Editorial: In 2016 race, the American people lose
By the time you’re reading this, barring a contested election, the U.S. will have decided who will be entering the White House in January in order to lead the country for the next four years. At press time, we don’t know who that’s going to be — but no matter who wins, it’s hard not to feel like the American people have lost.
A New York Times/CBS News poll released last week revealed that more than eight in 10 voters surveyed are “repulsed rather than excited” by the state of our national politics. This election may very well go down as one of the most divisive in American history, with both major party candidates being vilified by the opposing side to the point where they have both been routinely labelled as criminals, and much worse, since attaining their respective nominations.
Of course, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton did not just appear out of thin air, and this election hasn’t happened in a vacuum. The toxic political landscape has been slowly growing more ugly for decades, and it doesn’t appear that we’re on the verge of discovering a sense of national unity or purpose any time soon.
While The Leader stood alongside four other SUNY schools in denouncing Trump’s candidacy, its editorial board did not choose to endorse anyone else. No matter who becomes the 45th president, they’re already mired in scandal, and they’ll be deeply unpopular from the get-go. That’s to say nothing of the other problems that have defined our politics over the last several years, like congressional gridlock and the growing role of money in our elections, to which solutions seem impossible given the current climate.
It would not be surprising to see this rancorous election turn young people away from the political process. While wages for youth continue to stagnate, our presidential debates are more demolition derby than Lincoln-Douglas, prime-time television spots where the candidates can promise to put their opponent in jail and present outright lies as the unimpeachable truth, seemingly without consequence. The issues that define young people’s lives, the problems that politics are supposed to help us defeat, remain unexplored.
But we also must look at ourselves honestly. If the American electorate cared as much about holding public servants accountable or transparency in government as it did about what candidates wear, we might not be feeling such existential dread right now. In a democracy like ours, deciding who directly rules is perhaps our biggest responsibility, which means that we the people bear much of the burden when the enterprise goes south.
Ultimately, in the face of such great malaise, it helps to be reminded: it doesn’t have to be this way. No matter how diminished the power of the vote may feel, it’s the one tool citizens have to fix what’s broken, and it deserves to be earned by those that seek it. We may be looking back on the 2016 election with dissatisfaction, but it’s our duty to demand better from our elected officials, from each other and from ourselves.