This all highlights two issues. One is the adversarial nature of Red V Blue, politics as a team sport. This campaign was dominated by "you're shit" "No. YOU'RE shit". Policy. Plan. Philosophy. Ideology. None of it came into the equation. The whole thing was a mud slinging exercise, and the electorate bought into that. Social media was dominated by two herds of braying donkeys heehawing at each other. No discussion, no debate. He's a child rapist and shes a crook and both should be locked up.
Some merit to both suggestions but hardly helpful in terms of national politics and governance.
Your two major Parties, as the two major Parties in most democratc nations have to some extent, have stopped talking about what is best for the country and instead talk about "stopping" each other. You're still trying to navigate through a crippling economic situation not seen since the thirties, but for eight years your President has been actively blocked at every turn by an adversarial opposition Government, not out of some ideological conviction but because it's the best way to "hurt" the other team. Corporation and vested interest dominate all. Obama-care which should have see vital medical care brought to all, has been destroyed by spiralling costs brought about by insurance companies unwilling to relinquish their license to print money. But instead of resolving that situation, like all the other situations you face, your governing Parties in Senate and congress howl at each other like stray dogs.
How is that good for your country or people? Immediate talk from the Parties as counting was proceeding was how they could control Senate and Congress to stop whomever was elected President from taking any actions or making any changes. So another 4 wasted years of stagnation
Does that sound like Government of, by and for the people to you? To me it sounds like the thinking of a second division football team in a cup game against a Champions League winner. Park the bus and stop them from scoring.
But while this failure of the public and abuse of the system is entirely the fault of two major Parties more concerned with power than good governance [and let's face it, your independent candidates were fucking idiots unfit to govern their own kitchens], it is also, in this modern era, the fault of an electorate too lazy and uneducated to take command of their governing bodies and make them properly serve the will of the people. You all accept the premise of the argument and become so vested in that argument, that fight etween Red and Blue, that you forget that the real objective is not to win power, but to serve the Nation and the People and to sort out the problems you all face. You all look for Messianic leaders to wave a wand and resolve everything, never more clearly illustrated than when Obama was first elected, when what is really needed is collective thinking, co-operation and effort. Your two major Parties are incapable of this, but despite the fact that all power does, ultimately, rest with the People, you do't force them to change or burn them down and rebuild them but instead accept their premise while moaning abut their failings. And nothing changes.
You complain here about a broke system and you are correct. All over America last night hoards of people spontaneously took to the streets to protest the election result. That was organised nationwide in a matter of hours. Yet in two years none of thse passionately socially concerned citizens once thought to mount a nationwide campaign to change that broken system. Bernie Sanders was actively blocked by the Democrat Party so that Clinton, a universaly unpopular figure, could stand. But where was the Party membership who voted in the primaries? If they'd all followed their guts and selected Sanders what could the DNC have done? Nothing. So how is it that Clinton took the primaries? Think it can't happen? How did Trump take his primaries against the clear wishes of the GOP?
And consider this. The election just run is said to have been a choice of the least worst. PJ O'Rourke spoke of an electorate holding its nose and voting for those they could just about stomach, and Michael Moore waxed lyrical on the dangers of using the ballot as a tool of anger and retribution against a system that has failed the elctorate it is supposed to serve.
Yet 50%+ of the electorate did not bother to vote, and 100,000+ people entered the name of a dead gorilla onto their ballot papers as a protest.
So. just suppposing those 50% instead mobilised and entered the name of the dead Gorilla. Or Donald Duck instead of Donald Trump. Either. Pick one and stick with that. Far more easily organised through social media than you might think looking at the mass protests nationwide, and requiring little effort on anyone's part, certainly less than making a banner and taking to the street. The single biggest name on the ticket come result time would have been a dead gorilla or a cartoon duck.
So what would the GOP and DNC, two governing organisations clearly n longer fit for purpose, have one then? The election would become a farce and the only resolution would have been to rehold it. Probably with new candidates since the standing candidates would then have no credibility at all having just been beaten soundly by a dead gorilla or a cartoon duck.
Revoluion through the ballot box as an expression of the will of the people, which is the very essence of democracy. That the people, not Parties or organisations or corporations, govern. That the country belongs to them, not to boardrooms.
Instead, your country is regarded as a democratic laughing stock the world over, your new President is a corprate swindler and reality TV personality loathed internationally by all except your two adversaries, Russia and China, who did not, at any point, deliver any substantive policy or explanation as to how what grandiose plans he did share would be delivered.
Half your country are behaving like mesmerised cult followers, muttering "Trump-TrainTrump-Train" like meth soaked crack addicts, and the rest are weeping in fear of what the next 4 years will bring. But no one, no one, at any point has thought to dismiss the premise set out by the two major Parties and reject what they are proposing to force something better. Instead you take your positions, Red V Blue, and heehaw like donkeys, or just stay at home in bed with the covers pulled over your heads.
We get the government we deserve.
Do you really believe the people of the USA deserve Donald J Trump?
BOC