Check the hysterics at the door please. If you want bilious invective lamenting his election or militant patriotism and fervent he will make us great nonsense just head on down the road. Either way, you will be disappointed.
I do not think I am the end all and be all... this is just my shout to the void and my attempt thinking out loud to make sense of the current state of affairs. In some ways I don't think things are nearly as catastrophic as many seem to believe. On the other hand.... I may actually think they are far worse. You be the judge. I do think something new is afoot. And new is dangerous when talking about your government. But new is also needed if you want change, and that is something almost everyone agrees we need. Though obviously we do not all agree on what type. Hence... new is dangerous because it begets real change, and we (humanity) are rarely ever in agreement over what form it should take. Our social skills tend to rapidly digress in such cases... which is a very polite way of saying we have a tendency to get violent and do lots of stupid things when new things bring more change than we can digest in to short a time.
First a bit about my take on the world as I think it applies to the current situation.
I do not believe in equal coverage. I believe in correct information. I do not believe in consensus in the face of fact. The popular consensus once upon a time was that the earth was flat and Galileo was a heretic and lunatic. There are plenty of other cases, many related to scientific discovery. That said, it doesn't mean a consensus can't be correct, as it often is. Yes, life is complicated, contradictory and truth often a mystery. But the truth is out there, and many things are true... from a certain point of view. It helps to work to reach as many of those various viewpoints as you possibly can... but sooner or later you have to pick which one is yours, but it need not be a prison. I believe equal opportunity is sacrosanct, but success is not assured and the "game" is most certainly rigged. For that reason it behooves us to be constantly vigilant for oppression by those wanting to stack the deck to achieve success for them, and more importantly for their children. Often unconsciously, which is in its way far more insidious than outright bigotry and racism etc... because it is much easier to ignore and turn a blind eye to. The world ain't fair but that doesn't mean its an excuse to be a dick. When it comes to modern media... or ancient media. Follow the money. It tells more truth no matter how enlightened some of its scions can be. They who want to sell you the truth want to control you and all modern media is trying to sell you and sell to you. Some for good, some not so much... and really, who is who changes from day to day, from article to article. There is no assured safe source so buyer beware. That said there is no grand conspiracy behind the media other than perhaps the pursuit of the almighty buck, and yet, the free press in the US is far more a blessing than a curse. Its fracturing by the internet has reverted us in many ways to 'Yellow Dog Journalism'. Finding accurate news to draw your conclusions from has always been a difficult task... but in the blizzard of information brought on by the net it is fast becoming a specialist skill rather than a general one. Snowflakes aren't, ignorant rednecks ain't. The filthy rich are human and the poor are not saints. The reality is almost always more complex than a pithy soundbite... except for Hitler. And the only Hitler is Hitler except for possibly Stalin. Both were at the head of evil that the world is unlikely to ever see again short of in recovery from WWIII assuming as Einstein predicted we have to build back from the stone age and somehow manage to forget our history. So stop comparing every person that doesn't meet your personal approval to those responsible for pretty much the greatest atrocities of the modern era, and quite possibly all history. The next thing we see on that level will NOT take the same form and we will be surprised by it because not seeing it coming is the only way it will happen. Or... it will be because we have become so inured and numb to the warning that like the boy who cried wolf, the townspeople will no longer rally to the cry. So if you think you have spotted the next Hitler, I bet you a coca-cola they ain't.
And finally, at least in my opinion, this past election and the other similar national discussions/elections around the world are not about liberalism and conservatism. They are not about the elite vs the plebeians or tolerance vs intolerance. It is not about socialism vs capitalism or the 1%ism sticking to the 99%ism. But it is about isms. Nationalism and Globalism. Of course the other things play a part, but I think the over arching issue is this and it is occurring in a new way that we really have not seen before. This is not some original thought by me by any stretch but I only recently came to what I feel is my understanding of it. More on my likely neophyte sophomoric thoughts on that in a bit.
