By Peggy Noonan | Wall Street Journal
It’s exciting out there but enervating. People are spun up, nerves at a breaking point, and there’s an undercurrent.
Whatever the outcome of the election, at least half the country will feel crushed. Voters feel they are faced with a bad choice, and many millions will vote against, not for. Everyone is afraid the other side will destroy the country. If it turns out as close as the polls say, we fear a harrowing postelection time marked by accusations and aggression, with nothing clear and everything bitter.
What might be helpful right now to keep in mind?
My mind goes to something that I hope doesn’t sound facile because I don’t mean it in a rote, small way. But this country has gotten through a lot. It can take a lot of tension. It was born in it and is used to it. We made it through Shay’s Rebellion and Vietnam, the McCarthy era and the 1960s. We made it through the Civil War, and we will make it through this. We are practiced at withstanding trials. We have a way of forging through. We should take inspiration from this.
I reached for wisdom to the author Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute. He reached back to the 1830s, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” “He wrote that every presidential election is a kind of national crisis that drives people crazy, but that the madness dissipates when the election ends,” Mr. Levin says.
