I find I don't have a ton to say about this year's presidential election.
It's not that I don't think it's interesting or important. Well, scratch that: I'm not sure it's actually that interesting -- at least, not in the sense of there being much new that can be said about it.
This election really boils down to whether America is going to choose (and I use that term loosely, thanks to the Electoral College) Donald Trump -- again -- or if we'll try to turn the page on him, again.
Yeah, Kamala Harris is running. But that doesn't matter quite so much, does it?
I got into a rather intense online argument during the Democratic National Convention with an old friend. It was during Harris' speech, when she said something to the effect of 2024 being the most important election of our lifetime.
It's boilerplate, the kind of thing politicians say during every election.
Only it's not true. The 2016 presidential election was the most important election of our lifetime.
How can I say that? Easy. Because the 2024 election is still about dealing with the consequences of Donald Trump's unexpected win eight years ago.
Everything that's happening now is downstream effects.
Which means the new stuff to say is mostly about nuances and wrinkles in existing and extremely familiar narratives, and — for me, admittedly — often boils down to simple navel-gazing. Donald Trump is still racist and authoritarian and narcissistically impulsive, and all that is more than apparent now in 2016, but nothing seems all that different.
What's changed? Well, liberals hate the press more than ever. That’s a big wrinkle. And there's a recognition that Trump's victory wasn't a one-off goof, but ended up being a moment that catalyzed and changed the GOP into something different.
But that stuff's all been commented on, too.
For me, the bottom line remains this: Every person voting in 2024 was alive and presumably sentient on Jan. 6. You know what you’re getting, and why.
The rest is just commentary.
What I've been reading
"The Awakening" by Kate Chopin. This 1899 novel is very proto-feminist -- about a married woman who falls with another man, but who is really realizing that she doesn't necessarily want to be a wife and mother. It's the kind of thing I'm told gets taught in college intro classes regularly, but I'm afraid my Mennonite college didn't really emphasize feminist literature when I was in school 30 years ago, so I had to stumble on it on my own.
Since the pandemic, I've come to realize that a lot of the fiction I enjoy reading was written within a couple of decades on either side of the turn of the 20th century: "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Anna Karenina," "Of Human Bondage." I'm not sure if that means I'm no longer cut out for the left-angle challenges of postmodernism, or if it's simply that there's a reason that these novels have survived a century or more and remain somewhat relatively well-known and available. I do know I'm not much interested in reading books about social media. So plunge into the past I must.