Re: Campaign XXVI: The Drumpf World Order
Early morning ramble alert: Read and discard.
In addition to the fact that we now have an eighth-grader in the WH (and I challenge anyone to show that his emotional maturity is not at about that level), one aspect of this which bothers me a lot is that it will be seen as validation of the tactics the GOP has used over the last 25 years. For some, HRC was a bad choice because of the policies we expected from her administration. I count Kepler and many of the rest of us in that category. But for a very large number, she was poisonous as a result of a vague but unshakable belief that she was a fraud, a belief tied to endless messages about the Foundation, Benghazi, emails, etc. It started with Bill. The vast majority of all that was unproven innuendo, but it worked. Politics is a contact sport, always has been, so all is fair. But it has a stroke of genius for that party to, on one hand, create a feeling of doubt and mistrust in the benefit of knowledge and education by ridiculing the "intellectual elite," denying man's role in global warming, celebrating creationism, etc., and then capitalize on ignorance and the fear that usually goes along with it by using boogeyman tactics and appealing to base prejudices we should be trying to free ourselves from. It is so justification, in my mind, to simply say people were sick of Washington. They just elected someone who bragged about being a one-percenter who has never in his life shown any interest whatsoever in lifting a finger to help the "common man." To the contrary.
Trump ran a disastrous campaign. Every time he opened his mouth his image suffered. But the party had run a very effective campaign for a generation which, it appeared, might backfire by creating an angry, ignorant mob that would turn on its inciters. But in the end the mob did not turn against those who created it--at least not on election night--so all of those strategies have been confirmed as an effective way to obtain power. I thought people were a little smarter. Not a lot, but enough. I was wrong.
The low to middle income people will suffer from this choice, as will the environment and minority groups who did not fit into the 50s culture here. But the Country is pretty resilient, and social progress will move on because Trump's constituency is a dying breed. I do fear what might happen abroad though. A president may not be able to control domestic policy, but it can sure as he!! cause catastrophic harm in foreign policy.
Soft supporters of Trump continue to point out that liberals failed to appreciate the amount of distrust the average voter feels in what Washington is doing. Certainly the change from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, for one thing, has affected many of us in a very real and negative way. But simply recognizing that many people live a life of struggle does not explain or justify the Trump victory in my mind. The anger and fear that motivated the Trump vote was consciously engineered, effectively and over time. It tee'd up the email, Benghazi ball and shortened the hole. It worked. It is easy to say that such fear mongering ignorance-based tactics cannot continue to work for long because the demographics are changing, but ignorance and fear work with all of us, regardless of skin color, gender, sexual preference, religious choice, or political persuasion. Liberals are experiencing it now.
I have to apologize for some of this if you took the time to read it all. I won't even reread or edit it. Sometimes you just have to blurt it out. But now I don't have to kick the dog, though it would be nice to have a gopher fan nearby.
