Early in this election cycle, we were told that this election could be rather historic. Hillary Clinton would be the first female president, Bernie Sanders would be the first Jewish president, Donald Trump would be the first non-politician in the White House, and so on. All over the media, experts talked about and discussed the historic impact of this election.
While attribute like that don’t even indicate anything about the political qualities, their presidential agendas do. And this is where the historic impact of this election actually has its origin. Now that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the official nominees for the two major political parties, it couldn’t be more obvious that the American society is as divided as it hasn’t been since the civil war.
The two-party system has always represented two different political viewpoints. Conservatism vs. liberalism, free-market capitalism vs. higher taxes for higher incomes, the idea that “if you are poor you are either too lazy or too stupid to get rich” vs. the idea that “the government has to support the poor regardless the causes of their poverty.”
Even though these ideas have always been different, the two parties always found some common ground to work together in congress and in the senate. In this election however, the two parties do not only stand for two different political ideologies but represent two totally diverse directions that the United States could possibly take after the 2016 election. While the RNC has drifted further to the right, highlighting in the nomination of Donald Trump, the DNC could stop the “political revolution” started by the “democratic socialist” and U.S. senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders who challenged Hillary Clinton for the nomination and got more attention and votes than any experts expected. However, the success of Sanders’ campaign proved that the DNC has drifted to the left during the eight years under the Obama administration. Even though Clinton is part of the political establishment and the candidate that the DNC chair favored, she now has to convince the Sanders supporters to support her political way, which could cause her in running a far more liberal campaign than she planned to run.
Nevertheless, all these developments have caused this election not to be a conflict between two political ideologies but a decision between two paths. Donald Trump wants the United States to isolate on the world stage in order to remain independent from other world powers such as Russia and China. He also wants to strengthen the borders to create jobs for Americans whose jobs otherwise could be in danger due to illegal immigrants. Hillary Clinton believes in diplomacy and that America has to remain in touch with the U.N. and other institutions representing global politics. Clinton also believes that immigrants are a necessity since, according to her, it’s a fact that immigration has always been supportive to the American economy.
Those were just two examples in which the two candidates couldn’t be any more different. The 2016 election will have a huge impact on the role the United States will play on the world stage over the next decades. This election will go down in history as a historical caesura in which the Americans chose the path for the next 20 years.
