Nov 7, 2016 3 min read

Well, barring an overtime like the one we enjoyed 16 years ago in the battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the presidential election should finally rattle to a conclusion sometime late tonight or in the predawn hours Wednesday. The curtain will at long last come down on a process that more or less got going in March 2015, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz became the first heavy-hitting Republican to declare his candidacy for the White House.

If the thought of being deprived of breathless commentary online or on cable news networks about who’s up and who’s down, or who’s in or who’s out in the presidential race makes life seem futile, consider this – the preliminary skirmishes of the 2020 presidential race will be getting under way in just about 18 months. Our interregnum from presidential politics will be brief.

It goes without saying that if you are registered to vote, you should make your way to the polls today. America’s democracy is strengthened by the participation of its citizens. More voters always turn out in years when the presidency is to be decided, but every other election year is important, too, whether it’s the odd-numbered years when municipal candidates are on the ballot, or the midterm contests where the outcome of gubernatorial, Senate or congressional races are determined.

As Election Day comes and goes, we could not help thinking about the division and rancor that has marked the political process this year. Of course, the two polarizing nominees for president have stirred no small amount of ill will this year – it’s an interesting thought experiment to ponder how different the tone of this election season might have been had the Republican nominee been someone like Ohio Gov. John Kasich or if Vice President Joe Biden had been nominated by the Democrats. But the amount of poison in our political system and the degree to which Americans are angry and cynical is not warranted by conditions on the ground.

Consider the 1860s, when Americans were not merely divided on the issue of slavery, but actually killing each other on the battlefield over it. More than 600,000 Americans were killed in the Civil War. If a similar proportion of the American population were killed today, the death toll would come to 6.2 million – the equivalent of the current population of Missouri. With the very real possibility of the century-old United States fracturing, passions obviously ran high in the 1860s.

One hundred years later, Americans were again at each other’s throats. Despite the country’s continued pre-eminence economically, we were beset by discontent. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Cities burned in summer riots. More than 16,000 U.S. troops were killed in the Vietnam War in 1968 alone. People had good reason to wonder in the 1960s if America was spinning out of control.

Fifty years later, we are in a much better place. We are disentangling ourselves from Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy is recovering from the Great Recession and the country is vastly more tolerant. As The Economist pointed out this summer, America has problems, but the notion that it is a seething hellscape is nonsensical. The United States, in the magazine’s estimation, is “peaceful, prosperous and, despite recent news, more racially harmonious than at any point in its history.”

That’s something to keep in mind today.