Presidential Election

 

What follows is not an essay, more like a plea or exhortation.  I began writing this on Tuesday morning shortly after returning from the poling place, a firehouse about a mile from our house, to which our neighborhood was assigned.  The few people likely to be reading blog essays this morning are well aware that yesterday was Election Day in the United States and aware as well that I generally put my post up fairy early on a Wednesday morning.  As I write, of course, the absolutely final results are not yet known, but it is certain that Donald Trump has won the election and won it big.   While I cannot say that I shall be entirely indifferent as to what the final certified results will be, this brief post is not concerned with them.  Anybody who has been “following” the election campaign closely—and it has nearly obsessed me—will be aware that it has been conducted with an intensity bordering on desperation, and that prominent supporters of both the major candidates have predicted a nearly existential cataclysm should their preferred candidate lose.  Yet it was always certain that one of them must lose.  The clear logic of the situation is that many millions of voters—probably nearly half of all voters—will emerge from the experience disappointed,  and not a few of them angry.  Many are likely to be suspicious and dubious of the validity of an outcome they have been nursed by months of extreme rhetoric to regard to be so undesirable as to be unthinkable.

 

Whatever the result, however, it is an evidence not of the death of democracy but of its practice.  One of Churchill’s more famous remarks, uttered a couple of years after the end of the Second World War, is this: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”  Our own American democracy is undoubtedly being tested.  What the current electoral campaign has revealed to me—though I have nowhere seen this as a prominent item of discussion in the press—is the inadequacy of our two-party system in its current evolution.  If the only purpose of your organization is to achieve power, you are likely to employ all legal means in its pursuit and to stretch the meaning of the word “legal” to its breaking point.  Fortunately, a genuine democratic system, truly engaged in a principled fashion, allows constant refocus and recalculation.  By this I mean it is possible to achieve a just and effective government, possible but not of course guaranteed.  When a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of a government he and his co-conspirators had come up with, he is reported to have replied: A republic, madam, if you can keep it.  Let us by all means keep it.