Dear America,
I don't know why I continue to be so upset about the manner in which so many "experts" are analyzing the election results. Perhaps discomfited is a better word since I am fearful that the progressive movement is about to become a victim of misguided and belabored fear...partisan hand wringing over loss of power. In fact, Donald Trump did not win this election, Hillary Clinton did by over 2.5 million votes, and the Democrats did not lose either. The party picked up seats in both houses of the federal congress, albeit Trump did win the electoral college, and will win the vote there in a couple of weeks. Setting aside the bizarre analysis of some right wing nut who concludes that over 3 million votes were fraudulent, and moreover that 2.5 million of those fraudulent votes were for Hillary Clinton, if anyone received a popular mandate, it was Clinton, the putative liberal. And as to the Republican Party, they had a popular masthead on the ticket, Donald Trump, but they still lost ground in both houses of congress. That doesn't comport with the conservative brag that the nation is turning more conservative. In fact, if the public wanted what the Republicans are serving up, they would have lined up for more, not less. So, in the final analysis, or at least in my final analysis, the Democrats did everything right over the past eight years if retaining, or as in this case regaining, power is the legitimate goal of a political party, but the system is as corrupt as it was designed to be by the founding fathers. It just backfired this time, and populist mania in the incarnation of Donald Trump prevailed, irrational and ill-informed as it may be. In the end however, the electoral college will do what was intended because while his constituents believe otherwise, Trump is in the course of evicting his adversaries' alligators from the swamp, but he is replacing them with his own. There'll be no draining. It's just that new alligators are going to be in power and alligators do what alligators do; they are going to have slightly different appetites when it comes to their human vittles, but they are still going to be carnivores, lovers of human flesh in particular.
So, in the end, it is the Democrats who are in the proverbial catbird seat. For the Republicans, it is a case of being careless about what they wished for. With all the cards in their hands now, there is no excuse for failing to serve the American people, though they will certainly contrive a strategy designed to use the Democrats for that purpose, and it is primarily the Democrats' fault that they are vulnerable. When they had control of The Senate, they could have eliminated the filibuster, which the Republicans used to greater effect than the Democrats ever did to thwart the Democratic Party in pursuing its platform. That allowed them to point to the feckless Democrats as failures during the Obama years in that every attempt the Democrats made to do something productive was filibustered to death. Now, the Democrats have only two choices: let the Republicans take credit or let them take the blame. That usually doesn't work out too well because the Republicans always have an excuse. The moral is that the next time the Democrats find themselves in the majority, they should do the right thing for us, America. They should eliminate the filibuster and make everyone take the blame for his votes if they don't favor the common man, and conversely, let everyone take credit for his attempt to do the right thing. Today, obfuscation is the name of the game in congress; if your party line will not favor the people, just don't vote. That has to change...among other things.
The root problems though are the gerrymandered congressional district and the electoral college. There is currently two cases before our Supreme Court about districts in two states, North Carolina and Virginia, where all the black votes were corralled into one or two districts so that all white, conservative Republican districts could be formed around them. The states deny racial motives, but Republican state legislatures created the districts after the last census, and the Supreme Court at least sees the argument of effected voters that the redistricting was illicit in its racial motivation and thus illegal. Add to that the conservative efforts to limit black voting in other states and you have a concerted effort to swing every election toward the white right. And then, of course, there is the electoral college, inspired from its inception by the desire to take elections out of the hands of the masses and control them by giving the final say to the oligarchy of male wealth, which is no longer all male, but continues to serve wealth in that it keeps voters from having the final say.
We live in a culture today in which devious, and I would argue mostly conservative, malfeasors place false news stories on the internet and elsewhere--twitter and Facebook in particular--about such things a Washington child prostitution rings run by presidential candidates in fast food restaurants, which then inspire preposterously stupid right wing nuts to carry assault weapons into those public places thinking that they are true and that they are going to do something about them. I am starting to believe that Hillary Clinton was right about at least one thing: there is a right wing conspiracy and it trades in pathological ignorance and paranoia. It has no scruples whatsoever, no matter how righteous it claims to be. To them I say, Donald Trump wants you. To the rest of us I say, God help us.
Your friend,
Mike
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