Thanks to Dems and Trump, this year’s campaigns mostly dodged the real issues

It’s been a stupid election. Stupid because, when we vote on Tuesday, the real issues that determine the outcome in 2016 will have been largely ignored.

In 2016, Trump told voters that the American Dream, the idea that our kids would have it better than we did, had fled, and that he’d bring it back. He said Democrats had complained about social immobility and inequality, but that they were the ones who had caused it. He who smelt it dealt it, said Trump.

For a brief time after the election, Democrats recognized the need to mend their ways. They had forgotten the meat-and-potatoes economic issues of old-school Democrats. They saw that they had lost touch with millions of middle-class Americans who once voted for them, and that they had treated them with contempt. All that had to change, they sensed. Because Trump had eaten their lunch.

That didn’t last long. When Democrats took a second look at the Trump voters, they saw that they really, honestly didn’t like them. The religious voters, who turned out massively for Trump, were on the wrong side of gay marriage, to say nothing of the transgendered.

Trump voters still clung to their guns, and if they were white they were presumptively racist. When the Dems pretended to like them, it didn’t sound sincere. And people can pick up when they’re being condescended to.

Worse, the kind of economic policies Dems would have had to adopt, if they wanted to get back to economic basics, were Republican issues. And not just Republican, but — gasp! —Trump issues.

Open-border immigration policies would take jobs from Americans, so Dems would have had to want to restrict immigration. And screen immigrants in the manner proposed by the RAISE Act. The regulatory state gets in the way of job creation, so they would’ve had to seek its rollback. Our K-12 schools need some competition if they’re going to become a ladder to economic success, so they needed to support school choice.

If Dems had wanted to compete on real issues, they’d have moved to the center and cut deals, the way Bill Clinton did after the 1994 election. Except their base didn’t permit them to do that.

They could’ve told us they were the party of full employment. Except we’re already at full employment. They could’ve promised massive infrastructure spending to bring back jobs, except the jobs are already here. Or offered an economic recovery, except we’ve already recovered from the Obama years.

So what happens when you can’t run on the issues? You run on fear. The left charges that Trump adopted the politics of fear, and there’s some truth to that. But once again the accusation is coming from the one who dealt it.

You can’t go around telling us Trump is Hitler, that murderous crazies are representative of Republicans generally, that Trump’s policies are simply dog whistles, that the dark night of fascism is about to descend on America, and then tell us that you have a problem with fear-mongering.

You can’t say, as Cory Booker (D-NJ) did, that people who support Brett Kavanaugh are complicit with evil, and then complain, as Booker did, that this is a dark moment in our politics. You can’t ask people to harass Trump supporters, as Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) does, and then pretend you want a return to civility. Even Hillary Clinton has given up on civility.

And Trump? Well, when Democrats tell you you’re ruling like a dictator, it doesn’t help when you propose to ignore the Constitution with an executive order about birthright citizenship. When Democrats complain your immigration policies are racist, it doesn’t help when you vow to send 15,000 troops to the border with orders to shoot rock-throwers.

It doesn’t help when it’s just mud-slinging on both sides, and the politics of fear takes the place of honest policy differences.

Yes, it’s been a stupid election. Only it’s a real election, and your choice matters. So you need to get out there and do your civic duty. Cut through the impassioned and misleading rhetoric and concentrate on substance. A good start would be to ask the following question: Are we better off than we were two years ago?

F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School and is author of “The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed.”