Party unity. After a long and often ugly primary process, that’s what both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton sought at their respective party’s convention.
But it wasn’t there.
Neither candidate should have expected it in a year when authenticity was one of the major character attributes sought by voters.
Trump especially had little chance of bringing the entire Republican party behind him. He knew in advance the list of its notable leaders who were skipping the convention. The last two GOP presidents and their presidential nominee from the last election all stayed home. That alone was a sign that his nomination has divided the party.
Several GOP Senators have publicly said they won’t vote for Trump, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary,” Graham said two months ago.
Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser for President George H.W. Bush, has endorsed Clinton. In March another 121 Republican national security leaders published an open letter in which they committed themselves “to working energetically to prevent” Trump from winning the presidency.
Pulitzer Prize Winning columnist George Will, a highly regarded champion of conservative values, is no longer a registered Republican because of Trump’s nomination. “This is not my party,” he quietly declared in a speech to the Federalist Society in June.
Any façade of unity at the GOP convention was certainly disrupted when Sen. Ted Cruz spoke. Offering no endorsement, the runner-up in the GOP race told convention delegates and TV viewers to vote their conscience. Ironically, Trump supporters, who loved their candidate because he had the audacity to say whatever he thinks, didn’t like Cruz speaking his mind. They booed him off the stage.
That will be the new political correctness if Trump gets to the White House. He definitely wants to impose it on the news media by changing libel laws. If anyone writes “purposely negative and horrible and false articles,” he said, we’ll be able to “sue them and win lots of money.”
Well, libel laws already cover false and defamatory statements. But if it’s expanded to include negative commentary, then no one in America will be free to publicly criticize a Trump administration.
You can be sure there will be plenty of that if Clinton wins in November. Pundits at Fox News, the Breitbart News Network and Rush Limbaugh will likely be harder on her than they’ve been on President Obama.
But criticism from outside the party is very different from dissention within the ranks. Unless it’s a self-serving political act, it’s usually about adhering to one’s principled ideals. Sure, Cruz put his political ego on display, but he also expressed dedication to a brand of conservatism that Trump definitely doesn’t represent.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders didn’t follow Cruz’s lead. Instead, while acknowledging his differences with Clinton, the runner-up lived up to his prior pledge by giving her his full endorsement.
Like Trump, authenticity was one of Sanders’s strongest attributes in the eyes of his supporters. Many of them don’t believe Clinton has it and, at the convention, booed at the mention of her name. But if they demand authenticity from a candidate, then they must act that way themselves. That right to dissent should be respected all the way to their refusal to vote for her. That’s what freedom is about.
Silencing dissention because the appearance of a divided party might send voters to the other side is fear-based censorship. Both parties are guilty of this. That in itself isn’t unusual. But in this election Americans are being asked to choose between a pair of candidates each with historically high disapproval ratings. And that fact is going to amplify their argument that if the opposition’s candidate is elected President, he or she will utterly destroy the country.
In the end we need the kind of faith expressed by Vice President Joe Biden at the convention on Wednesday. Americans “have never, ever, ever, ever let their country down,” he shouted. That can apply to this election. No one needs to be coerced with apocalyptic visions to do what’s best for America.
But if that’s the primary thing that unites either of these parties, and you’re among the Americans who Biden said “do not scare easily,” then consider Cruz’s advice. Gary Johnson and William Weld, two former Republican governors, are running on the Libertarian ticket. And Jill Stein is the Green Party nominee again. They won’t win, but your vote for one of them is a way to reflect your freedom of conscience.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and a retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
