The Great American Eclipse – Robert Gancitano September 5, 2017
The media dubbed it the great American eclipse; its path of totality showing up on TV and internet maps like a great slash across America. We watched and waited and looked up, some of us even wore those pesky glasses the scientists told us to but not our dear leader, whose eyeballs and retinas, we are told can withstand any cosmic event, solar or otherwise.
America is being eclipsed by its’ own President. Forced to follow lesser powers rather than lead among the great and many for the first time in nearly a century. He did this, the one who was to bring us respect again on the world stage. Yet instead we sit in the shadow of a looming constitutional crisis. Like a giant stellar object that will confuse the atmosphere and make the lights go on when they shouldn’t and to bring about an eerie and surreal glow to our world of marching tiki-torches fueled with white hot rage. He did this.
I did not want to believe that we would, as a country, not continue on that great moral arch upward. I had become complacent, because I had, after so many years of waiting for this to happen, was on the winning side. My progressive social morality was on the ascendant, how could we not put this woman in the white house? My complacency was shared by many Stein and Trump voters, who had bought hook, line and sinker the narrative of Hillary Clinton. I heard a lot about how Clinton is not progressive enough for the left of the Democratic Party and we still hear about today, Month 7 of a Trump Presidency. As if somehow, the dismantling of the Obama administration’s accomplishments is a progressive ideal to be upheld and the tearing of our national fabric was worth it.
The problem here is not ideology or even the manipulation of the conservative media agenda by Russian trolls via fiat from the Kremlin, but rather something that has crept into our national discourse and that is political tribalism. It did not begin with Donald Trump riding that gigolo inspired staircase to the presidency. No, it metastasized online during the primary when, with Bernie Sanders’ help, the democratic party took the path of the republicans before us and decided there were some in the party who, “just weren’t progressive enough.” We have a few clever names for them, us progressives-in-the-center, like Bernie-babies or the more pejorative Bernie-bro. But that’s the thinking that cost us the election and the country is now entrenched in a situation where one side is always evil and wrong and the other side embodies the only morally correct position to have. George Washington warned of this but you’ll never hear that from either side, since it delegitimizes the purpose of the political party and prevents people on both sides of the political spectrum from compromising. It allowed Republicans to vote for the most dangerously dis and mis informed person to ever run for the presidency. He was a danger and they knew it but they voted for him anyway because how can you vote for the other side, no matter who that person is, if you believe them to be the embodiment of all that is wrong in America, of evil? You can’t and they didn’t.
We must find a candidate whom the country can begin to rally around; we must find a way out of this dense understanding of politics of us versus them and remember that politics is the art of compromise and not the art of the deal.