Can’t recall where I read it, but one article pointed out that young voters - loosely defined as those who will be age 18-20 this year - have basically never known “normal” politics in America. To them, the haywire, crazed Trump era is normal, or is expected. They’ve never known peace or calm.
Another article also pointed out that 2012, Obama-Romney, was the last normal US presidential election we’ve had. We might not ever have another one.
(No particular direction for this thread, just a empty-brain thought)
I’d say US elections have been spiraling down the tubes since Bush v. Gore in 2000. Heck, I think we could go back to 1994 and Newt Gingrich. Of course, this has all been a long slide downhill, the train wreck is in slow motion.
But, considering I turned 18 in 1985, I’d say I have not had many “normal” presidential elections to participate in either.
I agree with this. The decision to declare the political opposition as enemies of America as a tactic for electoral advantage was a major turning point in the transformation of a formerly sane party into an asylum for lunatics. The normalization of this madness means an entire generation has reached political adulthood not knowing what healthy governance looks like.
Maybe, but the big downward inflection was when Teddy Roosevelt came up with the idea that the candidate should campaign. Before that, supporters might engage in mud slinging, but the next president (and vice-president) had enough dignity to stay above it.
(Or maybe there were earlier mud-slinging exceptions I am missing, as the candidates did sit for front porch newspaper interviews. But they didn’t travel someplace and make a mud-slinging speech.)
For young voters in 2007, Obama-McCain was the first presidential election they’d seen where neither candidate on the Democratic ticket was popularly derided as “boring.”
I think the OP is pretty spot on noting that the past 12 years have been pretty extreme. Sure, you could go back to 2000 w/ Bush-Gore, followed by the horrible election night of 04, viewing the Obama years as somewhat of a hiatus in between those 2 periods. How many of us fools thought 08, 12 were signs of of the long arc actually bending in the correct direction?
But in terms of presidential politics, I think 96 and prior - at least as far back as I can remember - seemed far more sane than what a 1st-time voter today would have been aware of all of their life.
When Obama became a candidate, the media stopped pretending to be neutral, and started openly slanting the reporting to favor their preferred candidates.
In 1964, Democrats claimed Barry Goldwater was going to start a nuclear war and blow up the planet. They repeated the accusation with Reagan.
Candidates have been accusing their opponents of fascism, or being soft on fascism, since the 1940s.
Candidates have been accusing their opponents of communism, or being soft on communism, since the 1920s.
In a congressional race in the early 1800s, one candidate accused his opponent of spreading syphilis among his slaves.
I agree. That was the sprouting of the seed, so to speak. Prior to that, I always had the impression that the two parties more or less viewed each other like relatives who might be confused and misguided about how to handle things, but who were still family and on the same side when push came to shove.
It’s after 1994, and especially in the late 1990s with the rise of the Web, that it went from that, to being outright adversarial. Even early Rush Limbaugh was more about condescending mockery than anything else- sort of a “Look what dumbasses these liberals are!” type approach. But starting in the late 1990s, it became a situation where all the conservative pundits and politicians were painting the other side as actively harmful to the American way of life as we know it. And conspiracy theories started becoming more prevalent, if still somewhat perplexing about that time. Stuff like the Clintons having had people killed for example date back to the mid-late 1990s as well.
But… this didn’t really come to fruition until about 2016, when it ceased to be voting for which side you thought had the better plan, and became more a matter of voting for your side, against theirs. That’s the change I felt in the 2016 election- it was less about voting for someone, and more about voting against.
I thought so. Up until around 8PM CST or so that night I thought Hillary would win and all would be fine with the world*. Had there been a few less normal Republicans running against Jeb in '16, and if he’d had some of the charisma his brother did, things would have been different. Tump would just be a footnote in history. We’d be living in the closing days of the Hillary Clinton presidency. John Roberts would be presiding over a liberal SCOTUS with two grumpy old men that people point at and laugh and don’t take seriously while the other 7 justices do the real work of the court. All it would have taken is a few butterflies to have flapped their wings a little differently.
*. FWIW, that day was so traumatic for me that it’s the only day from this millennium (other than than the last few weeks or so on a rolling basis) that I can tell you exactly what I was doing in detail. I could tell you where I was working, which patients I saw that day, what route I took home, where I had dinner and what I ate, and so on. I can’t do that for my wedding day, the day I graduated from medical school, the day I bought my first home, or any other such milestones.
The rise of conspiracy theories after the internet became widespread, and particularly after 9/11, is a big part of all this. If you really believe any of that crap, how can you make any kind of sensible decision about who to vote for? And you’re right about 2016 being the ultimate fruition of this trend, when the US elected an actual conspiracy theorist as president. Since then, everything has been “a plot”. Rigged elections, pizzagate, the great replacement theory, the “plandemic”, “weaponization of the DOJ”, all of it grows out of that. One party has been entirely captured by conspiracist thinking, and it’s destroying American democracy as we watch.
