The Day After the Election

We are heading into the most contentious and ugly election in our lifetimes.  It is almost devoid of serious issues and is dominated by a 24 hour news cycle detailing the latest high wire failure of the Trump circus.  The day after the election, America will face a choice that has never been directly confronted by the campaigns.  The day after the election, we have to tell a new story.

It is obvious that what Harari has called the “imagined order” that we refer to as America is broken.  This is not to suggest that both parties are equally guilty.  Hillary and the Democrats are running on a theme of ‘stronger together,’ but in the end it’s clear that we’re really not all that together.  Obviously, a Trump presidency would be disastrous in ways that are even hard to imagine, but regardless of who ‘wins,’ the problem of who we are remains.

This is not a question of policy or programs.  This is a question of narrative.  What is our story about who we are and what we intend to be?  We already have a nation gridlocked and polarized by parties that don’t just disagree on the details; they disagree on reality.  The worldview of Trump supporters doesn’t just disagree with what Hillary’s supporters believe, it negates it. There is no longer any starting point for a dialog that both parties could agree on.  In 2016, ‘facts’ are whatever anyone wants them to be.  Climate change is a good example.  No one who understands science (by that I mean that they realize that there is always some dissent among scientists) doubts that climate change is real and that human activity plays some role in it.  But we have a major party who simply refuses to acknowledge that.  The same can be said for any number of critical issues facing the country – from economics to education.  We no longer share a reality – an “imagined order” – that can serve as a default setting to ground our disagreements and diverse perspectives.

The campaign will only make that worse.  Aided and abetted by a media establishment only interested in the horserace, one that refuses to call out even the most transparent and obvious lies, the narratives of the campaign are only going to move further and further apart.  Words such as America, patriot, and democracy are going to thrown around by people who assume they have a common meaning, but, of course, they don’t.  We don’t just vote in separate parties; we live in different worlds.  Assuming we avoid the utter catastrophe of electing the most unqualified candidate any of us has ever seen, we will still be left with a self-described policy wonk who is anything but inspirational..  In some ways her story and the reality of the first woman president is inspiring, but how will she lead.  She will undoubtedly purpose solid policy initiatives, but she will do so to a divided and gridlocked congress who is no more ready to work with her than they were Obama.  There is little hope that the divide opened up during the campaign will be healed by the politics that follow.

In some ways, we are like people caught in a relationship that was on the skids but was barely holding itself together.  In this election, we dropped the pretense of the relationship and started yelling and name calling.  The convenient fiction that we were one people is now gone.  I don’t think it can be pieced back together.  I think we need a new narrative, a new “imagined order.”   We need on that can truly embrace diversity, unlike the old one that paid it lip service but never quite figured how equal and diverse went together.  We need a narrative that embraces uncertainty and pictures America as a partner in the world not the alpha male.  We need one that realizes that ‘knowledge’ has to created by the people who live it and not by ‘experts’ who don’t.  We need that and so much more.  It is hard to imagine how a political leader can do that in the political context we live in.  Even the most gifted orator I have ever seen failed miserably, in spite of a heroic effort.

On November 8^th we’re going to elect a president.  Turns out, what we really need is a story teller.