If the idea was to blow up the Washington establishment and show its members who’s boss, it failed miserably, since just about everyone who was in power before the election, still is. The furious-with-the-power-structure faction of the electorate sent business-as-usual incumbents back to Washington in droves. In their only major trade-out, they put into office a fool who knows nothing of government, economics, or foreign affairs and who has great disdain for minority groups too numerous to mention. Of course, it never was about throwing the bums out. It was about making America great again; and by “great again” they seem to be referring to a time when women knew their place and blacks, gays, and other minorities didn’t compete with decent white folks for the good jobs.
There is always a segment of the population that has an unspecific sense of malaise -- who yearn for change of some kind, no matter how unfocused -- and national elections are just the thing for that, since they are, by definition, about change. It doesn’t seem to matter that times are pretty good, as they are now – general prosperity in the form of full employment or close to it, savings accounts thriving in financial markets, negligible inflation, low-interest debt. There remains a free-floating hostility for a variety of bogeymen, and you can round up the usual suspects – the establishment, Wall Street, the wealthy, big government, lawmakers that don’t “get anything done,” and various minority groups. These folks are encouraged to see themselves as victims of “the system,” and that, apparently is more appealing to them than enjoying their prosperity and general good fortune. And so, change. It’s so desperately needed as to warrant the selection of a knowledge-free blowhard as its agent.
The selection was made that much easier, that much more justifiable, by the dark reputation of his opponent – a reputation that was created largely out of thin air through the invention of a series of fictitious “scandals” ginned up by people who definitely had skin in the game – namely, unrepentant political opponents who coveted the power she and her party had and would say and do anything to get it
And so, Donald Trump. If any actual change is in the offing because of all this, it surely will be for the worse, particularly for this constituency, since the most likely results of Trump’s economic ideas, insofar as they can be deciphered, will be recession and job loss. But, no matter. That constituency was able to get its rocks off, as it were, and that, apparently, is what counts. Results? We don’t care about no stinkin’ results.
Meanwhile, returning to haunt our dreams are the acolytes of Saint Bernie Sanders, insisting, incredibly, that Donald Trump is the fault of Hillary Clinton and her adherents, because they renounced Sanders who would have been the more effective Trump opponent. The polls showed that, they say; but Sanders was deprived of the nomination by shenanigans within the Democratic National Committee.
This is truly delusional, First, do we need to talk about what polling tells us? Second, the actual numbers, as opposed to poll results, are implacable: Clinton got 3.6 million more primary votes than Sanders. You can’t rig that. It tells us she was a more broadly supported candidate in the general election than Sanders would have been. In this election, rationality and decency lost to irrationality, ignorance, and hatred, and the loss would have been just as bad with Sanders if not worse. Also, not helpful: obsession with the "establishment" (whatever that is) and continually characterizing Clinton as being part of it and therefore undesirable; naively swallowing, hook, line, and sinker the phony Clinton "scandals" ginned up by Republicans; and pointlessly switching a vote that would have gone to the Democrat to one of the off-party candidates.
The guess here is that Trump never really wanted or expected to be president – that it was just another ego trip, a place from which he could spout his half-basked theories about everything while his toadies nodded enthusiastically, and he could bellow orders at them to get me this and go fetch that. Now, however, he’s like the dog that caught the garbage truck. OMG, what now? Same with his constituents.
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