This past November, a four-year long election finally came to a close. Years of tension, stress, and hysteria about the effects one singular date may have on the near future finally came to a somewhat anticlimactic close.
In the days after the election, I have noticed that although many people are shocked, upset, or even ecstatic about the results, most people are just tired. Tired of two starkly different echo chambers of presidential parties yelling at each other ad nauseam, hoping their repetitive, extreme thoughts win out. Politics should not be a cycle of name calling and threats of retribution, it should not be a constant cry from both ends that the sky of democracy will fall immediately if we do not vote for their candidate.
Personally, I am a moderate who leans liberal. My ideology is closer to Kamala Harris’ than Donald Trump’s, and I would have voted for her if I were old enough. However, if you were to ask me why Kamala Harris would be a good president, I would have no idea what to say. Similarly, if you asked me why Donald Trump would be a good president, I would not know how to respond.
Since the creation of politics, politicians have been proving two basic concepts: why they would be an exceptional government official, and why they are better than their opponent. In this election in particular, Harris and Trump focused so much time on why the other is a bad candidate, they left little room for what would make them great.
Many of Trump’s statements were about how corrupt Biden, and later Harris, are, and how he will seek retribution immediately upon reentering office. Very rarely does he talk about how he did better during his four years in office, only criticizing Biden and the results of the 2020 election.
Harris often spoke about Trump’s misogyny and racism, how he was indicted several times, and threatened to target his enemies once regaining office. She spoke of uplifting people instead of putting them down, but did not go into detail about how she plans on doing that, or how a Harris presidency would make the U.S. soar without being compared to a Trump presidency.
If instead of pointing fingers at each other, and espousing how terrible the opposing party is, we all just took a moment to think about why and how our party is right, politics would be less stressful. Perhaps if for a moment we took our mind of the evils of a candidate we hate, and thought about why our candidate is good, we would not be so tired at the end of every election cycle.
