By BILL CHAISSON
The midterm elections left a bad taste in my mouth, not because of who won or lost, but because how the “game” was played. American elections, even the mid-term ones, drag on forever by the standards of the rest of the world. Like everything else that isn’t actually business (healthcare, for example) we have made political campaigns into a business. There is a lot of time and money involved and it is all a waste.
I heard about at least one New Hampshire state Senate race during which one candidate actually engaged in negative campaigning against another, running ads that made allegations about the other’s background that weren’t particularly germane or true. This is venom unleashed in a competition for a job that pays $200 per year and meets fewer times than just about any other legislature in a state that seems determined to have as little centralized government as is possible. And yet “big league” campaigning tactics are deployed in a mid-term election. Talk about bringing a knife to a fist fight.
The other aspect of the campaign that disturbed me was the rhetoric. Everyone becomes a political philosopher during an election and you get a lot of “armchair quarterbacking.” Some folks, for example, are absolutely sure that the founders believed in a federal government that didn’t have much power over the states. And that therefore no candidate should ever speak about issues that don’t concern their district.
In fact, this was one of the enduring disagreements among the founders and it was resolved, more or less, by compromise within the Constitution; the Anti-Federalists did not actually “win.” Instead, the two factions went back and forth for decades. For example, the Alien and Sedition Acts put in place by John Adams, a Federalist, were thought too heavy-handed, so the country elected Thomas Jefferson, an anti-Federalist who claimed to support a more decentralized approach. And then Jefferson turned around and had the federal government more than double the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase, to which the existing states almost immediately made extravagant and overlapping claims.
One of the candidates running for the legislature in Vermont, although running as a Progressive, criticized the incumbents for paying too much attention to the rest of the state and neglecting their district. I have written a whole other editorial about this tendency of elected officials (or, apparently, those who wish to be elected officials) to think of their districts as a place that they are supposed to “get stuff for,” pork, as it is traditionally called.
These are all ruinous ideas and behaviors — treating opponents as enemies, using philosophy as if it were rhetoric, and thinking of your own district or state as an isolated entity — that are part of the country’s decades-long slide toward intolerance, factionalism and social Darwinist tripe-spewing.
Some people have dated the beginning of this trend back to the 1968 televised debates between conservative William F. Buckley and liberal Gore Vidal, two public intellectuals who despised one another. A 2015 documentary film called “The Best of Enemies” explored how the nastiness of their on-screen interactions “opened the floodgates for today’s opinionated, conflict-driven coverage,” as the New York Times put it. Whenever it started, it doesn’t seem to have bottomed out yet.
There are signs that some people would like to see it change. Two candidates for a Vermont legislature seat found out they were both musicians. For no other purpose other than to show that political contests don’t have to be pointless hate fests, they sat down and played together. The story was picked up by the national media. Many people seem to want meanness and venality to stop, but they don’t want to look like chumps, so they play the game.
Think of the number of candidates that you have heard about who remain reasonable until their numbers dip in the final weeks of the campaign and they make the decision to “go negative.” We are now at the point where suddenly deciding to starting calling someone names, attacking their character, cherry-picking pieces of their record to paint a distorted picture, and generally behaving like a jerk is merely a “strategy.”
My favorite part of this is when the public and the media ask each other “Where are all the great political leaders of yesteryear?” They’re at home, teaching their kids to play fair.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times, but sometimes thinks about quitting journalism to run for office. He is a glutton for punishment.
As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.