Was the 2016 Campaign a Travesty? Assessing Campaign Quality

Abstract

It is easy to distrust politics, easier to be angered by it, easier still to hate it. Perhaps that has always been true but it seems especially true today. To be sure, there are fine reasons to hate politics since some of history’s greatest evils have been mixed in political cauldrons. That was true of theocracies in the past (the Muslim Conquest, the Christian Crusades) and the present (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc.). Secular autocrats, people like Genghis Khan, King Henry VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolph Hitler have also produced spectacular forms of evil, and dictatorships, or near-dictatorships, continue to populate the globe – in North Korea, notably, but also in Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and even China. Viewed from this perspective, it is easy to give democracies a pass, but democracies, too, produce evil. Mob rule, oppression by the majority, Machiavellianism, group think, neo-feudalism, media manipulations, violations of the social contract, pork barrel corruption, bait-and-switch taxation, fake news, vaunted elitism, false fag attacks – all are evils perpetuated in even the most enlightened polities. Democracies like the United States have been militarily aggressive in spots throughout the world (in recent years in Germany, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan) and all this despite the protests of the nation’s pacifists. While no true democracy has ever gone to war against another true democracy, tools like blockades, currency manipulation, tariffs, cyber-warfare, and economic sanctions have been used by democracies against one another, the United States very much included.