Editor’s Notebook: Election season grievances, election season hope

Concord's White Park on Oct. 9, 2024. (Dana Wormald | New Hampshire Bulletin)

As I write, a powerful hurricane is barreling toward the Gulf Coast of Florida.

As I write, the whole of New Hampshire looks like an autumn postcard.

As I write, nations are at war and people are sacrificing all to protect the vulnerable.

As I write, the world flickers between chaos and beauty, cruelty and love.

Last week, as the confrontation between Israel and Iran intensified, a New Hampshire Republican lawmaker tweeted that he had very little faith in the current occupants of the White House having “a good handle on the world falling apart today.” It’s the kind of partisan messaging you’d expect during election season, but it did make me wonder what day in history he would point to as an example of a time when the world wasn’t falling apart. The state of things has never been an either/or question, only a matter of where you look at any given moment. Chaos and beauty, cruelty and love.

Elections, more than anything else, come down to this duality of perceptions. We are asked to catalog our grievances and assign blame, while simultaneously mining for hope to be invested in a favored slate of candidates. This seems reasonable enough, but the problem is that too many people have outsourced their grievances and hope alike.

Earlier this month, I read about a plan pitched by U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, that would turn child care in America “into essential infrastructure” at an annual cost of $100 billion. It’s a number that’s hard to wrap your brain around – and it very well could be too low. But it’s a proposed investment in addressing what should be a core grievance of the American people collectively: The cost of living is such that both parents need to work, yet the cost of child care makes that a losing proposition for a lot of families. And that $100 billion, while “more than double what the U.S. currently spends on child care programs” is only “an eighth of the federal budget allocated for national defense,” Time’s Nik Popli wrote of Khanna’s plan .

Whatever your feelings about Khanna’s “Child Care for America Act,” I would hope you feel that the present and future of child care is a worthy conversation for the American people to have during an election season. But according to the latest poll from the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, the two “most important” issues facing America after “Economy/Inflation” (No. 1 at 24 percent) are “Border Security” (19 percent) and “Elections/Democracy” (16 percent) – and “Child Care” is nowhere to be found. While immigration policy and voting rights are important conversations, too, the reason they are issues of significantly more concern than daily challenges like “Health Care” (3 percent), “Social Security/Medicare” (3 percent), and “Education” (1 percent) is directly related to the outsourcing of grievances.

The favored boogeyman of a too-large segment of the American right is the nameless, faceless migrant – so reflexively blamed for all that ails America that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has even saddled them with the housing crisis . Forget what you know of your town, state, and nation – burdensome property taxes due to a broken education funding system, a lack of affordable housing, a shortage of health care workers, the prohibitive cost of child care – and focus your anger on the migrant. Be not afraid of what you see but what you imagine – foreigners who vote fraudulently, take American homes and jobs, and commit unspeakable crimes – because that’s how elections are won.

It’s a political template that’s been in use throughout history. To avoid the dangerous union of the lower and middle classes, grievances must be redirected and fragmentation created. Hatred – of “others” more economically similar than different – must be fomented.

For the most part, I have a lot of faith in individuals. Amid life’s many dualities, out in the world I see more kindness than hatred, more empathy than brutality.

I have less faith, however, in societies.

Fear is too easily leveraged, in this age of rapid and ubiquitous communication, for the winning and holding of power. Online darkness, born on the right fringe of American politics, has settled over our public squares, town halls, and schools. Better angels have been caged.

That is my primary grievance.

My hope, as ever, remains with the people.