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[Las Vegas Sun Editorial]

It’s time to heal this deeply divided nation

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Americans awoke Wednesday to a nation edging toward mayday distress.

In cities across the country, several businesses had boarded up their windows and taken out insurance to protect their buildings from being damaged or destroyed amid civil unrest. Police departments remained on alert after mobilizing Tuesday to protect voters from intimidation after President Donald Trump dog-whistled to violent extremists to lurk at polls.

Overnight came the chilling moment when Trump claimed he’d won the election, even though ballots had yet to be fully counted in Nevada and several other states. It was nothing less than a threat to circumvent democracy and take autocratic power: An American president was suggesting he would disregard valid votes cast in legal ways by eligible voters and short-circuit the electoral process.

None of this happens in the United States. Or at least it didn’t until this year. Before, Americans were smugly self-assured that our nation was above things like this—that it was the stuff of banana republics, not the greatest country in the world.

It’s not normal. But in a nation crippled by division in its leadership and in its population, it’s becoming that way. And unless Americans do something about that division, it’s going to destroy us.

It doesn’t matter who emerges as the president, Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden: Four more years of the dysfunction and stress we’re seeing now will tear the nation apart.

Look at what it has already done.

This is a nation that can’t pass a renewed pandemic relief package even with a staggering number of Americans out of work, businesses closing and the economy suffocating.

It’s a country whose president routinely threatens not to provide federal funding to states led by his opposing party.

America was once the country so unified that its citizens accepted rationing and grew millions of pounds of their own food during World War II to help the war effort. Now we fight over a public health measure like face masks as a political statement and watch while the coronavirus death count climbs past 230,000.

This is beyond being in two separate political camps. Our partisan differences have metastasized into dueling suspicions, leaving each side viewing the other as an existential threat.

We’ve built an entire splinter industry around right-wing propaganda and misinformation. Fox News and other extremist media organizations long ago discovered that there’s money to be made in tribalizing their audiences and throwing them red meat in the form of anger and fear.

Now, when Trump applauds the thugs who menacingly surrounded a Biden campaign bus on the road in Texas, his supporters cheer. When he tells the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” makes racist statements and lies, his supporters react not with revulsion but by telling Americans who are justifiably appalled by his behavior that they suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. When he makes his blatantly false claims that the election was rigged against him, they don’t question him but instead vilify bipartisan election officials and volunteers—who, remember, are their fellow Americans.

When a political discussion between Americans can start with one discussing tax policy and another saying Democrats are part of an international pedophilia ring that kills children and drinks their blood, we’re in a very dangerous place.

Keep in mind that a politician who loudly supports QAnon—the group responsible for the conspiracy theory involving progressives and pedophilia—won a congressional seat in Georgia on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Democrats appear to be deaf to the very real anxieties of the states derisively called “flyover,” and the Democrats’ traditional link to working-class Americans is weakened by their inability to deliver real change to parts of the country mired in decades-old problems.

The middle class continues to shrink, Americans sicken and die, racial justice is too far out of reach, the climate is in crisis, the world lacks American leadership and America’s dominant political parties are simply snarling at one another from their respective corners.

Americans used to solve problems together; now we institutionalize and weaponize them as propaganda tools against one another as our nation’s president, content to represent only a minority of the population, chortles in the White House.

Where our democracy once was the aspirational model of the world, other countries are now looking at us with pity and suspicion. In September, the Pew Research Center released the results of a 13-nation survey asking citizens of those countries their opinions of America. In several key nations—the U.K., France, Germany and Japan among them—the image of the U.S. was at a historic low. Fewer than 50% of respondents in those nations had a favorable view of America.

That’s just one measurement of many that show the same thing: Our global leadership role is deteriorating. In another indicator—a global democracy index that ranks 167 countries on such factors as pluralism, civil liberties and political culture—the U.S. lost its designation as a “full democracy” in 2017 when it was assigned “flawed democracy” status. Today, we’ve slid to No. 25 in the index.

Regardless of who ends up in the White House, we’ve got to figure out a way to work together to solve these problems.

The radicalization of the population cannot continue. We cannot lose our ability to be appalled at division and instead accept it as the new normal.

We can’t keep waking up to a nation that we couldn’t have imagined only a few years ago.

In June, a group of more than 100 national polling experts, campaign leaders, former government officials and others met for a series of war-game plotting to identify potential problems with the 2020 election.

Their conclusions read like a novel about a democracy’s dying days. The exercise envisioned a number of scenarios involving President Donald Trump and the extremist Republicans in his base refusing to accept the results of an election loss, flooding the courts with lawsuits, hijacking the Electoral College process and refusing to make a peaceful transfer of power. Many of these scenarios resulted in street-level violence—one led to Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying soldiers to U.S. cities.

“We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots and protests drawing people from both sides,” the report read. “The result is that the counting process would be disrupted, the election schedule would be derailed, and both Trump and Biden could go into January both claiming the presidency. Trump seems unlikely to concede regardless of the outcome; he’s already threatened not to respect the vote if he loses.”

On Tuesday, developments the group had predicted started to play out.

If we don’t want to keep waking up to this dystopian America, we have to start trying to bridge our gaps.

The outcome of the election isn’t going to solve our problems. Only Americans can do that—from Congress to statehouses to city halls and finally to the neighborhood level.

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Las Vegas Sun Staff

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