Perhaps you saw the poll that showed the percent of Americans who answered “yes” to the question, “Will who wins the election make a great deal of difference in your life?” has grown from 21% in 1996 to 62% today. If you’re like me, and you used to worry about voter apathy, perhaps you too think we should have been more careful what we wished for.
Elections are important, because politics allocates power, and power can do good or it can do harm. This election is more important than many I’ve seen (I won’t belabor why). Still, that number sends a shiver down my spine. I’d much rather be vainly trying to encourage people to care more about politics than vainly attempting to cool down a lynch mob. And much of the time, these days, I feel like we might be a lynch mob waiting to happen, here in the land of the free.
That nearly two-thirds of Americans feel so much hinges for them, personally, on who sits in the Oval does nothing to assuage those fears. I understand that some people are legitimately afraid. If you’re a child whose parents are undocumented, for example, or if you’re on a fixed income and worried about inflation soaring again. But I suspect that a lot of the people who feel deeply invested in the outcome of the election are using politics to fill a vacuum of some kind in their lives. Whatever it is, they want to win.
I think of what an Ohio couple profiled in the Washington Post said after the 2004 election: “It’s a victory for people like us.”
Candidates can talk of “victory” and “defeat.” And I understand why voters might want to. But I’d prefer they use other language: “disappointed,” “challenged,” “energized,” “relieved.” “Victory” means someone else has been vanquished; “defeated” means someone’s lost. Nothing so final ever occurs in American politics. A more developed sense of irony–if not tragedy–would do us well.
As it is, if 62% of us think the outcome of the election will make “a great deal of difference” in our lives, that means we’re going to see a lot of angry people come November, whoever wins.
“For a long while before the appointed time is at hand the election becomes the most important and the all-engrossing topic of discussion. The ardor of faction is redoubled; and all the artificial passions which the imagination can create in the bosom of a happy and peaceful land are agitated and brought to light,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.
As the election draws near, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the populace increase; the citizens are divided into hostile camps, each of which assumes the name of its favorite candidate; the whole nation glows with feverish excitement; the election is the daily theme of the public papers, the subject of private conversation, the end of every thought and every action, the sole interest of the present. As soon as the choice is determined, this ardor is dispelled; and as a calmer season returns, the current of the State, which had nearly broken its banks, sinks to its usual level: but who can refrain from astonishment at the causes of the storm.
If only it were still true that the ardor is dispelled once the votes are counted.