When it first became obvious that Trump was a contender my gut reaction was crap, this guy could be president. I wasn't sure why and I questioned it. Then I, like many others, did my research and came up with all sorts of reasons why it couldn't be. So I put aside my gut feeling that he had his finger on something that wouldn't be ignored and trusted my interpretation of the information I found. And yet he didn't fade in the polls. He boiled forth unimaginable gaffs.... for mere mortal politicians at least... and didn't fade in the polls. He is on tape bragging about barging into women's dressing rooms including the dressing rooms of minors, agreeing his daughter is a hot piece of ass and abusing his celebrity to... well you know this one I imagine, and it proved barely a speed bump. He spewed forth intolerance and ridiculous statements about banning entry to the US based solely on a religious faith. Quite possibly the single most un-American sentiment I can personally imagine. On election night none of the battle grounds were battlegrounds and the blue firewall wasn't. When the dust cleared there he was with a clear Electoral College victory yet having a 2% shortfall in the popular vote. FUCK. But perhaps I express that sentiment for a different reason than you may first suspect.
I suppose that brings up some other things about my take on the world... or the US system of government in particular. I believe in the constitution and I believe in the vision of the founding fathers. That said, while I adore the constitution I do not see the constitution as inviolate, and it is far from perfection. I think it is just as close as we (humanity) have yet come in terms of a system of governance. As a part of its founding a process of amending the document was provided and that process exists for a reason. I think we have slowly allowed our veneration of the document and our past skew our better judgement when it comes to updating our basis of governance based on what we have learned and how we have changed. For example, one thing that should have long since been struck from the official text is the 3/5ths clause. Something else I am becoming to believe must be changed is the electoral college. I do not think simply getting rid of it in favor of a straight popular vote is the answer. The fear of raw majority rule is as valid today as it was at the founding. However, the arcane nature of the college setup and its largely stillborn theoretical check on who can be elected president are mostly vestiges of their original intent. If the electors really did exercise the power invested in them constitutionally at this point it would almost certainly lead to a serious crisis of faith in the process. That makes it a time bomb and it should be defused. Finally, the underlying compromises which ultimately shaped it are long since invalidated. A new covenant, as it were , is called for. This is not due to Trump... I first began to suspect this during my study of the document in college but largely dismissed the reasons I believed changing it to be desirable due to it being highly unlikely to occur vs the extreme amount of effort needed to pass a constitutional amendment. That unlikely case was a string of very close elections, especially those that brought forth the odd case of electoral college results not aligning with the popular vote. Elephant, Donkey or other... I generally think who ultimately ends up in the Whitehouse is more molded by the Whitehouse than the other way around with the odd notable exception here and there. But widespread belief that the elections did not represent the will of the people is a very real threat to the foundations of our system of governance. Close elections are by far the most likely thing to challenge peoples faith in the system and 3 of the last 5 presidential elections have been real squeakers... and while individually they are not exactly off scale with regards to history, the close spacing of them is un-precedented (especially the two electoral college only victories) . If we continue to have them come out this close it will continue to be a poke to a vulnerable element (flaw?) of the frame work painfully hammered into life by the founders. Stress any system enough and it will fail and protecting against that is far more important (dangerous) than any individual elected. On election night 2016 I most certainly was not pulling for the Donald. But I wanted WHOEVER won to win by a clear majority as that would build more buffer time over the two Bush elections and at least pull one type of pressure off the currently ultra partisan politics of DC. Needless to say that is not what happened. So the explicative above on election night was directed more at the tally than at who benefited from it. A Clinton victory by the same means would only have been marginally better in my opinion.
So two things out of that to be very clear on. I did not vote for Trump. But what I wanted more than my personal choice to win, was a president elected by a clear victory at the polls and yes that means I preferred a Trump presidency with a clear victory (second choice) over a marginal Clinton victory. As I believed the results of the process more important than who garnered the support. That said, he is the lawfully elected leader of the United States of America. I think the protests purely at his victory are protected rights being exercised... but I think the effort of them would be better spent targeting objections (ideally legitimate informed grievances/difference of opinions) to his actions rather than his status as president.... or perhaps aimed at begining the process of lobbying for the creation of said amendment to address the growing dysfunctional nature of the electoral college as it presently sits.
