I'm writing this one week post-election, 2016. The coup is damn near complete. We will have a fascist government installed and we will suffer division and pain. With right wing majorities in both houses of Congress, a neo-conservative beholden President offering Supreme Court judges and a spiteful cadre of newly emboldened white supremacists, misogynists and anti-intellectuals coming to the fore - the fabric of the nation is under stress.
The great documents bequeathed to us by the founders of our democratic republic are only as good as the people see fit. Thirty-three red states, and it takes thirty-four to ratify changes to the Constitution. And if police and military both throw their weight behind so-called "alt-right" directives, the letter of the law will easily become subverted by political bias.
How did we arrive at this precipice? There are both legitimate and illegitimate reasons. Fact-finding will follow, and some blame-placing is in order as well! The sad fact that remains is that millions of people in America and quite likely billions of folk around the world are feeling grief, fear and uncertainty as an amateur takes the helm of the earth's greatest ship of state. And he got there by invoking populist techniques, inciting retrograde philosophies, speaking with bullying sarcasm and dog-whistle racism to great numbers of tired, frustrated voters suffering the stagnation of globalization and corporate thuggery.
There is a great irony here in that the people who elevated our reality show strong-man into the cat-bird seat stand to lose the most from the changes complicit in the radical right agenda. The "loyal opposition" will be hard pressed to utilize every check and balance available to the minority position to halt the dismantling of a hundred fifty years of hard-fought gains under the broad umbrella of human rights. What of the new president's debt to the "evangelicals" who would be quite pleased to take away a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body, who would not hesitate to start a "holy war" in the Middle East because of their belief in a coming Armageddon?
So the president-elect has made himself a Faustian bargain, with outre constituencies ready to hold his feet to the fire. And there will be other actors vying for power, creating unholy alliances, exacting their own petty vendettas, acting petulantly out of derelict attitudes and dislike to dismantle programs and institutions that are intended to offer aid and succor to the needful.
Ultimately, while some of the "squeaky wheels" will get their wish - in the name of "smaller government" people will lose their health care, an attempt will be made to end the Social Security program, military spending and offshore adventures of empire will increase. And while we are fighting those squabbles between red-faced and blue-faced partisans, corporations will become even bigger bastions of impropriety and white-collar pillage. Globalization is not a tide that will retreat. And in the name of "deregulation" - ostensibly to unfetter businesses from the restraints of caring for the environment - we will at the very least doom future generations to fight an even greater battle to save the oceans and the forests, to restore the precious balance of nature.
The "nyet-kulturnies" are celebrating and yet they have poured gasoline on their own funeral pyre. One doesn't build a better life by dismantling and destroying. We are all one humanity - to divide into competing nation-clans is folly - we should be unifying to improve the lot of every human being. It's nothing short of a sin to elevate oneself at the expense of another, but how can one counsel the sinner when they are feeling a great justification? And now we come to the crux of the matter. In order for our nation and our planet to survive we have to understand the point of view of those who oppose us, and common citizens need to unite against their true oppressors.
There is something very basic in the schism between Democrats and Republicans, left and right, neo-liberals vs neo-cons. Not long ago there was a university study probing the psychological makeup of the two major parties. The conclusion was startlingly direct and simple: Democratic-leaning folks came from families that co-operated, shared responsibilities, solved grievances with meetings and discussion, whereas Republican personalities were quite content with top-down management, essentially patriarchal families where the father was the boss, the judge, the commander. Of course there are exceptions, and differences in degree, but these findings point to something very basic in human nature.
Inside a political party there are strategists who use every modern tool they can to analyze trends and capitalize on the aspirations and fears of various identifiable sub-groups in the electorate. Because the "game" is to get as many electoral votes as you can to insure victory, resources are concentrated in areas that could swing in your direction while ignoring states where your party is historically well outnumbered. But those areas that are focused on will be subjected to every ploy and dirty trick - voter intimidation, sub rosa partisan tampering, late vote-counting according to district demographics, negative ads, false news articles, rumor, innuendo, wise-cracking ideological henchmen in the media. Of course both sides do this - and of course both sides know the core guidelines for managing opinion - which is dangerously close to brainwashing and can be charitably described as propaganda.
So if it's a given fact that we the people are being played like a violin by propagandists and psychologists, ultimately we are being duped. This whole business of getting fired up for your candidate plays upon some basic human needs. The marketing mavens refer to the "lizard brain" - primeval in motivation and response - subliminal cues are tools to control our psyche. We are sure we are thinking for ourselves, but are we? We are divided, and perhaps the co-operative family versus the strong central figure is a reality, a basic world view we are carrying into every situation. But we need to accept some basic differences between us, accept left-leaning socialism and knee-jerk conservatism as home base for different personality types.
