Trump’s America

There are a lot of people, probably mostly liberals, who are really quite shocked to find us where we are in America today. How did a terrible man like Trump become our President? This is not who we are as a country!

I think this sort of thinking requires a denial of the reality of United States history, both in the long view and in the more recent. Trump is, in many ways, the quintessential American President. Trump is America with the mask of politeness taken off and discarded.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about Trump that is so American is the racism. While we love to think of America as the "melting pot" of cultures, we're a nation pretty much founded on white supremacy. We were created by the genocide of indigenous Americans, and built by the forced labor of people stolen from Africa. The White House (so appropriately named) itself, the home of our nation's leader, as pointed out not too long ago by Michelle Obama, was built by slave labor. I myself am fond of reminding people that the founding fathers were made up of two groups: rich white men who loved Black slavery, and rich white men for whom Black slavery wasn't a deal breaker.

Trump’s sexism is also very American. We became an independent nation in 1776, but women weren't federally given the right to vote until 1920, nearly a century and a half later. (Oh, and that was only white women, of course.) And voting is just one right of many denied women; the right to own property, the right to have a bank account separate from their husbands, the right to not be discriminated against for employment or housing? All of those came later. Of course, one of the most important rights, the right to be able to control their own bodies and their reproductive choices? That one's still up in the air, as women are effectively given less bodily autonomy than a corpse.

What else defines Trump? Xenophobia? I would call it selective xenophobia, as ICE raids places known to have immigrants with black and brown skin, but makes no moves against communities of undocumented white immigrants. We build a wall on our southern border, but largely ignore undocumented immigrants coming across the northern border. Why? Well, those immigrants are white, aren't they? I may be wrong, but I believe the very first law in the United States limiting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, because we can't have non-Europeans in the U.S., can we? Of course before that, when the United States won a large portion of the southwest from Mexico in the mid-19th century, Mexicans in those territories were assured on paper that they would be American citizens, but apparently in practice, most of them were driven off the land, deprived of property and rights. America has never been keen on accepting non-Europeans, so Trump’s xenophobia is really nothing new.

Oh, and putting the rights and needs of rich people over those of the poor and middle class? That's just capitalism, which has also always been us. White capitalists have always ruled this country, and pretty much every President has been at least a millionaire. Bigotry against LGBTQ people? That's a western cultural norm. We used to (really still do) have laws against them existing, and barely have half a century of progress towards equality, but conservatives will constantly make up stories about how drag queens and transgender women are attacking children despite the fact that the observed reality is that the people children have to fear are religious leaders and their own parents.

This unfortunate conglomeration of lies and bigotry is what America is, has always been, and it's that reality that Trump represents. Can we change? I hope so, and so do many other Americans. But no politicians from either of the two major political parties seem to be willing to make those changes. I believe it's going to take a major shake up of the status quo that's going to require either some restrategizing in the Democratic party, or a rejection of the outdated Democratic party for a newer, more progressive set of politicians. Really, it may take a revolution of some sort, because the status quo needs to be completely rejected, and that's hard to accomplish.

If you, like me, don't want Trump’s America, then don't wait for voting in the midterms in 2026. Start strategizing now, and pushing for changes that can happen now. It's going to take a fight to reverse 250 years of history, but it's not impossible if we put in the work.

I am Brucker, and I approve of this message.

Voting is a funny thing. Don't get me wrong. In the midst of all I have to say here, I am certainly not trying to say that voting is a bad idea. The democratic process is vital to a free society, it's just that it can be confusing trying to figure out what the results mean.

Back in 1991, there was a funny thing that happened in the world of voting outside of politics: Rolling Stone magazine had readers vote for what album they thought was the best album of the year. The results: Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion. I don't personally remember the album, as I've never been much of a fan of the band, but it was a double album that debuted at the top two slots in the Billboard charts, something that nobody else has managed to do (not that a lot of double albums like that are released too often). The funny part? Rolling Stone also allowed readers to vote for worst album of the year, and in case you couldn't see it coming, yes, Use Your Illusion was voted worst as well. I recall the editors expressing some confusion about the matter, but it really made sense to me. It simply was an album (and a band, for that matter) that few people were neutral concerning.

An article in the current issue of Newsweek talks about similar irregularities in politics that never show up because we don't get to vote that way. The way voting works is generally taken for granted: You vote for your favorite, and the one with the most votes wins. Why do it any other way?

The article pointed out that as most people know, President Bush has actually been elected president with a smaller number of popular votes than the second-place candidate. (I don't recall which election it was, or if it was even both of them.) The odd thing that was pointed out in the article was that while Bush won the (so-called) popular vote in Florida in 2000, it's quite likely that he was the least-liked candidate by Floridans in general! If you assume (although it's not necessarily so) that most voters who voted for Gore would have rather had Nader than Bush, and of course those who voted for Nader would have rather had Gore than Bush, then more than 50% of the voters in Florida had Bush as their least favorite candidate! But voting doesn't always work to get rid of such a candidate, obviously.