Nationalism V Globalism
So what happened? In my opinion it goes back to the nationalist vs globalist, not that most think of themselves in those terms. There seems to be a growing body of evidence that urban populations under modern democratic rule are all more or less trending towards a globalist culture centered around some core values... one of the more visible and recognized being tolerance. It also comes with the notion of global economies that are not bound by traditional national borders... which in turn generally leads to less emphasis on national identity or at least a morphing of those nationalist identities to align better with the globalist core values. This is a new phenomena as far as I can tell in history to have such a wide group of various national cultures all incubating less nationalistic populations that are aligning across traditional geographic and geopolitical boundaries. The dream of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon and Genghis and all other would be world wide conquerors is in effect being slowly realized (well... attempted again) not by conquest, but by a largely spontaneous widespread alignment of culture. The problem is that the result of this process is an antagonism to nationalism. And outside of these urban populations nationalism is still very much king. Nationalism is effectively tribalism taken to its logical extreme. In the modern era it has generally been considered highly unlikely you would ever see a global identity... one of the reasons that the global national boarders have changed relatively little in recent times compared to most of our history. The tribe is our identity and those not in it.... well they are not our tribe. The growth of nationalism and the stabilizing effect of nationalism at scale is fascinating. But I always wondered if there was something beyond it. I think Trump is proof in the US that there is as Brexit did in the UK. Not to say that Trump and Brexit are Globalist results... quite the opposite. What happened in my opinion is that we reached a tipping point where in each case people no longer identified across the nation as one big tribe. And the cause you backed was the cause of your tribe. In the UK it took the form of support for Brexit, and in the US support for Trump. The UK case is a clearer example because it is very clear it was a vote about the UK vs the European Union. In both cases the break was in favor of the old national tribe which in hindsight is unsurprising. We have been large-scale tribal nations for far longer than this new fangled globalist hanky-panky. In America Trump was the nationalist tribal symbol, Clinton was the globalist. We will overlook a lot of flaws in the symbols of our tribe and we will magnify the flaws of the symbols of the other. The end result being two populations that while largely made up individually of reasonable people... are unable to have 'tribal' communication (ie reasonable debate about who to lead us or what we should all do) because while we are still one nation, we are no longer of the same tribe.
To me this explains the odd change over the past couple of decades of mostly good natured differences of opinion in my widespread family to the far more poisonous diatribes I see today. This of course gets exacerbated by the new found closeness of social media where in the past time often allowed the wounds of verbal barbs to heal before the next holidays/family event again brought everyone into close contact again. More to the point, it explains the seemingly inexorable march to more and more extreme partisanship in our federal leadership as they are simply reflecting the growing separation and intolerance growing between their various constituents. It explains the seemingly impossible to overlook flaws each side saw in the other tribes candidates and ascendency of 'us vs them' approach vs a look at the substance of proposed leadership goals. It explains the fundamentally different look each side has on the current state of America and the schism in the press that has arisen to speak to each view. To the nationalist the forward march of progress of core goals of globalism is not to be celebrated and so they see a nation in decline and at risk of loosing its sovereignty, and even of its very identity. Across the geographic boundaries of the US we are no longer seeing each other as all essentially of the same tribe first. And we do not know how to deal with it. Trump has his finger firmly on this pulse. Make America Great again. America FIRST. Similar nationalistic themes were put forth by the Brexit leaders. Perhaps more disturbingly to me is that Trump also appears to be the first president intent on challenging the doctrine of separation of church and state. Religion is by and large the antecedent identity and ideological driver prior to nationalism... and its record for peace was awful. Snapping back to more nationalistic priorities vs the uncertain and unproven deeper dive in to globalist priorities is debatable.... reverting back to religious intolerance and persecution is I think a categorically horrific possibility.
Well that is enough ranting for now. Perhaps I will put forth some more shouts into the void in the future at less than multiple year intervals.... the current administration is certainly kicking up some froth and sacrificing what for some are sacred cows.
Before I sign off.... I don't think the removal of the 3/5ths clause needs much elaboration... but suggesting we alter the Electoral college without actually proposing what that should be is not the kind of thing I like to do. Bring up a problem, come with a solution. How about instead of just saying thems the rules if we have a split result between the Electoral college and popular vote we basically just declare it a "mistrial" and have a Do-Over? Basically make it such that you have to win a majority of the states and the majority national vote in order to be president... because if you cannot successfully appeal to both, you are not suited to be our national leader. Please try again. Repeat until a suitable candidate is found. No house and senate non-sense if no one gets the electoral college majority. We mandate by constitutional amendment that the one nationally elected federal position must be held by a candidate capable of appealing both to the states and to the people. In such a system neither Clinton or Trump would be president. We likely would have had to move on to different candidates after multiple votes showing the problems of their appeal were intractable in one way or the other thus revealing the true problem of both candidates in being unable to represent both America's.
If somehow the above speaks to you (good or bad) to the point you want to comment all I ask is that you adhere to the Thumperian principle.... at least in that what you say is phrased in a polite manner whose intent is useful debate.