The biblical concept of loving your enemy is the key to our survival as a species. Of course it can be as simple as I love you, you're made out of the same stuff, I respect you, but "you drive me crazy!" Our current plight is not trivial, however. Millions of Americans are distraught, their tears are flowing. There is sadness that the final glass ceiling has yet to be shattered, fear that one's parent will be deported, a sense that black lives don't matter. There is gloating and a sense of vindication from those who are despised for their bigotry, their para-military love for weaponry, their very life-style. And there are an even greater number of Americans who don't fit either of the descriptions just offered.
When we look at the numbers in a general sense, there are 300 million (plus) US citizens, roughly 240 million eligible to vote. With 132.5 million votes cast - 61.8 million for Hillary Clinton, 60.8 million for president-elect Donald Trump - we see that the Republican candidate has a little over 25% support from eligible voters, and if those too young to vote follow the pattern of 18-25 year old voters, it's a safe bet that the conservatives have the full support of less than a quarter of the country. And what percentage of Trump's support belongs to neo-Nazis, what percent to rabid racists, survivalists, misogynists? Not very much. While whites with reprehensible attitudes abound, they are statistically a minority, albeit a sadly dangerous minority if they are armed and feeling put upon!
Nevertheless, here's our source for hope. Citizens of goodwill far outnumber the ideological partisans, but we are divided by profit-seekers who use the basic facets of our humanity against us. Whether it's a "non-profit" playing on our sympathies, empathy and concern for those of unfortunate circumstance, or an organized campaign playing on insecurities and fears to achieve hidden agendas - both "left" and "right" are being manipulated. If we can back off from the dogma we've assimilated as the "information age" has expanded to the all-pervasive news feeds we experience today - slow down and start talking to our neighbors - we will find that we all want a lot of the same things. And places of fundamental difference usually boil down to someone trying to tell somebody else what to do.
We need to get some dialogue and a sense of compromise restored to the general populace - and then hold our legislators responsible to We the People - before the original design of the representative government is taken away from us. There are mean-spirited, misguided, traitorous men and women who would, as the saying goes "hurt all mankind just to save their own." This may sound crazy, but in a way Donald Trump is "just a patsy." The more malevolent forces are all too happy with the power he has given them by virtue of his election. At some point, probably sooner than later, some real takeaways are going to go down. Before long Republican voters will begin to feel the pain - perhaps not a pain of betrayal - but a realization that things just got worse instead of better. That's when we will begin to heal our rift and instead of family infighting we can pull together and fight the real enemy.
And who is the real enemy? In a sense, it's untrammeled, unbridled lust for profit, corporate capitalism. It's love of money in the choice of what news story to run - don't offend the advertiser. It's elections that hinge on applying a "war chest" to offices and ad campaigns. It's cynicism in the institutions that serve us - banks, utilities, law enforcement - protectors of property, not respecting the populace. It's the families at the top of the pyramid who are insulated money-grubbers with no sense of indebtedness to the society that elevates them.
And how do we fight these enemies? First with a sense of common decency, love for our neighbor, and a new found ability to put aside philosophical differences and restructure the richest nation on the planet. We should be able to eliminate inefficiency, cut graft, re-think things like pork-barrel politics, eliminate "earmarks" on legislation, cut defense spending, take excess profit out of health care, repeal "Citizens United," require corporate profit-sharing with employees, limit CEO salaries, do away with offshore tax shelters, and increase benefits for the citizenry. Let's control the mad quest for the buck, decrease the perks of power, instill a sense of fairness and respect for the least of those among us - for Christ's sake!
Alas, it's going to get worse before it gets better. But when the red hats get their comeuppance - we are all going to be suffering. And it will take real work, prayer and education to get the citizenry on the same page, facing the same way. Left and right, black and white and the rainbow in between - abandon the learned attitudes that separate us and get ready to establish common goals outside of the obfuscating pap our political parties have been feeding us. We should hope the unfathomable destructiveness of the "alt-right" becomes obvious before doing irreparable damage to our country and our allies, before inciting even more enmity toward the US, before irrevocably harming the planet.
Yes, it will get worse before it gets better - don't gloat and say "I told you so" - give no "chickens come home to roost" speeches. Instead, let's get smart, drop the old political posturing, learn from events, teach each other, and bond together because surely there will be a backlash to the insanity of the neo-cons. The good people of this Land of Liberty can only save it by pulling together and fighting the common power brought to bear against us - the corporate monoliths and all the institutions that conspire to separate us from our birthright as free human beings.
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