What’s the difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton? Well, to start with, Clinton is a patriot, while Trump is a traitor, even if he can’t be convicted of treason because Russia and the United States are not formally at war. But he does exactly what Benedict Arnold would have done in his shoes. For Arnold, the country was just a stepping stone for the greater glorification of Arnold, and when it ceased to be so, he sold it out. It is exactly the same for Trump. “But her emails!” cry the Republicans, almost to a man or woman.
Those emails were a speck in the eye compared to the veritable plank in the eye of Trump. The fact that our candidate was not perfect does not alter the reality that theirs was a liar, a thief, a cheater, and a coward. And he is an idiot. That 70 million Americans are willing to worship the ground Trump walks on speaks volumes about the sad state of democracy in this country. When a software algorithm produces a result as erroneous as that of the 2016 Presidential election, people lose their jobs, lawsuits are filed, and companies go bankrupt.
Even an algorithm that has proven tried and true for years must be called into question when it goes off the rails so spectacularly, particularly if we remember that this wasn’t the first time it did so. Sixteen years earlier it gave us a President who plunged us into twenty years of costly and ultimately pointless wars and whose judicial appointees brought corruption in American politics to new heights by their Citizens United decision and turned streets, churches, and schools into killing grounds by their Heller decision. The appointees of the Two Errors now lord themselves over the country as our very own Guardian Council, our Supreme Ayatollahs. And they represent only a tiny faction of the damage that’s been done to our country over the past twenty years by an algorithm that keeps making error after error.
Our Attorney General represents one of those errors, because he would be on the Supreme Court today if not for the antics of Mitch McConnell, a man who represents only the population of one state, and not one of the larger ones, but whom the algorithm gave power far out of proportion to that which his position merits. His party enjoys only minority support, but the algorithm amplifies that support by disproportionately empowering rural states over urban ones. It deprives several million American citizens of meaningful representation in the national legislature, discriminating against them arbitrarily because of their places of residence. Yet we accept this, even though one of those places is our own capital city! Imagine the hue and cry that would ensue in Massachusetts if Bostonians were to be told that they’ll have no say in making the laws that emanate from the State House on Beacon Hill.
One of these things is not like the others: Germany, Australia, Japan, Canada, Spain, Norway, Britain, Italy, the United States. Give up? It’s the one country on the list where the head of state is also head of government, where a government that has lost the support of its people cannot be brought down, where an unelected and untouchable cabal grants constitutional protection to political corruption, permits employers to impose their religious beliefs on their employees, and gives to extremists and the emotionally unbalanced the right to walk around armed on the streets! Germany has reasonable prohibitions on hate speech, unlike our country. Britain imposes limits on the cost and duration of political campaigns, unlike the United States. We suffer under a primitive constitution written for eighteenth century farmers, unlike every other western democracy in the world. Not even Japan, whose constitution was written by Americans, does as we do.
Yet people in this country treat their obsolete relic of a constitution as though it were divine law inscribed on stone tablets. In the beginning was We the People, who in order to form a more perfect union, blah blah blah. We the people? Surely not we, as none of us was alive at the time; say rather They, who were not in fact The People but merely a committee of slaveholders, merchant princes, and local politicians who did their work in secret. They were ordinary human beings with the usual human frailties and limitations; they could never foresee anything like the world we live in; yet people here treat their words as timeless wisdom, sacred scripture, the Gospel according to Saint Madison, not a jot or tittle of which can be altered. We must be the laughingstock of the world.
There is no baby in this bath water. It's time to pull the plug out of the drain and start afresh. Remember the Canadians? The people who missed out on our glorious revolution and still groan under the brutal tyranny of the Crown? They have a health care system that works. They don’t live in an armed camp. They don’t exclude millions of their citizens from representation in government. Their governments are responsible to their elected representatives, and take a common sense approach to resolving their differences. Give us a constitution at least as good as the one we gave Japan in 1947, and screw this eighteenth century crap.