By David K. Shipler 

                Imaginea democratic country where voters ended a political campaign knowing more aboutthe difficult issues than they did at the beginning. Imagine the learningexperience of hearing presidential candidates seriously discussing how to curbthe wars in Europe and the Middle East, compete sensibly with China, retard climatechange, address the coming revolution of AI, open economic opportunity for theimpoverished, reduce racial discrimination, and gain control over immigration. Nowflip that upside down and you have the world’s supposed model of democracy, theUnited States of America.

                On thetasks before us, we understand less and less. If we once believed we lived in afree-market economy with prices set mainly by supply and demand, the campaignhas taught us to think that a president has all the power and so should get allthe blame—or credit—for our struggles or our prosperity, whichever happens tooccur during an administration.

                If we everunderstood the limits of US control over global conflicts, we are now convincedthat an omnipotent president could stop Russia vs. Ukraine and Israel vs. Hamasand Hezbollah.

                If weever took the trouble to grasp the complex forces of desperation and hope thatdrive immigrants from their violent homelands to ours, we can no longer bebothered with anything but simplistic measures and instant cures.

                Electionsseem to dumb us down. Its practitioners filter out the nuance, contradictions,and history essential to forming smart policy. We retreat into our caves ofcertainty and disparage the “undecideds.”

The problem is not brand new, just worsewith Donald Trump, whose fabricated unreality flows effortlessly out to agullible electorate. It’s worse now with social media and biased journalismthat flatten the intricate contours of the country’s challenges. It’s worsewith Russia attacking democracy itself by aiming fake posts and videos at a pluralisticsystem that Moscow has long feared, from the communist era into the present.  

                You canget to some issues if you get your news from responsible sources—The NewYork Times, The Washington Post, NPR, PBS NewsHour, for example. Goodreporting has been done on   important challenges facing the country. But thecampaigns themselves have been negligent. If you look for detailed policypapers on the candidates’ websites, you’ll find that Trump’s are mostlypropaganda and Kamala Harris’s mostly platitudes.

Instead, campaigns bombard us withsymbols and slogans, smears and slanders designed to trigger more emotion thanthought. Trump advocates huge tariffs on imports, which he claims China andother foreign countries will pay, which they will not. Harris counters that Trump’stariffs are a “sales tax,” which they are not. Neither tries to educate thepublic about how tariffs work: taxes charged to the importer, who willprobably, but not definitely, pass at least some on to the consumer. Or, foreignmanufacturers could reduce prices in response. Neither candidate makes aneffort to discuss the pros and cons of tariffs as a tool to promote domesticbusiness alongside their risk of fueling inflation. Unless you take the troubleto read a BBC or Wall Street Journal analysis, you are left misinformedby both sides.

Even the BBC can get it wrong, asin a fact-checkingarticle that said, “The Biden administration has added 729,000manufacturing jobs.” As for Trump, “He added 419,000 manufacturing jobs duringhis first three years in office.” Sorry, folks, the jobs were added by the manufacturers,not the presidents.  

Yes, government influences theeconomy through spending and taxes legislated by Congress and interest ratesset by the Federal Reserve. But personifying in the presidency vast powers overbarely controllable developments, domestic or foreign, distorts discussion and evadesthe hard tasks of problem-solving.

Therefore, as election analystshave observed, many of us vote more with our guts than our heads. We are wooedor repelled by a candidate’s images, and the image of strength, candor, anddecisiveness holds sway over the studious, the reflective, and the instinctiveregard for the multiple sides of a question. That blanks out the chance to beeducated about policy during an election.

                Goodleadership contains a paradox. Presidents need to be both strong and yet studious,decisive and yet open to various viewpoints. They are also entitled to changetheir minds as, one hopes, they mature in their thinking. In the electoralprocess, however, ironclad consistency is celebrated as principled whileevolution is denounced as hypocrisy. Both can be true, but not always. No consideredpolicy discussion is possible when no space is given a candidate for a changeof mind, even for purely political expediency,

Harris, for example, has not been ableto delve into the virtues or pitfalls of fracking, because she once opposed itand now accepts it, the arguments on each side be damned. It’s a worthwhilediscussion, but we don’t hear it from her or, it goes without saying, fromTrump.

Trump, instead, projects an aura ofpower by being dogmatically closed-minded, insulting, and authoritarian, andtherefore worshipped from the gut by millions who are drawn to their sense thatthe country needs a strongman, with all the accompanying dangers to democracy.            

                A remarkablefeature of this campaign has been its lack of serious examination of the perilthe world faces of widespread warfare and of ways to avoid it. Trump has warnedof an imminent World War Three, and in this case it might not be hyperbole. Buthe doesn’t lead an intelligent conversation on parrying China’s expansioniststrategy, and he merely brushes away Ukraine as something that he’ll magicallysolve between his election and inauguration.

On the Middle East, Harris triesnot to antagonize pro-Israel voters while giving little nods of recognition tothe suffering of Palestinians, not enough to erase many Arab-Americans’distress at the Biden administration’s support for the Jewish state. Tryingthat balancing act is politically protective, but it wipes out any chance ofserious discussion of the confounding issues in that war and America’s longtermrole in addressing the conflict.

            In sum, neither Trump nor Harris has offeredcreative thinking for managing and defusing this most dangerous period sincethe end of World War Two. But if they had, would their ideas have penetratedthe miasma of puffery and propaganda intrinsic to American political campaigns?Would they have been heard through the noise and carefully considered by votersas they made their choices in this most consequential election? Don’t bet onit.