Wrong” spray-painted on the sidewalk outside their home. In the Baltimore suburbs, “large Trump signs have been burned, ripped and vandalized.” A Democratic state house candidate in Michigan was caught stealing campaign signs of his Republican opponent.
#related#And those incidents don’t even begin to cover the unbelievable vulgarity 2016 has unleashed. It would have once rather shocking, or at least surprising, to see a certain five-letter word starting with “p” openly used in American politics. True, Trump’s now-infamous use of that word seemed to distress many Americans, but it also normalized the word overnight, from the signs urging people not to be one to the sign declaring it better to grab one than to be one to one Trump supporter who wore a shirt inviting Trump to grab hers. At Trump’s airport rally in Lakeland, Fla., the crowd chanted “CNN s***s!” At his rally in Green Bay, Wis., they chanted, “Paul Ryan s***s!” Rapper YG offers a variety of merchandise featuring the title lyric of his song “F*** Donald Trump.” A Boston brewery named its latest offering “Trump S***s A**.”
At the close of the Constitutional Convention, when asked “Well, doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” Ben Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
In 2016, the question is no longer whether we can keep it but whether we want to keep it. And the answer, for too many Americans, is “Nah, f**k it. It s***s a**.”