American politics are exhausting, even in Canada
Last Tuesday night I attempted to do a livestream of the United States election on my Youtube channel — a common Youtuber practice I thought my audience might enjoy — but anxiety quickly consumed me. I cut it short before even the safe states were called. Instead, I spent much of the evening walking in the rain, trekking beyond the boundaries of my neighbourhood, for as long and as far as I could. I had done something similar during the 2016 vote — as the results came in, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to just move, to be anywhere but in front of a screen.
As I idly rode the train home I noticed the other passengers, many of them young, many of them immigrants. They were listening to music, reading books, texting with friends. They were not obsessively refreshing maps of the electoral college on their phones. Their lives seemed better than mine.
Washington Post columnist George F. Will once said politics’ proper place is on the “margins of life.” He also said low voter turnout can be a good thing, because it implies a comfortable public whose “constitutional rights and other essential elements of happiness are not menaced by elections.”
Today, too many of us are menaced by U. S. elections. That’s true even in Canada, where our constitutional rights aren’t even theoretically at stake. This is because U. S. politics may be the best in the world, in the sense they deliver the purest essence of what so many people across the globe want politics to be: intellectual and abstract, but with clearcut conflict and drama.
As my friend Ben Woodfinden noted in The Critic in June, “America’s seemingly robust two- party system sets up binary struggles that multiparty democracies often lack. Political polarization and a combative media climate help make the gulfs between the two Americas much deeper than elsewhere. America’s domestic political battles and ideological divides seem much more interesting and substantive, and the appearance of a wider divide makes the stakes seem higher.”
But the perfect form of politics can also be toxic, like the perfect video game or drug. A politics that’s too relatable or easy can become an addictive and all- consuming obsession. A politics with a theory of everything can be brought everywhere — across national borders, into schools, workplaces, churches, art, entertainment, even families. It temps us to simplify our elaborate personal identities into mere ideological factions and view the world solely through this lens. Which then begets deep, almost spiritual investment in even highly irrelevant and distant political events, and all the according mental and physical anguish that comes with compulsive consumption of news, coverage and commentary.
I believe Canada owes much of what it has to our deep integration with the United States and feel there’s something morally repulsive about Canadians who stereotype Americans to build up their sense of self. To the extent American politics ever appears to validate negative stereotypes, I oppose it. This made the possibility of a quick, decisive victory for Joe Biden seem attractive to me, not because I had any great love for the man or his party per se, but because I thought it could impose a sort of national cooling.
Having been brainwashed by the podcasts, as the writer Rania Khalek put it, I had bought into a theory of a broadly Donald Trump- fatigued electorate. I believed this despite anecdotal knowledge that even here in Canada, basically every middle-aged man I know remains at least Trump- curious and willing to tolerate his presidency as a “middle finger,” as National Review’s Rich Lowry put it, to what they consider their opposing tribe on “the cultural left.” On Tuesday, we gained ample evidence that there’s far more appetite for continuing this war than peace on the enemy’s terms.
Constitutionally, I am not built for this kind of politics. I can be a snarky right-winger but deep down, I know that the healthier life is one without partisan role play as its defining theme. As Democrat dreams of a blue sweep began to crumble last Tuesday night, my mind could not help but wander to thoughts of sympathy for progressives whose emotional investment in this election has been so overpowering — and whose on-camera “meltdowns” will surely be spliced together to provide an emotional jolt of a different sort to ideologues on the other end. It’s all so exhausting.
So I will do what I can, within the limits of the profession I have chosen. I have emptied out my Twitter feed, turned off my phone alerts, set limits on my news consumption. I will try to take fewer cues from the political hobbyists, and more from the people on the train.