I barely slept last night and I felt sick to my stomach all
day today. It truly hit me while walking
back from dinner tonight. I was struck
with a moment of near convulsion and panic as the awful fact cemented itself in
my brain.
Donald Trump is going to be president.
This realization still hits me at least once an hour.
Not only did he win, he won in a land slide. He won Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania,
Wisconsin, probably Michigan, and maybe even New Hampshire.
Democracy has spoken. The republican establishment is out. The democratic
establishment is out. Hillary Clinton is
out.
The establishment ignored tens of millions of people for decades. Donald Trump spoke to
them, and last night they had a voice. That
voice may be rooted in fear, ignorance, and tribalism or maybe it stems from feelings
of marginalization, economic insecurity, and a mistrust for the political establishment,
our institutions, and media. No matter
the cause, they were heard loudly.
Make no mistake about it, I believe Trump is a dangerously
unqualified sexist demagogue with fascist tendencies. He is a narcissist who cannot help
himself. He is what the KGB would call a
“useful idiot”, and has probably been groomed by the KGB for decades ever since
he first declared his presidential aspirations in the early 90's.
On January 20th, he will become the leader of the
free world.
He will get to appoint at least one supreme court nominee, likely
securing a conservative SCOTUS for decades.
He will repeal Obamacare, leaving 20 million uninsured.
He will likely back out of the Paris climate treaty because
he thinks global warming is a conspiracy invented by the Chinese to hurt the American
economy. The 2 degree warming goal is
now impossible to achieve.
With Mike Pence in his ear, he will likely overturn Roe v. Wade, and erase all progress on LGBTQ rights.
He will forcibly deport 2 million people and build a giant useless wall.
I felt pure outrage. Every
major policy point that I care about and have spent days, weeks, months, and
years thinking about, researching, debating in my mind and with others… it’s all
for nothing. A demagogue who suckered millions
into voting for him is going to undue all the progress that has been made and will
block what needs to be done to move forward as a society and as a species.
But you know what? Outrage
is a stupid emotion and I am bored of it.
My time is better spent trying to understand what happened. It’s time to look forward and solve problems.
We need to ask ourselves questions like, why did Trump
appeal to so many people? What similarities
are there to Brexit? Is this a global phenomenon
across western civilizations? Or is it
just the UK and the US? What can we
learn about our own society? Does globalism
leave low skilled workers behind? If so,
how can we avoid this? Will advanced
automation have similar effects?
We need to look inward and to expose our own faults. We need to reason from first principles. We need to understand the world as it is, not
as we want it to be. We need real
political and economic solutions to shape the future, that don’t marginalize
and ignore the desperate or quiet needs of others. If we don’t, we will fall back into our
identity politics, we will continue to become more divided, and the fabric and
shared values that hold our society together will continue to erode. I believe the way forward has to be paved with honesty, compassion, and a pursuit of truth.
No more pathos. No more identify politics. Only truth.
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