Demolish workers’ unions and leave only churches to fill the void, demonize political ideologies that offer the people control over their lives (their workplaces, their media, their finances, their political parties) and you get trumped.
I’m an outsider so I will defer to two American commentators, the first of whom loudly predicted just this result.
Michael Moore: Morning After To-Do List
1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.
2. Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn’t let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must “heal the divide” and “come together.” They will pull more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.
3. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn’t wake up this morning ready to fight, resist and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that’s about to begin.
4. Everyone must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked”. What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all “You’re fired!” Trump’s victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that.
5. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: “HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!” The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don’t. The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we’ll continue to have presidents we didn’t elect and didn’t want. You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above).
Let’s try to get this all done by noon today.
(posted with permission from AlterNet [link (http://repubhub.icopyright.net/freePost.act?tag=3.18566?icx_id=1066877) broken: Neil Godfrey 24th July, 2019]
Then there’s an interesting post by Thom Hartman, author of The Crash of 2016: How a Small Group of Republicans Hijacked Our Democracy and Delivered Donald Trump
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I’m still trying to breathe normally again. Tomorrow, I will re-read this, but for now, let the drinking begin.
Neil, Your such a sore loser!
* you’re, as in ‘you’re such a fool’.
We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don’t know how wise they were.
“Gore Vidal and the Mind of the Terrorist”, interview by Ramona Koval, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio National (November 2001)
Apposite?
H.L. Mencken one of the great American humourists
“You can never go broke underestimating the taste of the American voter.”
Slight modification to
“You can never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.”
Francisco Goya from Los Caprichos “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos from
The Caprices etchings The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
I think you nailed this one, Neil.
I just think a lot of people were feeling sorry for Trump because he was losing so badly and being beat up by the mass media, so they voted for him.
It makes you kind of think of what would have happened if after Jesus said, “Forgive them daddy, they’re jerks,” God had said, “No son, I don’t forgive them and now go out and fuck up these bastards.”
Mark Chapter 17
And Jesus slithered down from the cross
and grabbing Romans and Jews indiscriminately
He began to bang their heads together,
So that slimey mush poured in a stream, from their skulls,
He then said, “Take that you knuckleheads, you defilers of the sacred temple.”
Everyone thought he was talking about the sacred temple,
But he was talking about his own body.
47.7% isn’t a majority. It’s certainly true that most voters voted against Trump, but a fair few of them declined to state a preference between Trump and Clinton. Trump+Gary Johnson together won a majority of the vote. I don’t actually think this proves that they’re all against national health care, but it sure doesn’t constitute a vote of confidence for it.
I understand total 2016 voter turn-out was only ~50%, which is historically low – http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101
Moore’s number 5 is a non-starter. The Electoral College isn’t new, and it sounds like sour grapes to complain about the rules of the game that you agreed to play under, only after you have lost. It doesn’t change the fact that the nation is electorally divided nearly equally, and has been since 1992.
The demographics of the country are such that it’s easier for a Democrat to win the popular vote and still lose because they rack up huge margins in large blue states like California and New York. Republicans write-off these states ahead of time, but if a popular vote election existed, you would have seen different strategies with Republicans trying to compete better in those states by spending resources there.
The US is a union of States, not a single entity. There are a few institutions where the States have some autonomy and power. The Electoral College is one, the United States Senate is another. Amendments Nine and Ten in the Constitution are another. Those institutions and provisions aren’t there accidentally.
The US Presidential election is not a national election, it is fifty separate state elections. The people who complain about the Electoral College (only when they lose), don’t spend much time complaining about (or asking to get rid of) the US Senate, where tiny Rhode Island has an equal voice to gigantic California. But both should be considered equally “unfair” according to such people.
Yet we only hear whining about the Electoral College once every four years by a faction of people who didn’t get what they want. I’d have more respect for such people if they were more consistent in their criticisms of other areas in the US where States wield power that the Feds don’t.