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I don't have time to sit around and be everyone's therapist on social media when it comes to the U.S. election results. So many of the people I follow are smart, intelligent, progressive, successful and brilliant. But all that success has allowed the "online and outraged" to put blinders on to what ails our world.
Allow me to Monday Morning Quarterback this for you and tell you why you should have seen this coming:
Ask yourself: Why on earth would Donald Trump get enough momentum to win the Republican nomination? What sort of person latches on to that and backs it? When your choices are traditional politicians like Rubio, (another) Bush, and Cruz; politicians who live life with a full filter between their brain and their mouth. A well known broadcast secret is if you want to make it boring, bring a politician on. Everyone knows that the words are calculated and they are skirting around the issues.
There is no filter with Donald Trump and people are fine with that. I don't know who Van Jones is because I never watch CNN unless Don Lemon is cruising New York in his Blizzardmobile, but I kept this gem:
Americans have never been very worldly people. Rarely do they look beyond their borders to see what's coming. The country that was founded by dissatisfied British ex-pats looking for a better life. Their descendants should have seen the Brexit vote in June as a sign of things to come. In case you missed Brexit, it featured British citizens voting to leave the European Union in search of a better life. The Brits believing there country was tangled in a trade agreement benefiting corporations and London more than the rural and working class. Sound familiar?
That's what happened last night. Middle America and the working class have been fucked over by every corporation who funnelled money to Washington, to Hillary's campaign, and every Congressman (or woman) who got elected last night. Trump voters blame them, and the NAFTA agreement, and Mexico and Canada, and Wall Street. People who own manufacturing companies let the dot coms do all their selling, China to do all their manufacturing, and sent the worker home with no future. Well last night those people go their revenge and they upset the apple cart. By the way, Michael Moore saw this coming for many of the reasons I point out.
Democrats just couldn't get out of the way of themselves. They were prepared to annoit Hillary sometime after Obama won the 2012 Election. Money was collected and stockpiled; campaigning calculated with the "best" people in place. At no time was a vision of the future provided for the working family that has been left behind. Bernie Sanders took up that cause, accepted no corporate donations and he had Trump-like momentum. He beat Hillary in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Alaska, Utah, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Montana, Minnesota, Kansas, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, and Wyoming. All places that went strongly Trump.
Rather than seize Bernie's momentum and put him on the ticket, e-mails (again) suggested that the Democratic Party railroaded his campaign in the lead up to the DNC. Think about that: A political party used corporate donations to screw their own people over; people who were saying we want Bernie and his ideals to be apart of what will shape America's future. And Hillary's people drowned it out with corruption and told them, "You have to vote for me (and 4 years of this) or you get Donald Trump."
Those people did the math and felt a loose cannon trumps corruption.
Electing a woman for the sake of electing a woman is not a reason to vote for that person. People vote for the best candidate that has the best chance of providing the opportunity of changing their life. Put yourself in the family who has been restructured, job shared, outsourced, dot commed, and ignored; and there's not a lot of reason to vote for Hillary. Her biggest baggage is not that she's a woman; it's that she's a lifelong politician. A position that just got an Uber-like job restructuring.
Trump is a successful business man who understands that the way to win is to solve a problem for people. And he just spent the last year convincing people he could do that. For the last 12 months, BOTH parties have been screaming to be heard above the noise of corporate donations and a broken political system that fails to get bills passed the right people elected. No one was listening.
But are you listening now or just banging away at the keyboard saying that white men are to blame? If that's the case then why did women who "could not/did not" attend college vote 62 to 38 percent in favour of Trump? Attending college is expensive and there are a lot of people who will never get a chance. Want smarter voters? Make college education affordable. (Bernie's free education plan doesn't seem so nuts now, does it?)
Are you still hung up on all the things Donald Trump does and who he is? That's what the Democrats did and look where it got them. My social media feeds are a mess and clouding issues that need to be shared and talked about. Sadly, this is America's reality for the next 4 years. Expect it to get worse. America probably won't see real change until the economy tanks like it was 1929. By the way, the previous year was last time the Republicans won the presidency, house and Senate. Stand by.
In the meantime, Republicans can start their "Dump Trump" campaign and recruit Condolezza Rice for President in 2020. Again, another case of the best candidate sitting on the sidelines. Democrats, you need to get immediate therapy. Money made you arrogant and enabled a belief that it could fund denial in a candidate people repeatedly said they didn't want.
Feedback from my Grade 12 English Teacher, Ron Patterson:
"The arrogance of politicians and their reluctance to change are directly connected to the market and shareholder capitalism. The very same people who want to see the USA change also want to see their mutual funds grow, and that only happens with global trade, big pharma getting bigger, and more wars. Look at the stocks that went up after this election. And the people who profit are the lobbyists, who grease the hands of the politicians, who pretend to cater to their constituents, who want to see their mutual funds increase, but who also want immigration slowed, full-time employment, no unions, and a return to the fictional American Dream days of Mayberry. And even though the roots of America are expats from Britain, the real makeup of Americans is a cross-section of cultures melted into a pot that wants freedom from government until the next disaster. Lastly, please cut our taxes but give us a sound infrastructure. The contradictions abound, but the ultimate one is to elect the guy they chose to make all this happen in a system that controls that guy, who incidentally profited from the very system he has said is broken."