Beyond Labor Day- a Force Majeure
Labor Day 2016 has come and gone, and across the nation, school children find themselves back in their classrooms, longing for the idleness and freedom associated with not having to be tethered to schedules that will last until mid-June, next year- an eternity to such youngsters. We recall such feelings from our own childhood and it was for this reason that we somehow came to associate September with ominous feelings of dread- another school year of homework and bedtimes and shrinking afternoons of shortening daylight, wondering if the magic of care-free summers will ever arrive again. How little did we know, back in the day, that care-free summers of our youth would become momentary, fleeting and illusory.
With the passage of Labor Day, so too has the respective, post-convention bounces to the candidacies of Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. Voters are settling in and solidifying their choices, roughly speaking. Forty percent have decided to vote for Clinton, or have decided to vote for her in opposition to Trump, and will not be swayed away from doing otherwise. Another forty percent have decided to vote for Trump, or have decided to vote for him in opposition to Clinton, and also will not be swayed away from doing otherwise. The remaining twenty percent will either decide to stay home on Election Day, be swayed one way or the other, waste their votes on quixotic third-party candidacies, and yet, will inevitably and inexorably determine who will be the next president of the United States.
It is said that presidential campaigns in the United States do not really come into their own, until after Labor Day, when people start “paying attention.” At one time, this was probably truer than it is today, given the plethora of cable news networks, social media and on-line sources of information to our avail. We have been forcibly immersed into this election for the last eighteen months, and have come to the conclusion that Election Day cannot arrive soon enough if, for no other reason, to see an end to the monotony and cacophony that is political coverage in the mainstream media. We long for the time which will arrive soon enough, when all of the bickering between the candidates, their campaigns, with our friends and our family members, will become moot.
While candidates and candidacies come and go, just as the leaves of deciduous trees fall onto the ground beneath, there is nevertheless an equally true maxim that political movements tend to last beyond the balloting that decides winners and losers. Such was true in the 1930s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered in the era of big government, and such was true in the 1980s, when Ronald Wilson Reagan ushered in the era of supply-side economics. In both cases, the relative legacies of these political movements have continued to this very day and, often and ironically, are found to be in direct conflict with one another.
Yet, this election of 2016 somehow finds less than the subordinated and stubborn struggles between liberalism and conservativism, less than the predictable and partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans, less than the tenacious and treacherous tugs-of-war between left and right. No, this election of 2016 transcends the norms of the old and tired teeter-totter of leaning one way and then the other. This election is about a movement- a real and very palpable difference between the inside and the outside, between the forces of the entrenched and the forces of the disillusioned, between the powers that be and the powers that seek to upend and upheave the old and the stale and, in the end, the ineffective. This explains why many of the mainstream and inside-the-beltway conventional Republicans refuse to support their party’s nominee, even if this lack of support results in the dreaded election of one Hillary Clinton. These recalcitrant Republicans find common cause with the mainstream media, the political pundits and pollsters, and ultimately, the Democrats whose very survival depends upon the continuation of the status quo ante. Simply speaking, Donald Trump’s election will realize all of their worst fears, and will result in their own loss of power, prestige and influence- and this, they cannot and will not abide.
Yet, beyond the beltway, beyond the prosperous and toady suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, and beyond the festooned watering holes of Georgetown where insiders gather and deride the people they supposedly serve, there is a movement- a real movement of people- just plain people- who have had quite enough of their egomaniacal and elitist “expertise,” who have grown weary of shrinking paychecks and cultural disdain from the empowered who believe they know better, who want the country they once knew to return to the days when opportunity and promise were very real, and where anything and everything was possible, if only we seek it with all of our might and determination.
This is why an outsider like Donald Trump can win in November, and this is why an outsider like Donald Trump must win in November, for his is a movement that cannot and will not be refused, at long last.
Simply stated, the people want their country back, and such is the force majeure beyond Labor Day.
-Drew Nickell, 6 September 2016
© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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