Going back to the well

Here we are, two days out, and I've been involved in a number of conversations with people trying to understand the whys and wherefores of president-elect, Donald J. Trump. I get that. It's a surprising turn of events for many people who figured there was no way that the voting public could be so irrational as to elect that idiot. But I don't think irrationality is the issue here. I've also been involved in a couple conversations wherein people objected to my overtly humorous reaction to the election. I get that, too. A lot of people are frightened of what a Trump administration could look like, especially as we are now regaled with stories of who is under consideration: Ann Coulter, Myron Ebell, Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin, etc. A couple things about that:

• My sense of humor has been described as anything from "macabre" to "quaint" because I tend to find humor in situations that many people find abhorrent. There's a certain level of cosmic perspective ("Nothing will ever match the depredations that would accompany the world being taken over by Yog-Sothoth!") but it's often a Robert Frost thing ("If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane.")
• I TOTALLY called the Palin as Secretary of the Interior thing. There's no better indication of a collection of people that have no clue as to how government (to say nothing of Interior) actually functions than to believe that she's the right choice for that post.
• Ann Coulter as White House press secretary. Can't you just imagine Trump barging onto the dais in the press room to interrupt Coulter saying something outrageous with a pronouncement that's even MORE outrageous? Pardon me while I convulse with laughter again. It helps if you have absolutely zero respect for most of these institutions as a whole, given that they largely deserve none.

 Those people all sound horrible for those of us actually concerned about things like, say, climate change or police-community relations. But what concerns me even more is the number of Democratic voters and media types who are continuing with the "race" and "likeability" angles as to why Hillary Clinton lost to the most outrageous and incompetent candidate and campaign in the last century.

Race is a factor, as David Duke and his execrable ilk are now happy to tell you. Clinton's difficulties on the stage and with regular folks are a factor, as has been cited often. But just because some of Trump's supporters are bigots

Low-income rural white voters in Pa. voted for Obama in 2008 and then Trump in 2016, and your explanation is white supremacy? Interesting.

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) November 9, 2016

and just because Clinton was a suboptimal candidate on the stump

This is very curious advice. Clinton not a great speaker, reportedly great listener. That works on @foxnews? https://t.co/UJYjS2YapR

— Medellín (@TonyJohnIII) July 22, 2016

doesn't make those the defining traits of her loss. Anyone remember what Bill Clinton's in-house slogan was for his campaign in 1992?

And there you go. When you have a block of voters that have missed out on the benefits of the "new economy" and are, at best, serially lied to by politicians promising to help them or, at worst, are labeled as losers by the media for not succeeding in said "new economy", presenting them with a candidate whose message is just more of the same is a sure recipe for disaster. The only thing that kept this race close for Clinton was the fact that Trump is such a horrible human being (and who goes on trial for fraud in a couple weeks. 'Merica!) If she'd been running against Romney, it would have been a slaughter. But, again, one of the reasons someone like Romney or Jeb Bush didn't get nominated is that they represent the same things Clinton does: Goldman Sachs, concentration of weatlh, and continued oligarchy. In the emails that were hacked from the DNC, Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress put it best:

“I mean it makes my life more difficult after telling every reporter I know she’s actually progressive but that is really the smallest of issues. It worries me more that she doesn’t seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment.”

Here's a hint: She doesn't.

So, what now? Well, what this presents us with now is opportunity. Yes, the next four years are going to be a bit of a trial with the GOP controlling all of the government and that idiot loose in the White House. But the opportunity comes in the fact that so many people dread that reality. This should be a galvanizing event. Don't be one of those Facebook warriors screeching at me about how others are going to suffer more than I am. I'm aware of that. What I'm saying is that there were plenty of people already suffering, including those highlighted by the keyboard champions whose only real expression of concern was to hit a Paypal button to toss $20 toward the Clinton campaign and feel like they were "contributing" to anything other than a stagnant edifice that's already rolling in cash, thanks. Again, borrowing from people who are likely expressing it better than I am, take a listen to Marc Lamont Hill on The Breakfast Club from a few months back:

The pertinent stuff begins at the 11:05 mark, but the whole thing is worth a watch, as he's a very interesting guy. But, in short, what he says is that he's not interested in voting for the same thing that continues to not work and a Trump presidency may be the thing that gets the majority of people to finally fight back against a system that is largely designed to make them passive observers (i.e. the equivalent of walking into a voting booth every four years), rather than active participants.

We can't just keep dismissing this event as the work of closed-minded racists. That's missing the point. The point is that a genuinely democratic and/or representative republic has to work for more than just the wealthy and ours simply doesn't.