The In-credible Donald Trump
Anyone’s news feed for the past 48 hours has been a stream of shock, despair, anger and click-bait with a side of memes. Quite frankly it is exhausting. There is something disgusting about the Liberal Elite, the Academic Elite and elitists talking down to the American public like a naughty, misbehaving child and scolding them. This almost proves that we aren’t giving our problems the time and thought they deserve, we isolate singular themes such as fear and we monopolize on them, allowing them to foreshadow everything else. No doubt, Donald Trump captured the hearts and minds of racist America, sexist America and bigoted America, but there is something deeper here. There is also poor America and disenfranchised America, tired of being talked down to by people that purport to know better. Poor America – where 15% of the country live in poverty. According to voters demographics at most there was a 4% difference in voting demographics ‘by earning’ between the two parties, clearly neither candidate captured any unified economic demographic, and the middle class that was once Democratic is abandoning their shackles to gamble for, whether falsely promised or not, greener pastures.
This year was one of the lowest voter turn outs, establishing how disenfranchised America is. I am tired of seeing demographic maps about ‘if only millennials voted’, if only millennials voted, Hillary would not have been the nominee to begin with, Bernie Sanders was the millennial champion. It was Bernie’s time; he should have been the liberal movement’s champion for the rage against the machine, but the Democratic Party cast him aside as childish and unrealistic. But hindsight is 20-20, and even I, who was a Hillary supporter, am starting to question the foundations of governance and rule. This election was about the establishment failing to serve their duties as part of the Social Contract that enshrines the relationship between a government and their constituents. There is an America that has been sidelined, left out and ignored.
Taking Forbes article on ‘The Improbable Demographics Behind Donald Trump’s Shocking Presidential Victory’:
“Trump owes his election to … ‘the leftover people’. These may be “deplorables” to the pundits but their grievances are real – their incomes and their lifespans have been decreasing” … “the Democrats have gone ‘from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard’”… “Many of these voters were once Democrats, and feel they have been betrayed. And they include a large swath of the middle class.”
Yesterday American Elitism eroded away the final screw holding together the American establishment, and Trump voters ripped the carpet right from under the status quo. In a twisted way it was a beautiful moment for democracy. No matter how strong your institutions are, no matter how established your establishment is – if they fail to uphold the Social Contract, democracy can rip the rug right from under it. When we, as Liberals, sit on our couch and laugh at late night television hosts as they accuse Trump voters of being the uneducated underbelly of America - part of a populous movement to elect an idiot, I can kind of understand why Middle America is so mad. It reminds me of Aristotle when he purported that elites engage in conflict with other citizens because of their desire for an unequal share of honor, which leads them to treat the many with condescension and arrogance.
Remnants of Plato’s Republic come to mind where he argues feverishly that the elites should rule as ‘Philosopher Kings’, for years in Democracy we have watched as our Harvard’s, our Oxford’s, the elites run our governments. This is Plato’s republic, his republic has transcended time. Plato argued that specific education available to few, will allow those few to become philosophers, but this does not create a ruling class that is representative of the ruled. A government cannot be an expert of the people; it must be a collection of the people.
The elite are so apparent in American’s politics with dynastic politics, the same institutions and the toing and froing of Democrats vs. Republicans. Unfortunately today, this is like most modern political arenas where elitist to and fro between parties that are cyclical and repetitive in nature. Trump was the in-credible Republican Candidate, the spanner thrown into the working gears of a political machine - outside of the system, unrefined, brash, bullish – fracturing the Republican Party and throwing the Democrats into a dizzy spell.
As a foreign Liberal Elitist, I did not see this coming, and not a single one of us could see this coming – my ignorance, our ignorance was our weakness. We thought like all elections, this was about policy, and leadership – Hillary, the obvious choice. But it wasn’t. Irrespective of what this means for women, or race or unity, we need to take a long hard look at ourselves, and our world view, and what this means, and who we are forgetting. We willingly ignored down and out America. Not only in America, but around the world, we need to look beyond the racist and sexist outbursts and sentiments that come from dark and misplaced frustration. These sentiments distract us and fuel our 140 character outbursts and the cycle continues. Maybe we need to consider where this begins and where we need to support the disenfranchised to rebuild a fairer political future. But it is to our own discredit that we put the Trump voting demographic in the crazy basket. We ignored the noise. It is to our own discredit that we didn’t look beyond the noise.
This post was originally published here. The authour granted The PACT Online permission to re-publish.
Photo Credit: Slate
