After way too many months of the 2016 presidential campaign and trying to sort out the drama from the facts, I’m more frustrated now than I have ever been with previous elections. The criteria for choosing presidential candidates has fallen so low, I don’t want to give the event too much of my energy. However, as an American citizen, I realize that it is my responsibility to vote this November and so I have tried to rally my enthusiasm and examine what is being said by the candidates about how they intend to address the issues our country faces.

My conclusion thus far is that the original founding fathers would be horrified and furious at the spectacle we are currently witnessing. They recognized that emotionalizing issues is the most useless and damaging approach to running a country and anticipated this when they wrote the Constitution, which attempts to give later generations an example of the wisdom and insight that our founding fathers possessed. These people often came from repressive governments and had first hand experience of living under repressive conditions, so I look to their insights with considerable respect and am grateful for the sacrifices they made to create a less repressive government that many of us have prospered from over the past 200 plus years.

Many years ago I saw this quote, attributed to Alexander Tyler about democracies and why they are doomed to fail. I thought it was time to trot it out again for those who may never have read it. It is entitled “Why Democracies Fail.”

“A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy and always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations is 200 years. Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage; from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence and from dependence back into bondage.”

Does this resonate with anyone? I believe it ought to, because the idea that America is not great anymore is one of the emotional reactions to our apparently failing democracy. Loss is frightening and frustrating, but it is a fact of life that everything has a birth, growth and death cycle and it seems we do not have the power to prevent this cycle from occurring. From my perspective it appears that we are in the last stages of Tytler’s warning and no amount of emotionalizing will prevent the loss of our democracy from happening. We need to look to our higher selves and stop the screaming and yelling, the judgments and finger pointing and try to rise above the usual human condition of undisciplined emotional thinking and begin to consider more rational cognitive approaches to electing our government officials.

When I observe the rude, arrogant and superficial attempts of the candidates to get votes, I am amazed at their lack of civility and their remarkable arrogance to think that they have all the answers.The word that comes to mind is ‘megalomania,’ which Webster’s dictionary defines as “a mental disorder marked by feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur.” Although Donald Trump certainly exemplifies this behavior, the Clintons do as well. A megalomaniac is a person who truly believes that he or she is above the laws and moral integrity that the rest of us acknowledge are necessary for a smoothly functioning government.

One of the things to look for in assessing whether or not someone is affected by this mental disorder is if they employ fear as a strategy to win votes. Dictators routinely use fear to enslave their populations, as Hitler did on his rise to power in Germany, when they were struggling with their economy which had been devastated by WWI. One of his platforms was eliminating all people he did not like, afraid they could challenge the majority if not controlled or eliminated. He call was to “Make Germany Great Again” and as a result led his people into another devastating world war. He is, perhaps, the perfect definition of a megalomaniac.

I think all of us would be grateful if the candidates would stop the pointless personal attacks, the fear mongering and the relentless ego-centric emotionalizing of how great or not this country is and just discuss the issues, which are many and complicated and need serious attention from mature and skilled candidates.

Mitch FitzGibbon is a Westfield resident.