There is a misguided reaction to trump’s election — a reaction of his election being the problem.
It’s not.
The problems are bigger and longer term.
Point to something bad about trump, and I’ll show you how the same problem existed without trump, and likely has had historical precedence already.
This matters because if too much energy is spent on trump, it’ll hurt the fight against the real issues.
Here are some actual, real, problems:
- Plutocracy/corporatocracy
You can take the battle between the haves and the majority to the war between Adams and Jefferson, but it didn’t get more serious — national bank battles notwithstanding — until the industrial revolution. At which point you immediately had robber barons and the gilded age and the corporations fight for and win the legal doctrine that “Corporations are persons” for purposes of various constitutional rights — most notably, paving the way for ‘money is speech’.
Does this cartoon look familiar — talking about the politicians who have industries as their bosses?
That’s from 1889 — when we couldn't even vote for our Senators, when that meant more, instead of today when we get to vote for the Senators the billionare class selects and funds.
Ever since, there has been the battle between wealth and the public interest. But it got especially worse when wealth got political organized beginning with the Nixon administration, and denying us progressive government ever since. That did not start with trump. The very existence of the modern Republican Party — and how many of the Democrats are tainted — is an offense to democracy.
(This point lets me quote again the old saying, “Politicians have to LOOK good to voters, and DO good for donors).
The fact one of our two major parties is owned by the corporatocracy, that they have fought for wealth over the public for decades, that they now have 34 of 50 states and in those states a third of the bills they pass are handed to them to pass by ALEC, the organization that exists to write the laws on behalf of corporations against the public, the fact that Bush/Cheney WERE — with 150 top regulators all appointed who were industry executives and lobbyists — or would have been with McCain/Palin or Romney/Ryan — just as corrupt as trump says, this isn’t a trump issue.
- Any of the Republican candidates would have been similarly bad on the corruption issue.
Some were more experienced than trump and had a better ‘temperament’, but they were all walking disasters for the public with variations on the details, but all supporting the same corruption.
- The billions spent to indoctrinate much of America are paying off for the right.
Since we don’t tend to watch Fox News and listen to right-wing talk radio, we didn’t seem to notice much how much of America is smothered by those propaganda outlets and similar web sites.
This is an attack on the foundation of democracy: an informed and rational electorate.
The people whose interests lie in taking the power away from the people have a few ways to do it.
One is to not have democracy. Another is to have democracy that is secretly corrupt, unbeknownst to the people. Not very practical.
But what does work for them is, indoctrinate enough of the people to win elections.
Hopefully it’s not news about the propaganda machine — the propaganda factories called think tanks that create the messaging for the wrong policies, and the media system that distributes them.
But now, that system has gone from being a large minority and sometimes Congressional winner to a more clear threat with the loss of the 2016 election.
trump did not start that. He’s an almost irrelevant effect of the problem, as any of the Republicans might plausibly have won the way he did, now that the voting situation is clearer.
trump as the most disliked candidate in history winning says the problem is not just him.
You can find our founding fathers, in a time when the country was 90% agrarian and corporations weren’t one tenth of 1% as powerful as they are today, already talking about the threat coming that the corporations would like to challenge the government for power. That power has increased to the point that the politics just have to largely follow the corporations. The people need to do more and more to try to beat ever stronger corporate opposition.
Times have changed. Millions organized for the environment in the late 1960’s, and it was the last time the public got its way, really.
Since then, you can have millions organize against the Iraq War, millions organize against the gun epidemic, and other issues, and it’s not changing the policy.
A study has found that now, the non-donating public — that’s over 98% of the people — have zero influence on Congressional votes.
That precedes trump. He did not cause it.
What’s needed hasn’t changed, but the opposition has strengthened.
We need an informed public — overcoming Fox and talk radio and others. We need a rational public — the same challenge.
We need an organized public, for the public interest — which starts with re-organizing the public around the issues of wealth, rather than divided by right-wing created divisions on the lines of abortion, guns, race, the ‘culture wars’, fear of foreigners, and any other issue they can use to manipulate people into supporting ‘their side’.
The great republican depression allowed that and we got FDR and Democratic super-majorities. The Great Recession was a lost opportunity, when we got a Democrat, but a moderate.
Those chances don’t come along often. We had one this year with Bernie, and did not pick it.
But that's our challenge — the institutional, massive, powerful, wealthy interests that find themselves against the public issue again and again.
On the climate, on affordable education, on public healthcare, on the safety net, on the middle class incomes, on inequality, on the arms industry, on the pharmaceutical industry, and much more.
And those are the issues with or without whatsisname president-runnerup.
trump is not the problem. The move toward corporatocracy is.
And even issues that are important such as racism, in terms of politics, are largely issues simply used to divide the public and get the corporate interests power.
Winning the battle against wealth is important to be able to win on issues like racism.
trump is an irrelevancy, really — a petty narcissist who won the lottery.
US #1 arms seller in the world, spending twice as much for worse healthcare, record inequality, globalization, fossil fuel threats, etc., all big problems unrelated to trump.
The problems we want to beat are the power of the interests that are against the people and their ever-more effective propaganda machine.
One more quote, Louis Brandeis from a century ago — “You can have democracy, or you can have vast sums concentrated in the hands of a few, but you cannot have both.”
That was an issue before trump. We’re seeing how correct he was.
We have hundreds of important issues for society. They have one issue: their power and money.
We’re the ‘water protectors’ for democracy, and the threats to it include the billions of dollars that are used to buy elections, the indoctrination of the public, and voter suppression/Gerrymandering.
We’re at a point those battles against democracy will solidify towards permanent defeat of democracy, or we can defeat them.
Not soon, unfortunately. Things are going to get worse. But we need to be organizing, planning our battle for media to reach more of the country, and so on for coming elections.
And, let’s not overreact to the trolling tweets of the president-runnerup. That’s why he sends them.
Let’s win back the voters who were lost this election. We can win many of them.