Isn't this a wonderful political mess?
It appears that Donald Trump has captured the Republican nomination for the Presidency, and that is causing establishment Republican politicians to cramp up. The problem is that somebody, presumably establishment Republicans, rounded up sixteen other candidates to run against Trump, and they failed miserably.
Now the Donald is embarrassing them. His slogan is, "Make America Great Again", but what he talks about is making America white again: build a wall between us and Mexico, scorn the Chinese, quit paying our debts by declaring federal bankruptcy and then reorganizing under Chapter IX, banning all Muslims from entering the country, round up and ship out twelve million Mexicans who live in the US, muscle up our military until it scares everybody, and when he is elected President, move the Executive offices to Trump Towers. Yes, and that women with small breasts are odd, or invisible.
"Awful! Shameful! Unthinkable!", the old-time members of the Republican Party cry. "He is a novice. He isn't Republican. He is . . . he is winning."
Instead, they lament that Trump should cozy up to the Republican members of Congress and the stalwarts like Reince Priebus, and be nice. As if the Republican members of Congress have done anything except to vow to do nothing ever since Barack Obama was elected: they have kept their word.
On the Democratic side of the swamp, Bernie Sanders won't go away. In some ways, Sanders and Trump are so far apart that mere, mortal speech cannot hold both of them in one coherent sentence, except that both of them are saying that politics as practiced nearly everywhere is misguided.
Sanders is not calling for America to be white, again. He says that the problem is that all the money is being concentrated in the hands of very few people, and that most people are scared and angry. We have been too eager to fight wars, too neglectful of our highways and bridges and water lines, too anxious to please coal and oil companies, too blind to see how hopelessly in debt students have to go to get an education, and criminally ignorant about how many people do not have adequate health care. While the richest country in the world we, almost alone, refuse to provide health care for all of our people.
Establishment Democrats say that Sanders is not really a Democrat. Sanders calls himself a Democratic Socialist, and that sounds dangerously like wanting to do the kind of things Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to do. Maybe you don't remember FDR: he was elected four times in a row.
The other Democratic candidate is Hillary Clinton, and her credentials are solid: she is an establishment Democratic. She has impeccable establishment credentials, and she is competent, a bit too savage, militarily, and knowledgeable. If it were not embarrassingly true that we have never elected a woman to the Presidency, she would be purely establishment.
It would be astonishing if either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders were elected, so we will probably have to console ourselves that we finally have a woman president, and that will be no small consolation, but it is not the largest issue in this election. The largest issue in this election is that we have not yet figured out that politics as usual should not go on forever. Trump represents the fear of the change that we need. Sanders represents an economic analysis of the change that we need. Clinton represents the fact that we are still thinking about it the way we used to think about it.
The real problem is that the electorate, the public that elects people to office, has not gotten to the place where they are willing to do what needs to be done. The public keeps electing post-World War II people to office. After all, Russia and China are still there, worrying us. Our real problem is that the world has changed since World War II.
The Islamic world has come awake, fueled by oil, and suddenly the issues aren't Catholic and Protestant and Christian, anymore: they are Sunni and Shia and Islamic. It is no longer, "Where is the oil?", but that using coal and oil--which fueled the industrial revolution--are heating the planet to the cooking point. Jobs does not mean steel factories and automobile plants, but information technologies. England is no longer an island fortress, and the oceans no longer isolate us from the rest of the world. Suddenly there is no longer the illusion of one, true, holy and catholic faith, but a world of beliefs and values. Without asking permission, women have demonstrated human equality. We are a large nation, but China is three times as large, and India will soon be larger, still.
The real problem we face is that everything is changing, and we are oblivious even to the changes we are in, let alone what it is we ought to be thinking about.
We are not going down the tubes. We will survive, and do well. But if we thought about the fact that we need to get our act together and understand the world as it is becoming, we could do wonderfully well. We aren't going to get there doing what we have been doing: nothing.
Doing something means doing it together, deliberately. Doing something together is what it means to govern ourselves. Wal Mart or Wall Street will not make decisions for all of us, together. They will work to their own advantage. The public good has to be decided and managed by the public, by the people the public elects. Most of the people we have already elected should be put out to pasture, nicely and kindly. Then we should tackle the big projects.
It really isn't a Democratic and a Republican thing: it is a cultural and economic revolution. It is worldwide, this time. We need to understand it, and embrace it.
Maybe the next time we can have a more coherent election, when we are tired of arguing whether we prefer to be angry and white, or more of the same.
