Politics November 11, 2016
Donald J. Trump dealt Hillary Clinton and the Democrats a humiliating blow Tuesday night; he also single-handedly took down the mainstream media (NYT, CNN, Washington Post), the intelligentsia (including many high level academics at America’s elite universities), a good bit of the Republican party, the Obamas, the fashion industry (including the likes of Anna Wintour) as well as Hollywood (Beyonce, Madonna, Jay-Z, Springsteen, the list goes on). Not to mention all the so-called experts, pundits, pollsters and the like who predicted a landslide victory for Hillary.
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It may seem like Hillary’s defeat marks the defeat of order, unity and perhaps even American pride. After all, riots protesting President-elect Donald Trump have taken place in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, D.C. and several other cities. The future of the stock market is, at worst, uncertain and, at best, contradictory. What will happen to America with Trump at the wheel?
Then it finally hit me. This is indeed not a nightmare. In fact, it is something to celebrate. Why? Because the one percenters and the intelligentsia are exactly that: a very, very small minority. Why should the one percent be able to so strongly influence presidential races based upon who will continue policies that have shrunk the middle class and may make the gulf between the wealthy and working class even wider?
Make no mistake, I personally am not supporting Donald Trump. That said, I am happy (yes, happy) to accept Trump as President of the United States. The general population, the millennials, the silent majority, the working class, poor and underprivileged are speaking loudly and clearly: They are tired of the professional politicians, they don’t trust them as far as they can throw them and they have had it.
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Trump is perceived to fit this bill and this explains how he unexpectedly won by 290 electoral votes to Clinton’s 228. His win wasn’t by mistake either. Although Clinton won over most minority voters, she didn’t receive enough votes to make up for her lack of white voter support. Trump also beat Clinton among men (by 53 percent to 41 percent), women (by 54 percent to 42 percent) and voters without a college degree (by 72 percent to 23 percent).
I’m not sure if Donald Trump will actually do what he claims (in fact, I hope not), but that is not the issue. Americans are finding Trump’s version of “calling it as he sees it” a breath of fresh air. They like the candor, they like the political incorrectness and they like the fact that he is not aggressively soliciting their campaign contributions.
I am ready to celebrate and embrace the results of this election. After all, this is what America was intended to be when the framers of our Constitution designed the world’s greatest democracy. The People speak at the polls and they should be able to overpower special interests and other wealthy and powerful influencers who have their own agendas.
The only corollary to this is that sometimes letting “the people’s will” prevail has been met with disastrous consequences, as my friend Diane Zeiger, always an astute observer of things political, points out. “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and the Arab Spring countries of Egypt, Yemen and Libya … on some level all were based upon the concept of free stuff for the people. Free stuff is only free until it isn’t anymore. Venezuela is a great example of this,” Ms. Zeiger reminds us.
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Thus, the will of the people must be balanced with the tenets of a true democracy. Consider the following list of what makes a democracy, from Law and Democracy. This is a terrific assessment and litmus test of how to judge whether a government truly practices the basic principles of democratic law:
You can insert the name of many of the world’s most important countries and by the time they reach number one, Citizen Participation, or number three, Political Tolerance, the buzzer goes off and they are already eliminated. How about China, where President Xi Jinping recently ordered the entire country’s media outlets to act as his personal PR machine … or else? Or Thailand, where according to BBC News, since May of 2014 the military has taken control of the democratically-elected government because of widespread corruption and suspended the constitution in order to restore order and enact political reforms.
Or Russia, where Vladimir Putin is trying to reconstruct the USSR and his political challengers have a convenient habit of disappearing or mysteriously dying. Or Turkey, where Recep Erdogan, who has been in power for over 13 years, seems to make new laws designed to keep him in power, even when elections and public opinion say otherwise. The list goes on … it seems like true democracy is becoming more of a scarce commodity than in recent decades.
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Thus, it really does make me proud to be an American when I see the groundswell of frustration with our clearly non-functional partisan political situation in Washington. People are angry and hurting, yet they also have this silver lining: This election proves that we truly live in a democracy and that the Electoral system, while not perfect, is not rigged. If it was, Hillary Clinton’s army of powerful elites would have ensured her decisive victory.
As the saying goes, it – this election’s results – is the will of the People. Americans’ choice to make Trump the 45th Presidents of the United States is a mandate that, to borrow from the classic film Network, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore.” Ironically, the reaction to Trump’s election may be summed up in the same words. However, one statement that can’t be made about America’s new President? That his election wasn’t democratic and that America can’t be great because of it.
