No Moore

At 9:00pm on Tuesday, December 12th, I thought about how absurd it was that I was sitting on my couch with my eyes glued to my laptop screen as the results from the Alabama Senate race came in county-by-county.

Over the past two decades of election cycles, I witnessed one circus geek-show after another; each more bizarre than the one before. The increasingly shrinking pool of ostensibly "serious" candidates appear to be preparing their stump-speeches for the lowest common denominators of their political bases and featuring only the hot-button topics that were pre-tested by their respective party platforms.

What used to be known as the "fringe" candidates have become the mainstream and the gradual break-down of political norms has been on full display on a 24-hour news cycle for many years.
Some people would like us to believe that this problem exists equally on "both sides" of the political spectrum. It is beyond the scope of a single blog post to demonstrate just how asymmetrical this problem is. It is manifestly a right-wing fanaticism and a base-tribalism in the Republican Party that is creating a level of toxicity in politics sufficient to turn off a generation young voters and future civil servants.

Before last Tuesday I thought that the purest distillation of the problem was the candidacy and election of Donald John Trump. Now I have a new date to mark the calendar: December 12, 2017.
The celebrity and name-recognition of DJT gave him a distinct advantage in this "reality television" culture. Indeed, Trump's entire celebrity has always been driven by his buffoonery and boorishness coupled with his own lack of self-awareness. In other words, he ain't in on the joke!

The RNC-supported candidacy of the twice-removed-from-the-bench Roy Moore is; however, no joke.
Tribalism and hate-for-the-other has never been given such a prominent role in electoral politics as it has in the Alabama Senate race.
A man who has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, as well as many other egregious violations of the constitution nearly took a seat in the United States Senate.
Had he won, Roy Moore would have had a vote and a voice on issues that effect the lives of hundreds of millions people in the US alone. The fact that nearly one-third of the American population and virtually half of the state that he almost represented was ravenous for his leadership is an arresting and chilling reality that should give us all cause to look carefully at where we are as a country and who we want to be on the world stage.

Donald Trump and Roy Moore are mirrors for us all to look very carefully in to. It doesn't matter if you are as shocked and outraged as the vast majority of the United States and the rest of the world is. The fact is, we all let the whole world down, either by explicitly voting for these malevolent and dangerously unqualified candidates, or complicity facilitating their rise in politics by taking our hands off the wheel of Democracy.