The really thought-provoking part of the article was this:

Consider an election with 30 voters, who mentally rank the candidates this way:

Three voters prefer John McCain to Mike Huckabee to Mitt Romney to Rudy Giuliani, in that order.
Six prefer McCain to Romney to Huckabee to Giuliani.
Three prefer Giuliani to Huckabee to Romney to McCain.
Five prefer Giuliani to Romney to Huckabee to McCain.
Two prefer Huckabee to Giuliani to Romney to McCain.
Five prefer Huckabee to Romney to Giuliani to McCain.
Two prefer Romney to Giuliani to Huckabee to McCain.
Four prefer Romney to Huckabee to Giuliani to McCain.

In our system, McCain wins, with nine first-place votes, trailed by Giuliani (eight), Huckabee (seven) and Romney (six). Now let's say Huckabee drops out. Cross out his name where he came in first, and notice who is now the first choice of his former supporters: two go with Giuliani and five with Romney. That pushes Romney, formerly in last place, to the top, with 11 first-place votes. As the GOP field prunes itself, don't be surprised if the new leader comes from the back of the pack.

This is fascinating to me. Not just for the simple claim that it makes, but the other implications of this setup, which I suspect the author put in for people like me who can't help but analyze these sorts of things to death. You'd think intuitively that if a candidate drops out, the remaining candidates would stay in the same relative order, but not only does Romney move from last to first if Huckabee drops out, but McCain moves from first to last, reversing the order of the remaining three! In fact, losing any of the candidates causes the other three to switch order of preference, meaning that Romney wins any three-way race of which he's a part. Furthermore, any pairwise matching also reverses the original order, meaning that while Giuliani comes in second to McCain in the four-way race, the only race he can win out of all possible combos is a one-on-one match up with McCain.

The author suggests a form of voting known as "approval voting", a form of voting that can be confusing for some, but has certain benefits. It comes in many forms, but here's one I suggest for this scenario: each person votes for their favorite two candidates, and the one with the most votes wins. In that scenario, Romney gets 22, Huckabee 17, Giuliani 12 and McCain 9. Once again, the complete opposite result, but perhaps one that best reveals the will of the voters. Sometimes it's hard for some people to quite fathom voting for more than one candidate when only one wins in the end, but if that hurdle can be passed, what I really like about this is how much this gives more power to third-party and dark horse candidates. Think back to 1992, when Ross Perot was running for president. He actually got quite a few votes, but it's likely that many people who were considering him were afraid of "throwing away their vote". How many would have voted for him if they could have also voted for either Clinton or Bush at the same time? If we had approval voting, we probably wouldn't have had eight years of either Clinton or Dubya! (I think there's something in there to appeal to just about anyone.)

On top of all that, it seems to me that an alternative voting system gets people more involved in politics. Think about it: how many times have you thought to yourself or even heard someone else proclaim "I don't feel like my one vote makes a difference!" This is probably true, but then, what if you had more than one vote? No longer do you think of voting as choosing the lesser of two evils, but instead, it's a matter of examining the whole field of candidates and choosing the ones you like best. More options instead of singular decisions, more examinations of issues instead of popularity contests, more candidates declaring their own worth instead of slinging mud at their biggest rival(s)--what more could you want?

Our current system has its flaws, but I don't think it's completely broken. Rather than complaining about the system, people should be examining what parts of the system work and what parts don't. Why does the electoral college exist, and is that reason a good reason to keep it, or throw it away? How can we help people make informed decisions about government instead of passing laws like term limits and balanced-budget amendments that effectively put the government on auto-pilot? What can we do to make elections into a contest of individual candidates with personal convictions rather than cookie-cutter images of the same two party platforms over and over? There's always potential to improve and streamline the system, whatever it is. Can we find ways to make it happen though?

Red, white, and mostly just blue

I don't know if I've expressed it here in this blog before, but despite the stereotype of evangelical Christians, I am actually a registered Democrat. Not that my official party registration necessarily means much, since I didn't vote for any Democrats in 2000, and the next time I voted Democrat was in the California gubernatorial recall election (is that the proper way to say that?) in which I voted to keep Democratic Governor Davis and, should he be recalled, to put Democratic Lieutenant Governor Bustamante in his place. That was largely on principle, though, as I thought the whole recall process was a bunch of crap. No matter, I'm going too far with this tangent.

