America's political history is no stranger to scandal. Both professional and personal, controversies have time and time again hit public officials and called America's moral and ethical core into question. The 2016 presidential election was no exception and remains one of the dirtiest elections in recent history, and it serves as a sign that people are willing to accept wrongdoing as long as it means beating the other team.
Cartoon by Arcadio Esquivel for The Mercury News
I'm willing to admit that I'm someone who was willing to drop controversy to beat the other candidate. The victory of Donald Trump was something to avoid at all costs in my eyes, and I was arrogant on November 8th when it came to how the election would go. Up to then, I was willing to accept that Hillary Clinton had used a personal email server that was eventually compromised. She did apologize, and it is true that previous Secretaries of State had also used private email servers, so I minimalized the problem as the price of admission to avoiding a Trump presidency (though I also believed, and still do, that Clinton was more qualified for the position).
People supporting Trump were just as quick and willing to accept the baggage of their candidate, weaponizing it in a similar fashion to how Clinton supporters weaponized Trump's offhand comments towards her (See: Nasty Woman). I'll never understand how family groups were still backing a man who said the things he said on that Access Hollywood bus, but I imagine it's the same mentality behind why so many of us put aside the email scandal when Clinton became our only viable candidate after the Democratic National Convention (Sorry-not-sorry, Johnson/Stein supporters). Republicans decried Clinton as unfit to lead with how she handled the email server and continued trying to hit her with the tried and true "Benghazi" stick.
Hard to beat the Trump-bus comments? Unfortunately, not in my opinion. I believe the biggest scandal people were willing to swallow during the election was the internal DNC operations that tried to make Clinton the nominee.
I'll also admit that I was a Bernie supporter up until after the second democratic debate, it's hard to escape the appeal of his idealistic views when we're equally idealistic, and I still ideal the man today as a senator. But when the hack came and revealed internal, mobilized bias within the DNC, I'd already turned to the Clinton camp and was, for the most part, willing to accept it. In the face of my own party, I wanted the heads of those who weren't impartial in their actions within the committee, but to the rest of the country, I was ready and able to stand behind Clinton for the next four months up to the general election.
I won't try to defend my own tribal bias, but I do think it's important to realize that a lot of what we're willing to accept from our politicians is aligned with the goal of beating the other team, and realizing what being in a tribe does to us is the first step in true cooperation and compromise.
