I feel compelled to write about the election today, but no fear – I intend to do so only briefly. So you know where I’m coming from:
- I dislike financial excess, including giving money and power to people and corporations who are already unimaginably rich and powerful.
- I do not think that the government should tell people what to do in their private lives.
- I do think it should provide help to the disadvantaged – I know it’s a subject of some debate who belongs to that group, but I think if you start from the idea of everyone being as equal as possible, you’ll probably be on the right track.
- Most of all, I think the world is changing very quickly in a number of ways, and it’s long past time that the people chosen to govern begin doing that instead of promoting themselves. (Incidentally, I think there are a lot of elected officials trying to do that, but it’s an uphill battle.)
Having established these things, I don’t think the president-elect is really a good fit for the job he’ll apparently be taking up again, mostly because it seems like he’s not that interested in governing. Throughout his entire multifarious career, he’s always been focused on self-promotion (and preservation), an instinct which has led him to cater to the worst impulses of his most devoted fans. He’s constantly reducing fiendishly complex issues to short, often inaccurate sound bites, and he tends to surround himself only with people who agree with him and fire those who do not. In short, I don’t want to get into the ideology; I mostly think he’s just bad at the job.
A lot of people have been/will be writing about this being the end of democracy, which is a bit hyperbolic – something like that isn’t decided by a single election. There are worrying signs, to be sure – primarily news outlets apparently being influenced by both parties to suppress opinion. American society would appear to be in decline, in some senses, and American politics is leading the downward trend – to quote one of the pithiest German sayings I know, “a fish stinks from the head down” (ew). But here’s the thing: things are almost never as bad as we fear, nor as good as we hope.