Trump-Biden presidential election race nears end, but America’s divide continues

Here we are at last, the weekend before Election Day.

By this time next week, we probably will know the winner of the presidential race. And then it will all be over, right?

The country will settle down, and life can return to normal. Politics will recede into the background. Democrats and Republicans will be free to safely intermarry again.

Right? ….Right?

No, that doesn’t seem likely, does it?

Even if the election is decided by then, there’s the coronavirus pandemic, which looks certain to get worse before it gets better. That’s going to continue to mess up our lives a while longer.

But even the pandemic is just another diversion from the larger problem that has exacerbated it.

No matter who wins the election, the underlying divide between the American people that brought us to this juncture will remain. The factors that are driving us apart are unresolved.

You’ve heard it said before, but it bears repeating at this moment: Donald Trump is not the problem. He’s a symptom of the problem.

When it became clear in the early-morning hours of Nov. 9 that Trump would become the 45th president of the United States, the sickening feeling that most of us had in the pits of our stomach wasn’t just that this awful man was our nation’s leader. It was the knowledge that so many of our fellow Americans had chosen to vote for him. Suddenly, we didn’t recognize our own country.

That’s the part nobody has ever really wanted to face: that our fight is with each other as much as it is with Trump. Because honestly, we don’t want to have that discussion. I’m still not really ready because I don’t know how to do it constructively.

My preference would be for everything to magically get better, and, with time, maybe it will. But we know where magical thinking has got us this past year.

So we fixate on Trump, understandably so, because he had to be kept in check and because we knew that, if we made it through four years, we’d have this chance to replace him.

But that has only led us to this very precarious moment when some on both sides of the political divide seem to be rooting for a fresh provocation to push us over the edge. It’s madness.

A pair of Northwestern University professors just helped co-author a scholarly article referring to our current state of affairs as “political sectarianism,” employing a word usually used in connection with religion because of the religious fervor that has overtaken our polarized politics and undermined our ability to find common ground.

Political sectarianism sums it up nicely, which is why I wonder whether it would be asking too much for everyone to try to dial it down for a while.

To be clear, I’m making no assumptions about the outcome of the election.

Trump could still win. I don’t expect him to win. But I didn’t expect him to win four years ago either, so I take nothing for granted.

I’m pretty certain millions more voters will choose Joe Biden over Trump, just as 54% rejected Trump in 2016. But I recognize that’s not how we pick our presidents. If Trump again wins the electoral college vote, then he will have been duly elected, and we’ll have to figure out how to survive another four years.

Just for argument’s sake, though, what if Trump loses?

Trump supporters seem to have worked themselves up into believing all kinds of calamitous scenarios if that happens.

Speaking only for myself, but believing I’m probably in the mainstream, I’m not looking to turn this country to socialism.

I’m sure I favor policies, especially in the areas of health care and housing, that your mainstream Republican might consider socialistic. But my interest is patching the holes in capitalism, not tearing it down.

Democrats generally believe in capitalism. We nominated Biden this year, for crissakes, not one of the lefty alternatives. C’mon, man.

You say you voted for Trump but that doesn’t make you a racist or a fascist. OK, I believe you. I voted for Biden, and I’m not an anarchist or a socialist. There’s a lot of us.

What I want from a Biden administration is reconciliation, not revenge. I want to revive the push for social justice that got waylaid four years ago and restore the momentum for prosperity that got sidetracked by the pandemic.

No, this election won’t be the end.

But it could be the start.