Game or blood sport?
Until the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, Americans have generally assumed that their leaders should be role models, persons evidencing the best and noblest of our aspirations for society. The occasional scandals — Nixon’s Watergate, Reagan’s Iran-Contra issue, Bush 41’s Willie Horton ad, Clinton’s impeachment for sex, and Bush 43’s WMD lies and torture of captives — were treated as brief aberrations, perhaps if only as rationalizations.
In my opinion, America reached a tipping point when Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich introduced the idea of treating our politics as an enjoyable blood sport. Realizing that our system and gerrymandering in particular has over-valued rural and southern voters, he reasoned that winning is everything and the game should be fought almost to the death. And that seemed to work for a while. Republicans began to feel they were winning because their leaders no longer drew the line at being observant of previous norms. As more and more norms were proved to be mere imaginary barriers, Republicans began to have their way politically, even to the previously unimagined point of refusing even to give an advise-and-consent vote to Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
Now the age-old question arises again. How does a society de-escalate from “no-holds-barred” to trusting the long-established norms of due process and democratic order. President-elect Joe Biden has taken the first step in this direction by saying he will work as strongly for those who didn’t vote for him as for those who did and also by urging all Americans to lower the temperature of the political rhetoric. It remains to be seen how Biden will follow-up on his own rhetoric. For the good of the country, I hope he will.
John Sucke
Waimea
Glad that’s over
I’m glad that the election is over and the people have made their choice, I just hope that President Donald Trump can accept the results graciously and not throw a tantrum.
Hopefully, now America will join the other industrial nations to curb climate change and global warming. First and foremost we have to save our planet so life on Earth can continue to exist.
Colleen Miyose-Wallis
Kailua-Kona
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