ON ELECTION day in America it is usually a comfort to spend hours talking to voters emerging from polling places. After months of interviews with partisans at campaign rallies, regular citizens are reassuringly unzealous, and willing to volunteer that neither party has a monopoly on wisdom. Not this year. In 2016 too many Americans sounded sour, unhappy and quick to dismiss as illegitimate or immoral those who disagree with them.
Lexington spent November 8th in southern Wisconsin, talking to voters in small towns known for an unflashy, church-picnic and chambers-of-commerce sort of conservativism. This is Paul Ryan country—the home turf of the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, a beaky ideologue and devout Catholic who several times clashed with Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, publicly rebuking the businessman for his boorish ways (Mr Ryan called Trumpian slurs against an Mexican-American judge a “textbook case of racism”).
Reporting from polling stations in Elkhorn and Janesville was dispiriting and revealing. Republicans who had just cast ballots for Mr Trump and Mr Ryan expressed contempt not just...Continue reading
Source: United States http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21709919-setting-americans-against-each-other-paved-president-elects-path-power-donald-trump?fsrc=rss
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