And did you ask them who they voted for in that election?
I am not a historian, but my recollection from History classis is that many of the 19th century contests were nasty events (“Ma! Ma! Where’s my Pa?” “Gone to the White House! Ha! Ha! Ha!”), and we had a period of relative civility through most of the 20th century.
Rather than saying that ALL recent Presidential elections have been abnormal, I think of it only as a Trumpian thing. Three elections with that POS is enough. I can’t wait to see if things become “normal” again with the 2028 election, or if someone successfully picks up the mantle of Trump and his methods.
I was born in 1973 (with about eleven months left in Nixon’s tenure), but many of the elections I remember had something special about them. 2008 was a big one: it was the first since 1976 in which neither a Bush nor a Clinton was somewhere on the ballast. 32 years is a ridiculously long time for that phenomenon to play out.
1992 was also an interesting one to me. I remember Pat Buchanan at the GOP convention basically advocating for a religious and cultural war in America. For everyone who’s impressed by Schwarzenegger’s anti Trump/anti-Nazi vlog posts of late, maybe look at the footage of him sitting in the convention hall, listening with rapt unwavering attention to Buchanan. As well, you had Bill Clinton as the first Boomer president emerging from that year (was he the first credible Boomer candidate as well?) actually sailing past his sex scandals into the White House. Not to mention the wild card of Ross Perot, may well have contributed to Clinton ending the GOP run. The fact that they actually lost office to a draft…um…avoider that year, combined with lingering resentment over Nixon’s ouster (a blip in time beforehand, in the grand scheme of things), was a contributing factor to the collective GOP brain cracking, and Gingrich leading the rage caucus onto the path they’ve been following ever since.
Yeah, 2012 may well have been one of the few more or less normal elections of this 50-year-old’s lifetime.
On October 1796, a mysterious editorial from a writer named Phocion appeared in the Gazette of the United States, a popular Federalist newspaper in Philadelphia. Phocion said, in terms understood by most readers, that presidential candidate Jefferson was having an affair with one of his female slaves. Phocion also accused Jefferson of running away from British troops during the Revolution, unlike his brave friend Alexander Hamilton. Phocion also paid compliment after compliment to Adams and claimed Jefferson would emancipate all slaves if he were elected president.
Jefferson’s folks had been using their own strong campaign tactics in the fight against Adams. Adams was accused of wanting to be a king and starting a dynasty by having his son succeed him as President. He was also accused of being overweight and given the nickname “His Rotundity.”
Accusations of sexual impropriety and cowardice on one side, accusations of wanting to be a dictator, nepotism and fat insults on the other. Some of which are made-up or exaggerated, some on the nose. Sounds familiar!
My hope is that these things have a pendulum effect, and we eventually get back to something akin to the ‘period of relative civility through most of the 20th century’ that Dr.Winston_OBoogie mentions.
I agree … sorta. I imagine many GOP voters and leaders were as appalled by Bill Clinton winning in 1992 as we were by Trump winning in 2016. How could someone with so many character issues and so little experience have beaten our guy? (Of course, while Bill was definitely a sleazebag, it goes without saying that Trump is orders of magnitude worse as a human and as a president.)
But the seeds of the culture wars go back to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” and it was Reagan who initiated the insidious Christian/Republican alliance that equates political disagreement with irredeemable sin.
I don’t know how much character came into play for Clinton until later, even though he was pretty widely known to be a horndog from his time in Little Rock. I think many were thrown by the generational thing. As a Boomer candidate, Clinton was the first to have been (ostensibly) on the other side of the seismic 60s culture wars from the Republican mainstream. Going up against a war hero from the last “good” and less contentious war, there’s no way that damn hippie (no matter what a Christian bubba he actually was) had earned that win. Obama v. Romney in 2012 was the only election in my lifetime in which the social battles surrounding the Vietnam war barely came into play. Once Bone Spurs Trump showed up for the 2016 bout, we were back on that bullshit again.
And we have since seen it is so much bullshit. We knew it then. Pious, holier-than-thou crap. But now the lie has been displayed for all to see.
Of course, conservatives just ignore that. If Biden got a blowjob from someone other than his wife I have no doubt the republican outrage machine would kick into full gear with zero sense of hypocrisy.
This 2018 Atlantic article explains it well all the while it is breaking your heart:
Gift link here.
[The site says: " Give this story to any reader, no subscription required. Your gift link will be accessible for 14 days. A recipient does not need to register or subscribe in order to view the gifted article, unless their access expires.] I don’t know if this is true.
