This election was unlike any I have seen in my lifetime, and I am no spring chicken. Think back to the beginning of the primaries. No one expected that Trump would end up being the Republican nominee, including him. The Republican establishment openly despised him and didn't take him seriously. But they didn't have the means to stop him (aka pre-pledged super delegates), and they only realized too late that it was no longer enough to promise a platform all about guns, abortion, God and gays. They thought that they could continue to ignore the anger of their constituents at their failure to do anything to benefit them, and finally they got a giant FU response in return from the Republicans who voted for Trump.
On the Democratic side, the simple fact is that Hillary didn't excite the voters. Yes, she won the popular vote, and yes, the Republicans had done everything possible to reduce the number of Democrats who voted–or whose vote counted–but even so, based on her experience, Hillary should have won by a landslide.
It seems to me that the Democrats need to wake up and face the fact that there is an increasing feeling of economic insecurity in this country, and we cannot expect to start winning again until we address that. And NO, I am not saying that we should ignore social justice issues, of course not. But we need to face head on the fact of the enormous shift of wealth in this country upward over the last 35 years, thanks to a tax system based on an absurd economic premise that lowering taxes on the wealthy benefits everyone. The failure of that supply-side economic theory has been proven over and over and over again to be wrong, but it is a zombie that simply will not stay in its grave.
Bill Clinton presided over a booming economy, and he did raise taxes on the wealthy, which is what motivated the Republicans to impeach him. But he also continued the deregulation mania started by Reagan in ways that ultimately led to the financial meltdown of 2008. What people saw in Hillary was more of that, combined with a foreign policy that scared them.
We all think that Hillary would have made a far better president than Trump can ever hope to be, but we must remember that most people vote on the basis of emotion, not rationality, and what they saw in Hillary was the same old establishment that seems totally removed from the lives of most Americans, and what they saw in Trump was someone who wasn't beholden to corporate sponsors who would be an independent voice for them. We all know that Trump cares only about himself and his family, but for now we are stuck with him, and, armed with a Republican Congress and–horror of horrors–the potential to reshape the Supreme Court, it is hard to imagine the limits of the harm he could do.
So please, everyone, let us set aside our feelings about the primaries. The only point in addressing them is to seek to avoid the mistakes of the last one, which should be apparent to all by now (if they are not, it is not for lack of information), and to focus on how we can hinder Trump from getting his way and to take steps to insure having a more reliable voting process in the future. Not doing anything about how are elections are conducted is the great mistake the Democrats made after 2000. As well, of course, as being wimps.
Obama was right, albeit far too late, in telling the Democrats not to try to work with Trump. He must be resisted across the board (unless, out of sheer incompetence, he manages to come up with a constructive policy. The best medical advice is not to hold your breath waiting for that.
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This is a national emergency: we must be willing to do everything lawful to resist Trump and what he represents.
See you at the barricades!
Potone
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