Would you consider the 2016 election the biggest political election of our lifetime? Why or why not?

“Our lifetime” encompasses quite a few elections. The student who posed the question—is the 2016 election the “biggest” of our lifetime—is probably in his/her twenties. The person writing this response is in his fifties. Whether the 2016 election is more important than the first of my lifetime, the one that featured old-school conservatism in the person of then-Vice President Richard Nixon against a young, confident and attractive liberal senator from New England named John Kennedy, is difficult to say. Kennedy’s election, which ushered in the idealistic notion of American political royalty that became known as “Camelot,” was, in its own way, transformative but for the tragic ending to that brief era. The 1968 contest between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey took place against a backdrop of tremendous social and political turbulence, with protests and riots against the war in Vietnam and for civil rights occurring at the same time that same old-school conservative, Nixon, was to be finally elected to the office of the presidency rather than the liberal Humphrey. That, however, is my lifetime. The campaigns for the presidency of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were, in their way, illustrative of the period in which they took place. Carter’s election in 1976 represented the end of an era—the post-World War II consensus on foreign policy that had, to a certain extent, existed among both political parties, and the degradation of American politics represented by the Watergate scandal—while his subsequent defeat by Reagan in his bid for reelection represented a mandate among much of the public for a more vigorous administration that would strengthen the United States militarily after years of relative decline. All of these were important, or “big,” elections. Obviously, the election of the nation's first African American president is more than a little noteworthy, although the actual governing part of the equation is less transformative than the ethnic or racial element of it.

All of that said, the current election process is without a doubt one of the more transformative ones of recent history. The ugliness of the ongoing process is hardly unique in the annals of American political history, with name-calling and “dirty tricks” very much a part of that history. What makes this election “big” is the potential, on the left, for the election of a self-avowed socialist, and the potential, on the right(?) for the election of a populist businessman whose comments on a number of issues have placed him outside the mainstream of American politics—a mainstream that Trump’s popularity may be in the process of upending. Sanders represents a radical transformation in the economics of the most economically-powerful country in the world; Trump represents a somewhat xenophobic, protectionist, ideologically vacuous presence that few can label within the context of this nation’s political history. Whichever of these two prevail would usher in a very new type of administration, one the ramifications of which nobody can confidently predict. Clinton, Rubio and Kasich represent the more pragmatic, traditional perspectives on governing, with Clinton seriously tainted by allegations of corruption and a reputation for dishonesty. The political process, to date, can either be, then, transformative, or represent a rejection of the extremes personified by Trump and Sanders.

For somebody in his or her twenties, this may very well represent the most important election of his or her life. To those of us where are older, however, an answer to that question remains to be seen.