Many have expressed relief that the 2016 Election is drawing to a close. For many it has seemed to be ugly, overwhelming, and worse than others. For me, it's been as close as I could get to being in a Godzilla film (or any Japanese inspired Kaiju film), specifically it's been like being that one kid who tries to tell the soldiers that the big monster is really good if you don't listen to the hysteria. But it fits the model: two Titans clashed, and then banded together to fight off the threat to mankind. Old enemies resurfaced (from the 90's to now), evil geniuses banded together to throw everything they could at the monsters--and we all ran around trying not to get squished.
But for me, this wasn't a bad election cycle. It wasn't even bad from a historical perspective, for example, during the American Suffrage movement, at time of Susan B. Anthony, a popular argument against women's voting rights was that politics get too ugly with mudslinging and rants to be any kind of a place for a lady. For me this election has actually been refreshing:
Trump isn't a politician--that's been his appeal to his base. It's also been his appeal to me... in the sense that he has delivered a regular Republican platform, but without the skilled political-speak that trained politicians have, and thus everything that he has proposed has come out in the blunt artless terms in which they were conceived. This exposes Republican ideology for it's flaws in social responsibility--but it also makes it less likely to be adopted into everyday speak. This gets at what the miracle of the 2016 Election has been for me. Trump stole the stage from his own platform. Instead of feeding us bullet points of the Republican agenda, this whole election has been about what Trump said.
What has really hurt me in past elections is when I have seen people who I respect, innocently echoing the Right's talking points as if they were equally viable options for our society. It has in the past been hate-speech, in easily digestible little tabs, and it has eased us into keeping a bygone political party on life support, to the point where roughly 50% of voters cast their ballots for a party that represents the interests of just 1% of the population. By internalizing the discussion and trying to be fair, we have inch-by-inch worked our way to the Right-Wing side of the scale. Reagan in 1980 represented ideology that would be further left than that of a "Blue-Dog" Democrat today. But to hear friends of mine contemplating labor problems that would result from mass citizenship of undocumented Latinos (not a real threat, it'd be a boon), Or mass unemployment from higher minimum wage (a fairytale), Death taxes hurting Farmers (they still have yet to find a case), or reasons why there are WMD's in Iraq, nuclear proliferation, an axis of evil, etc.--this is what has really hurt me in past elections, friends pitted against friends, and having to make the judgment call of challenging the fallacy of a friend vs. allowing the myth to perpetuate and infect the common knowledge of my fellow citizens. I resent the form of politics that will say anything that might stick with anyone just to get elected--and then come-what-may after that.
So an election that remained "did you hear what he said now?" was a nice change. Sure it made people angry enough to rally against him--but I'd much rather have angry mobs on my side in defense of one another, than cool and calm talk about why some of us should be denied rights, why some people should be bombed or executed, or any number of mass tragedies that have come out of calm rational discussions that failed to rule out the ideas beneath our standards of decency.