A Guest Postby Dr. Chris Ferguson As we approach elections in November and the end of President Trump’s first term, it’s worth taking a look at the stressors facing our country and the two leading contenders for the throne. In my book How Madness Shaped History, I write about how important individuals can find themselves in a critical historical moment, playing a pivotal role in the fortunes of their culture or nation. I think we can say that the United States is at one of these critical moments as we nervously approach a kind of cultural precipice. Though there are often multiple contenders for the presidency, like it or not, it’s typically only realistic to think the candidates of the two major parties are truly competitive. So, let’s have a look at them. Recent decades have seen several books emphasizing the role of the environment, geography and even luck as contributors to history. Popular wisdom has seemed to deemphasize the Great Person model wherein specific individuals have a powerful influence on world events. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel has been perhaps the best known of these and we’ve certainly had plenty of these in 2020. So, I don’t want to suggest these other factors are unimportant. But if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s the difference an individual can make. Do we honestly think we’d be in the same position we are today if Hilary Clinton or even, say, Mitt Romney had been president? I don’t think so. In Donald Trump, we got exactly what was on the tin. Other mental health professionals have diagnosed Trump as an extreme narcissist, and a danger to our country. With the caveat that any mental health impression is, by necessity, based entirely on public behavior not a mental health assessment, I tend to agree. When things were humming along, it was something of an embarrassing carnival sideshow. But his inability to handle the catastrophe of 2020, whether covid19, race relations or even establishing law and order in the face of violent looting and riots (the denial of which, let’s be honest, is not casting the left-leaning mainstream news in a great light), highlights the degree to which he and his administration are ill suited for this particular moment. Even if one is a conservative worried about law and order (which is not unreasonable), do we really think four more years of Trump is going to bring more of that? That said, I still understand why some people vote for Trump. To be clear, I don’t believe the majority of Trump voters are racists, white supremacists, transphobes, etc. Rather, the far-left has worked with remarkable diligence, whether via “cancel culture,” some surprisingly stereotyping views of ethnicity, and their elitist disdain for working-class people to make themselves as obnoxious as possible to mainstream voters. I don’t believe these voices represent the majority on the left any more than the QAnon "masks are tyranny" folks represent the right. Unfortunately, both our news media and social media environments promote and amplify the most extreme voices in our society. These, in turn, make it more difficult for us to remember our shared humanity. What we need, more than we’ve needed in decades, is a truly great leader to light our way through the darkness and unite us, liberal and conservative. Is Joe Biden that person? Well, no probably not. I actually met Joe Biden back in 2013 after the Sandy Hook shooting when he held hearings on the role of video games in the shooting (TL/DR: there wasn’t one.) I think he’s a talented politician but the odds of his (or Trump for that matter) having at least mild cognitive impairment are not trivial. That said, he’s the placeholder we need (yes, I know that’s not the best political slogan) until that great person can come along. To be fair, like a stopped clock, Trump has been right on a few things, such as the update to Title IX hearings in universities, which restored necessary due process to those proceedings. But my best guess is that Biden is the better choice for stability moving forward. If we’re to have any hope moving forward as a country, we need to work together and as individuals to end our partisanship, find empathy for one another and stop indulging our anger and fear. We should find the better angels of our nature, even if our opponents don’t reciprocate. That’s a choice each of us can make as individuals. We can move forward together or, divided, come to our end.
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