It seems that with every presidential election, both sides of the aisle come out in force claiming, “This is the most important election of our lifetimes.”
Now, in the 2024 go-round, the slogan is that the Trump/Harris bout will determine if America remains a democracy.
Isn’t that a little over-the-top?
What is a democracy?
First of all, the United States was not designed to be a “democracy,” and we should all be thankful for that.
In a democracy, freedom of speech is limited to groupthink and freedom of association is determined by the majority. Democracy demands that the needs and wants of the majority become supreme, while all others be damned.
In a democracy, limited resources are only spread out to those who the majority deems to be loyal to the official dogma, rather than allow the marketplace of ideas to bud and flower and expand those resources to be more widely available.
To those on the far left, a presidential win for Donald Trump will automatically create a dictatorship; they just know that Trump will immediately resort to jailing his opponents and any journalist who does not toe his line.
These people have raised their rhetoric to the point of being so shrill that it almost seems that they want Trump to win so that they can be proven to have been right all along.
Trump has already had four years in office, and he did not turn into some weird hybrid of Jack Torrance and Richard Nixon roaming the gilded halls of the White House with an axe in one hand and a bottle of Scotch in the other, demanding his generals nuke Russia.
Meanwhile, the far right insists that if Kamala Harris wins, she will sit in front of a giant magic mirror, fixing her eye shadow and demanding the mirror reassure her that she is the “fairest of them all,” while Israel gets overrun by Iran, gas shoots up to $10 a gallon, millions starve and transexuals overrun the universe.
Now, Harris might not be the most articulate political player on the court, and she seems to waffle and waver on public policy, but the woman is not an idiot either.
Harris is merely untested; but so were Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln when they entered the White House, so we do not know how she will react in a crisis. But that does not mean she can’t handle pressure with grace and the wellspring of wisdom that adversity spurs in the human psyche.
We have had presidents who were drunks, others who were somewhat megalomaniacal, some who put the nation in real peril with their in-office sexual exploits and still others who relied on their wives’ astrological charts to make policy decisions; yet the nation has stayed together during times of both prosperity and want.
Putting these things into perspective means that we recognize that we, the citizens, are far more impacted by the actions of state and local governments than we are the federal government.
Sure, the executive has the power to stop gas pipelines and offshore drilling rigs from being built, and that affects us directly at the pump. The executive makes Supreme Court appointments that can last a generation, and the executive can righteously or with malice at heart, take the nation into yet another war.
However, it is local and state governments that make the decisions that most impact our daily lives.
It breaks my heart to see friendships end and families even get torn apart over who might win the 2024 election, as if that were the most pressing issue of our times. I have even seen people that I esteem highly begin acting like toddlers on social media over the presidential race.
Let’s all have a little perspective here and face the fact that out of a nation of 265 million people, these are the best two candidates our political parties can manage to find to run for the office and that is a shame.
Perhaps we look to the future and find ways to foster and groom the next generation of leaders to be real leaders who we can be proud of rather than being faced with choosing at the ballot box the better candidate between two people who have no idea what the average American faces day-to-day.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
