By David K. Shipler
Imagine
a democratic country where voters ended a political campaign knowing more about
the difficult issues than they did at the beginning. Imagine the learning
experience of hearing presidential candidates seriously discussing how to curb
the wars in Europe and the Middle East, compete sensibly with China, retard climate
change, address the coming revolution of AI, open economic opportunity for the
impoverished, reduce racial discrimination, and gain control over immigration. Now
flip that upside down and you have the world’s supposed model of democracy, the
United States of America.
On the
tasks before us, we understand less and less. If we once believed we lived in a
free-market economy with prices set mainly by supply and demand, the campaign
has taught us to think that a president has all the power and so should get all
the blame—or credit—for our struggles or our prosperity, whichever happens to
occur during an administration.
If we ever
understood the limits of US control over global conflicts, we are now convinced
that an omnipotent president could stop Russia vs. Ukraine and Israel vs. Hamas
and Hezbollah.
If we
ever took the trouble to grasp the complex forces of desperation and hope that
drive immigrants from their violent homelands to ours, we can no longer be
bothered with anything but simplistic measures and instant cures.
Elections
seem to dumb us down. Its practitioners filter out the nuance, contradictions,
and history essential to forming smart policy. We retreat into our caves of
certainty and disparage the “undecideds.”
The problem is not brand new, just worse
with Donald Trump, whose fabricated unreality flows effortlessly out to a
gullible electorate. It’s worse now with social media and biased journalism
that flatten the intricate contours of the country’s challenges. It’s worse
with Russia attacking democracy itself by aiming fake posts and videos at a pluralistic
system that Moscow has long feared, from the communist era into the present.
You can
get to some issues if you get your news from responsible sources—The New
York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, PBS NewsHour, for example. Good
reporting has been done on important challenges facing the country. But the
campaigns themselves have been negligent. If you look for detailed policy
papers on the candidates’ websites, you’ll find that Trump’s are mostly
propaganda and Kamala Harris’s mostly platitudes.
Instead, campaigns bombard us with
symbols and slogans, smears and slanders designed to trigger more emotion than
thought. Trump advocates huge tariffs on imports, which he claims China and
other foreign countries will pay, which they will not. Harris counters that Trump’s
tariffs are a “sales tax,” which they are not. Neither tries to educate the
public about how tariffs work: taxes charged to the importer, who will
probably, but not definitely, pass at least some on to the consumer. Or, foreign
manufacturers could reduce prices in response. Neither candidate makes an
effort to discuss the pros and cons of tariffs as a tool to promote domestic
business alongside their risk of fueling inflation. Unless you take the trouble
to read a BBC or Wall Street Journal analysis, you are left misinformed
by both sides.
Even the BBC can get it wrong, as
in a fact-checking
article that said, “The Biden administration has added 729,000
manufacturing jobs.” As for Trump, “He added 419,000 manufacturing jobs during
his first three years in office.” Sorry, folks, the jobs were added by the manufacturers,
not the presidents.
Yes, government influences the
economy through spending and taxes legislated by Congress and interest rates
set by the Federal Reserve. But personifying in the presidency vast powers over
barely controllable developments, domestic or foreign, distorts discussion and evades
the hard tasks of problem-solving.
Therefore, as election analysts
have observed, many of us vote more with our guts than our heads. We are wooed
or repelled by a candidate’s images, and the image of strength, candor, and
decisiveness holds sway over the studious, the reflective, and the instinctive
regard for the multiple sides of a question. That blanks out the chance to be
educated about policy during an election.
Good
leadership contains a paradox. Presidents need to be both strong and yet studious,
decisive and yet open to various viewpoints. They are also entitled to change
their minds as, one hopes, they mature in their thinking. In the electoral
process, however, ironclad consistency is celebrated as principled while
evolution is denounced as hypocrisy. Both can be true, but not always. No considered
policy discussion is possible when no space is given a candidate for a change
of mind, even for purely political expediency,
Harris, for example, has not been able
to delve into the virtues or pitfalls of fracking, because she once opposed it
and now accepts it, the arguments on each side be damned. It’s a worthwhile
discussion, but we don’t hear it from her or, it goes without saying, from
Trump.
Trump, instead, projects an aura of
power by being dogmatically closed-minded, insulting, and authoritarian, and
therefore worshipped from the gut by millions who are drawn to their sense that
the country needs a strongman, with all the accompanying dangers to democracy.
A remarkable
feature of this campaign has been its lack of serious examination of the peril
the world faces of widespread warfare and of ways to avoid it. Trump has warned
of an imminent World War Three, and in this case it might not be hyperbole. But
he doesn’t lead an intelligent conversation on parrying China’s expansionist
strategy, and he merely brushes away Ukraine as something that he’ll magically
solve between his election and inauguration.
On the Middle East, Harris tries
not to antagonize pro-Israel voters while giving little nods of recognition to
the suffering of Palestinians, not enough to erase many Arab-Americans’
distress at the Biden administration’s support for the Jewish state. Trying
that balancing act is politically protective, but it wipes out any chance of
serious discussion of the confounding issues in that war and America’s longterm
role in addressing the conflict.