As a Democrat, and even someone who has felt a lot more affinity for my official party pretty much since we invaded Iraq, I've got to say once again despite expectations that I'm a little worried about the overwhelming results. On election night, I heard on television that this election was unprecedented. Never before (since the Republican Party formed in the mid-1800's I assume; I hate statistics in a vacuum) has there been a national election in which Republicans did not gain a single seat. While as usual, the majority of the offices up for a vote ended up going to incumbents, six seats in the Senate switched party, around 25 seats in the House switched, and seven state governorships switched, all from Republican to Democrat, not a single one the reverse. After what certainly seems to many like a long period of either a very incapable and/or corrupt Republican rule of this country, we're swinging back Democratic. Given my party affiliation and general disdain for the way the country's been run lately, you'd think this would be positive news.

I worry nonetheless. Part of it has to do with the situation. Because of how badly the GOP has been handling things of late, the strong shift to the left may be far less an indication of nationwide support for liberal policies than a nationwide rejection of conservative policies. The thing is, the two are not tantamount to the same thing, but we live in a country with a political system that has come to so often endorse the concept.

How many of you heard in 2004 that "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush!"? Bush and Nader didn't stand for much of any of the same things, if any at all, but the idea is that any vote that went to Nader as a third-party candidate (and yes, I know he was technically independent in 2004) was one vote less that Kerry would get. Perhaps more aptly, but showing up what's so offensive to this idea in my view, a friend of mine said that if your second choice was Kerry, then a vote for Nader was like a vote for Bush, but if your second choice was Bush, then your Nader vote was in that case a vote for Kerry!

You understand the idea, and that is that there is no possible way that a person could get elected in this country unless he or she is a member of one of the two main political parties, despite the fact that we actually have Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Natural Law and Reform candidates that have real plans on how to make this nation great, and they might even be good plans. In 1996, The Simpsons aired their annual Halloween episode with a political bent to it. (YouTube clip) In the story, Clinton and Dole get abducted by aliens who take their places so that no matter the outcome of the election, they will take over the Earth and enslave humanity. On Election Day, Homer finally manages to reveal this plot to his fellow citizens, unmasking the two aliens:

Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're nothing but hideous space reptiles!
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens, but what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system. You have to vote for one of us.
Man in the crowd: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate!
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away!

Sure enough, the next day Kang is declared the winner. The disturbing thing about this episode is that every time I see it again in reruns, I think to myself that while I find it unlikely that aliens with superior technology would try to infiltrate our government in such a manner, I can totally believe Americans would vote for an unsavory candidate because they thought they had no choice. Let the Democrats run Stalin for President, and the Republicans run Hitler, and Perot and Nader would still get less than 10% of the vote it seems.

Then again, maybe there is hope. After all, defying everyone's expectations including my own, after Joseph Lieberman refused to drop out of the race after losing the Democratic primary, he managed to win Connecticut as an independent. Also, the Vermont Senate seat up for a vote was kept by independent candidate Bernie Sanders who, I have been told, is pretty much a socialist. (That was, however with no Democrat opposing in that race.) But third party candidates, while an interesting subject, are not the only subject that concerns me here.

Back in 1994, there was a similar upheaval in which the Republicans managed to gain control of both houses of Congress. At that time, some amazing things happened. Thinking that their substantial gains in Congress indicated widespread approval of their conservative issues, they proceeded to go wild and push through legislation at an impressive pace. There seemed to be no stopping them. And then before long, Congress went back to the Democrats. Why? I think political parties these days are often getting high on their own sense of power. We're not a nation of people represented by politicians anymore so much as a nation of political parties. How many people vote for candidates anymore rather than voting for parties? If we see this election as a victory for the Democratic Party rather than as a victory for several politicians many of whom happen to be Democrats, then the country comes to be run not by 500-odd human representatives of their constituencies, but by two grotesque, inhuman creatures battling over who gets to feast on the carcass of representative democracy.

Will the Democrats take this opportunity to make real changes and make this country better, or will they see it as a chance to take their power and gloatingly use it to their own selfish ends? Note that I'm not saying this is characteristic of the Democratic Party, but characteristic of politicians in general. I think to a great extent this happened to the 1994 Republican Congress and to the Bush administration, despite lack of a strong victory in the latter case. As Jon Stewart asked DNC chair Howard Dean the day after the election, "How long...before power corrupts you absolutely?" Dean shrugged it off as a joke, but I tend to think it's a question every politician should ask themself and their party.

Maybe nothing in particular will come of this election. Maybe only real change will occur once a new Presidential administration is in place, whatever political party it may be. I don't know. Sometimes I weep for this country. I don't believe that there is a political party out there that has a better chance than any other to make this nation great. All they need is to stand up for ideals rather than the quest for money and influence. What kind of a Congress will the 110th be? As every year, I look to my government with hope for the best, but little expectation for great things.