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The Rebellion of 2016


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WestVirginiaRebel
the_rebellion_of_2016_132266.htmlReal Clear Politics:

GETTYSBURG — This has been the year of living rebelliously.

 

Exhausted, frustrated, disgusted, millions of Americans nonetheless go to the polls Tuesday, possessed, despite all their disappointment and despair, with a sense of hope for the future and a determination to restore respect to the country and its institutions.

 

Tuesday brings to an end a tortuous and tortured process that has raised questions about the sturdiness of our democracy, the processes we use to select our leaders, the durability of our political parties and the willingness of Americans to be engaged in the vital civic activities of our culture. We emerge from this experience battered and bruised, skittish and skeptical — and yet still committed to Lincoln’s better angels, and of course to better presidential candidates.

 

This is, to be sure, a moment of extreme pressure on our institutions, spawned in part by those two deeply flawed candidates and amplified by the emergence of a new generation of voters with its own perspectives and priorities and by profound demographic shifts that are rendering old notions of our politics as outdated as the city bosses were in the 1990s.

 

Some of what the country has witnessed seemed new and searing, but wasn’t. The name-calling (Lying Ted, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary), for example, was discordant but not exceptional in our history.

 

Years before he became president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis was the target of unforgiving opprobrium from Sam Houston, who criticized the Mississippi senator by saying he was as “ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.” In “Profiles in Courage,” John F. Kennedy wrote this of Thomas Hart Benton, who served in the Senate from 1821 to 1851: “Pouring out his taunting sarcasm in short, bombastic thunderbolts of gigantic rage, hate and ridicule, day after day, in town after town, he assailed his opponents and their policies with bitter invective.”

 

Nor are shifts in party loyalty a new feature of our democracy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said of his 1940 rival, Wendell Willkie, that it was typical of him “to stand alone and to challenge the wisdom taken by powerful interests within his own party.”

 

This is not the worst election we have ever had, though surely it is the worst we have had in modern times. The campaign has distressed commentators and political scientists, but there remain glimmers of hope among the people who actually will decide the outcome. This is not a guess based on anecdotal conversations in this classic swing state but a statistically significant finding in a respected poll. The percentage of Americans who, according to a Colby College/​Boston Globe poll, say both sides in the election confrontation should come together and work together is astonishing: 93 percent.

 

The strains on the two parties have tested their mettle and perhaps prepared them for a raucous future, when the New Deal coalition is dissipated and when old ideas of Republican rectitude are abandoned along with wing collars, bustles and puttees.

________

 

The people have revolted.


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