It appears that Donald Trump has captured the Republican nomination for the Presidency, and that is causing establishment Republican politicians to cramp up. The problem is that somebody, presumably establishment Republicans, rounded up sixteen other candidates to run against Trump, and they failed miserably.
Now the Donald is embarrassing them. His slogan is, "Make America Great Again", but what he talks about is making America white again: build a wall between us and Mexico, scorn the Chinese, quit paying our debts by declaring federal bankruptcy and then reorganizing under Chapter IX, banning all Muslims from entering the country, round up and ship out twelve million Mexicans who live in the US, muscle up our military until it scares everybody, and when he is elected President, move the Executive offices to Trump Towers. Yes, and that women with small breasts are odd, or invisible.
"Awful! Shameful! Unthinkable!", the old-time members of the Republican Party cry. "He is a novice. He isn't Republican. He is . . . he is winning."
Instead, they lament that Trump should cozy up to the Republican members of Congress and the stalwarts like Reince Priebus, and be nice. As if the Republican members of Congress have done anything except to vow to do nothing ever since Barack Obama was elected: they have kept their word.
On the Democratic side of the swamp, Bernie Sanders won't go away. In some ways, Sanders and Trump are so far apart that mere, mortal speech cannot hold both of them in one coherent sentence, except that both of them are saying that politics as practiced nearly everywhere is misguided.
Sanders is not calling for America to be white, again. He says that the problem is that all the money is being concentrated in the hands of very few people, and that most people are scared and angry. We have been too eager to fight wars, too neglectful of our highways and bridges and water lines, too anxious to please coal and oil companies, too blind to see how hopelessly in debt students have to go to get an education, and criminally ignorant about how many people do not have adequate health care. While the richest country in the world we, almost alone, refuse to provide health care for all of our people.
Establishment Democrats say that Sanders is not really a Democrat. Sanders calls himself a Democratic Socialist, and that sounds dangerously like wanting to do the kind of things Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to do. Maybe you don't remember FDR: he was elected four times in a row.
The other Democratic candidate is Hillary Clinton, and her credentials are solid: she is an establishment Democratic. She has impeccable establishment credentials, and she is competent, a bit too savage, militarily, and knowledgeable. If it were not embarrassingly true that we have never elected a woman to the Presidency, she would be purely establishment.
It would be astonishing if either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders were elected, so we will probably have to console ourselves that we finally have a woman president, and that will be no small consolation, but it is not the largest issue in this election. The largest issue in this election is that we have not yet figured out that politics as usual should not go on forever. Trump represents the fear of the change that we need. Sanders represents an economic analysis of the change that we need. Clinton represents the fact that we are still thinking about it the way we used to think about it.
The real problem is that the electorate, the public that elects people to office, has not gotten to the place where they are willing to do what needs to be done. The public keeps electing post-World War II people to office. After all, Russia and China are still there, worrying us. Our real problem is that the world has changed since World War II.
The Islamic world has come awake, fueled by oil, and suddenly the issues aren't Catholic and Protestant and Christian, anymore: they are Sunni and Shia and Islamic. It is no longer, "Where is the oil?", but that using coal and oil--which fueled the industrial revolution--are heating the planet to the cooking point. Jobs does not mean steel factories and automobile plants, but information technologies. England is no longer an island fortress, and the oceans no longer isolate us from the rest of the world. Suddenly there is no longer the illusion of one, true, holy and catholic faith, but a world of beliefs and values. Without asking permission, women have demonstrated human equality. We are a large nation, but China is three times as large, and India will soon be larger, still.
The real problem we face is that everything is changing, and we are oblivious even to the changes we are in, let alone what it is we ought to be thinking about.
We are not going down the tubes. We will survive, and do well. But if we thought about the fact that we need to get our act together and understand the world as it is becoming, we could do wonderfully well. We aren't going to get there doing what we have been doing: nothing.
Doing something means doing it together, deliberately. Doing something together is what it means to govern ourselves. Wal Mart or Wall Street will not make decisions for all of us, together. They will work to their own advantage. The public good has to be decided and managed by the public, by the people the public elects. Most of the people we have already elected should be put out to pasture, nicely and kindly. Then we should tackle the big projects.
It really isn't a Democratic and a Republican thing: it is a cultural and economic revolution. It is worldwide, this time. We need to understand it, and embrace it.
Maybe the next time we can have a more coherent election, when we are tired of arguing whether we prefer to be angry and white, or more of the same.
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