Democrageddon 2016: The Voteocalypse

Well folks, we made it: Election Day 2016 is finally upon us! (if that exclamation point seems a little forced or sarcastic, it absolutely is)

The last year or so has been an election "campaign" in a very military sense: after an initial burst of bombastic patriotic fervour, we soon became bogged down in the trenches and have been begging for months for it all to just be over.

"The horror. The horror."

To put it another way, right now America is now very much like Tea Leone at the end of Deep Impact: we know there's no hope of avoiding the monstrous shit-storm of a tsunami headed our way, so we've decided to step outside and face it stoically on our own terms.

Tea Leone being America, and the tsunami being this shit-storm of an election

How did we end up here? Well, for starters let's take a look at the candidates:

Hillary

For the Democrats, Hillary Clinton fairly quickly emerged as the 'safe' choice that not many people actually wanted. There was an undeniable fervour to Bernie Sanders' campaign that Clinton's lacked. For example, hen I was in LA back in April I bumped into a Bernie crowd a few hours after he'd given a speech, and there were still a hundred people chanting on the sidewalk and whipping up enthusiasm. Those guys were motivated. An insider like Clinton could never realistically replicate that energy, but she's ploughed through and made a good fist of the campaign. In my personal opinion, Clinton's not perfect (see: close links to the major banks and a hawkish foreign policy), but she does have a wealth of government experience and would make a supremely capable and diligent POTUS; in the words of Louis CK, she's "the tough, bitch mother" that America needs right now.

Which, all-in-all, leads her to compare favourably with...

The Donald

Clearly, the "star" of the election has been Donald Trump- specifically, a neutron star of unimaginable density and instability. Say what you like about Trump- I'm about to- but he *has* seized the public attention and been almost literally unavoidable over the last year. When he first announced his candidacy, he was a laughable figure (guilty as charged), and it's true that he's been an absolute gift for satirists. Indeed, he's almost been too good; he is so inherently ridiculous that it's hard for satire to keep up.

"Watched Saturday Night Live hit job on me. Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!" -  an actual Presidential candidate  

Cut it however you want, but The Donald is intriguing. There are populist politicians all around the world, but to me, there's something quintessentially American about Trump. He seems to embody the toxic flipside of the American dream; rich, privileged, brash, domineering. At the same time, he's undeniably fascinating, albeit in the same way that I'd be fascinated by a particularly mouldy yoghurt in my fridge: I'm damned if I know how it got there and it repulses me to my core, but it's intriguingly disgusting. Trump is an enthralling caricature character with an indisputably unique "style": hair like a threadbare birds nest strung with tinsel, skin the colour of a Cheeto-dusted tangerine, and a grammar structure in which all sentences are constructed by subject-verb-hyperbole. However, peel behind his ridiculous persona and there lies a truly deranged and dangerous person who could feasibly become President of the United States.

One of the reasons I haven't bothered to write more about Trump during the election season is just that it would be exhausting; if professional, full-time journalists can't keep up, then how the heck could I? Suffice to say, it's been a pretty busy year for ol' Donald. Scandals that would normally derail any other campaign are met with a pretty standard response:

1) Denial (even if there are witnesses or video evidence)
2) Deflection (it's not my fault, it's "Crooked Hillary"/media elites/the GOP/dead soldiers)
3) Distraction (with a new outrageous comment)

There's a quote by Mark Twain (or possibly Winston Churchill) that goes: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on". Donald Trump is basically the International Space Station of untruths, whizzing around the planet at 7.67km/s while the truth is still sputtering on the runway.

"This thing is bigly quick, I mean, the velocity is just YUGE" - Donald Trump on the ISS

The Danger of False Equivalency

As John Oliver pointed out a few months ago, there's a real danger in looking at both candidates and thinking that because neither is squeaky clean, they are somehow equivalent which is absolutely not the case at all. Is Hillary perfect? I wouldn't say so. But you'd be hard-pressed to look objectively at both candidates and say that they are both equally tainted. The worst scandal for Hillary essentially boils down to bad data handling; for Donald Trump, it's effectively admitting to raping women.

Where The Hell Do We Go From Here?

I try to keep an open mind about opposing points of view and have been digging around to find out why exactly The Donald, repugnant as he is, has such an appeal for millions of voters. For example, David Wong wrote a good article on Cracked framing the rise of Trump as a consequence of the divide between rural and urban America. Similarly, this sociologist moved to Louisiana to better understand the Tea Party and the American right. Both of these articles go some way to giving more context about the mess that we find ourselves in, but both seem to come to the same unsatisfactory conclusion; white, rural, uneducated Americans- especially men- automatically distrust government (despite benefitting most from government programs), and feel like they're getting left behind by the economy and society as a whole.

Pictured: Cognitive dissonance

I can sort of see where they're coming from, because they are actually right: society is changing, it is getting more multicultural, and it is becoming less patriarchal. So, they have two choices: embrace the change that is happening and appreciate it as a positive evolution, or plant their feet in the mud and try to resist for as long as they can hold out. Trump may well lose this election, but in a sense the damage has already been done; his campaign has empowered those on the far right, and it's hard to close that particular Pandora's Box once it's been opened.

That said, if Clinton can take the White House then the US might indeed be safe for the foreseeable future. Demographic trends show the Trump/GOP base declining, and unless the party reforms itself and reevaluate where it stands then it could face many more years in the wilderness.

Whatever happens, let's all agree that there's one thing we can be grateful for: on the 9th November, this election will be fucking over.