Democracies’ Discontents: American Voters at a Tipping Point

With twenty-one more days to election day, November 3, Americans see how limited and bad the choices are. As the cliché goes, we are caught between a rock and a hard place or forced to choose between joining the devil or jump into the deep sea. With hucksters, shills, and true believers on both sides hectoring, lecturing, shaming, pleading, demanding our time, money and vote with promises of keeping America great, making America great, building something better — slogans tested and marketed by well-paid K Street snake-oil marketers and PR agents — we are at our wits’ end, except of course for the true believers who swear by their “old man”. “Trump is Reagan on steroids,” someone recently sought to persuade a group of people who fear what a Biden presidency will augur for the country. Not knowing whether it is some slogan being tested by the well-connected in the Trump campaign, I wondered what it even meant for the group that it was being sold to! Trump is a conman, a vulgar, blustering fool on hydroxychloroquine and God knows what else after the Walter Reed docs fast-tracked him to 98.4. To support Trump and throw good money into the campaign of a vulgar narcissist is the only choice for those who believe Biden is on the cusp of total senility and that Kamala Harris will bend reality to her purpose. Politicians are psychopaths, people have warned us, and if voters therefore do not distance themselves from personalities and focus on policy, and take the next step and move from policy to considering the political philosophy upon which…