Elections are supposed to be about the future. But Tuesday in Anderson County it will be déjà vu all over again.

Since 2000, voters have heard repeatedly from a vocal, conspiratorial, perhaps paranoid constituency that believes our local county government is a hostage to cronyism, awash in irresponsible spending and engaged in a systematic attempt to pull the wool over the public’s eyes.

And every two years, voters get a fresh batch of candidates who present, in equal but opposite ways, the tantalizing possibility of clearing the haze of accusation, insinuation and speculation that surrounds our local politics.

“Vote us in, and you’ll make sure we get to the bottom of this mess,” the candidates say. In a demonstration of what is so beautiful and frustrating about democracy, however, we never get an unequivocal display of voter sentiment. A “truth-hunter” will knock off one weak incumbent. A “community first” candidate will replace another. Overall, it’s swings and roundabouts.

So we find ourselves in the worst kind of political hell, where we’re trapped in a bizarre Catch-22 where there is never going to be enough trust for truth to win and not enough truth for everyone for trust in government to grow.

Everything has been tried on both sides. Persuasion. Political organization. Litigation. Prevarication. Nothing has worked. We are in a deadlock, in every sense of that word.

I wonder whether the best way to look at this is through the classic five stages of grief.

The community-firsters are still grieving over the fact that not everyone believes in their vision of progress, especially when it threatens Anderson’s nativist roots. The nativists, for whom is progress is mostly if not always beside the point, are grieving the loss of Anderson County as theirs, a place and a people of shared, traditional values.

The nativists blew through the denial stage. They are still comforting themselves through their anger. As we all know, there’s always someone who’s ready to be angry with you. It’s the most unifying emotion there is.

The community-firsters spent an inordinate amount of time in denial. Harboring grand ideas and even grander plans, these folks aren’t given to people getting in their way, so they just ignore them. Anger takes too much energy, so they skipped over that and went to the bargaining phase, only to discover that angry people don’t think very rationally and aren’t interested in compromise. Now the community-firsters are just stuck in depression.

As you can probably guess, I’m suggesting that it’s time for the community-firsters to move toward acceptance.

There will never be an overwhelming progressive political consensus achievable at the ballot box alone.

The community-firsters should stop trying to win one. They can accomplish a whole lot more by working diligently together in the social and business networks through which the real work of social progress has always been done. The political class always jumps on when it has nothing to lose.

Government can help for sure, but we know we’re lost when we rely on it to show us the way.