A Helpful Suggestion

Thanksgiving traditionally is a time for Americans of all beliefs to display gratitude and appreciation  for this wonderful country and its bounty.  For many religious people it is an occasion for expressing prayerful thanks for what they see as the divine blessings which have been bestowed on this nation.  It has not been associated with politics. Yet some Democrats  suggested that this Thanksgiving people should be offering thanks to Barack Obama – not merely  for him, but to him.  The idea of families gathering around the table for their feast, solemnly bowing heads, clasping hands, and offering a blessing  to a politician may seem a little excessive to some, but one  should remember the special place Obama holds in so many hearts.

The man has done so many wrong and harmful things that those who opposed him may feel gleeful he will soon be gone and might even experience some schadenfreude over the mournful distress of his worshipful followers as the end of his administration nears.   However others believe they  should rise above that, be sensitive to the leftists’ feelings, and try to be helpful.  In that line one can try to think of a way for  Obama’s enthusiasts to  give him a boffo final  tribute in keeping with their feelings for him.    

It is well known that the Romans were among the very best at honoring their rulers spectacularly.   So Obama’s acolytes might consider  borrowing  a mixture of  the Romans’  customs and throwing him a triumph.  One can picture Obama  leading  the procession from the White House to the Capitol mounted on a Segway and escorted by  members of traditional media organizations  acting as his praetorian guard.  They would be followed in train by diplomats from Iran, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and China bearings gifts, carts with  Lena Dunham, Beyonce,  and Amy Schumer as vestal virgins and  Al Gore as Pontifex Maximus, and hundreds of   young children and their teachers marching it step and reciting panegyrics in his honor. On the steps of the capitol Nancy Pelosi would present him a garland,  and Harry Reid, in the name of  part of the senate,  would solemnly proclaim him a god.

Obama probably would love it. It would make fine TV, and it could help give his followers some closure, as they say. 

Two Weeks Later

At the start of the movie The Crimson Pirate, Burt Lancaster as the  pirate Captain  Vallo warns the audience to believe nothing it hears and only half of what it sees. That would be good advice as well for someone considering  the comments about and reactions to the recent election.  

Some of Trump’s supporters have claimed a mandate from the people for him and his policies, ignoring both the fact that more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for him and polls consistently showing majorities disapproving of both candidates.  Even allowing for problems of accuracy in polling, it seems clear that a large number of people who voted for Trump chose him as the lesser of two evils, not as someone they would have wanted apart from who his opponent was.  This election was very close and far from any sort of landslide.  (There has not been a landslide in a presidential election in this country since 1984. Large  margins in the electoral college for George H. W. Bush and Barack Obama in 1988 and 2008 might give the impression of a landslide, but  neither received as much as 53.5% of the votes. No candidate for president since 1984  besides these two men has gotten even a simple majority of votes cast.)

For months before the election large numbers of  so-called establishment Republicans  assumed Trump would lose and claimed to be adamantly opposed to him both on principle and because of his flawed character and bad behavior.  Some supported Hillary Clinton, overtly or otherwise,  while others simply sat out the presidential election. Now that Trump has won, a some of them seem to have put those principles and reservations aside and decided he is not so bad after all -  maybe even someone they would like to work for in the new administration.  Yet Trump is the same person with the same ideas as he was last summer.

I have not seen much about it in the news, but the Libertarian party had its best results ever, with Gary Johnson receiving over four million votes. This was remarkable, particularly  considering that Johnson was far from a dynamic campaigner  and that the election was very close – which probably led many people who might have preferred to  support Johnson to vote for one of the major candidates.  There were times in the campaign when polls had him favored by around ten percent of the voters.  Johnson was helped by the weakness and unpopularity of Clinton and Trump, but his showing was still impressive and could help hasten the time when one or both  of the major parties take libertarian voters and ideas seriously. It surely made a good start.  

Some of the  worst, but  also most amusing,  reactions have come from the leftists and their publicists in the traditional media. We have had rioting, looting, vandalism,  demands for safe spaces and counseling, calls for  defiance or even revolution, expressions of crushing fear and anxiety, warning shouts that the Nazis are coming,  and immense amounts of self-righteous pouting – along with some curiously reasoned analysis of what went wrong.  Some have blamed Clinton’s defeat on racism, despite the rather obvious facts that she and her running mate were white and that the country had chosen a black man to be president in each of the prior elections. Some said the problem was  with poorly educated white people (or trash) who voted for Trump because they were poorly educated (trash), despite the fact that Trump won among  both non-college educated and college-educated white people and did better than Romney had among non-white voters.  Few seem to have considered the possibility that if the left could not win with a far more experienced,  far better funded candidate with almost all of the traditional media strongly behind her against a clumsy and very flawed newcomer who was not even supported by much of his own party, there could be things about their policies and ideology many people reject.  It seems fairly clear that  many who voted for Trump  were voting against the left rather than out of any enthusiasm for him.   (The fact that in exit polls  an unusually high percentage of voters were said to have listed filling vacancies on the supreme court as influencing how  they voted is an interesting datum supporting this notion.)  Yet that seems not to be being considered much in the losers’  post mortems.

The main  lesson I hope people can learn from this election is that we would be better off giving all  politicians and governments far less power. A political process that in a country of three hundred million people left us with a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should help lead people to consider that idea.

Obama 3.0?

When he left the White House, President Truman moved back to Missouri and lived with his wife in a house  which had belonged to her family – the same house they had live in after they had married.   President Eisenhower, who had spent most of his adult life in the army, retired to a farm in Gettysburg, near the nation’s most famous battlefield. Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and both Bushes returned to their home states after their presidencies.  While some of these men remained somewhat active in politics after leaving office,  none tried to continue a career as a politician.  Each seemed able to walk away and find other things to become the main interests and activities of their remaining lives.

If some  reports in the press are true, Barack Obama intends to remain in Washington after leaving office and resume a career as a political activist, perhaps functioning as a spokesman for the opposition during the next administration.  If so, besides being an undignified spectacle of an arrogant narcissist who cannot give up the spotlight and accept that his time in it has passed, it would be pathetic. For it would indicate that for this man there is nothing in life to replace politics and the desire for power and no meaningful home to go back to.  It would also be yet more evidence the nation will be well rid of him in a few weeks. 

After the Election

I was not quite as wrong as some others about how  this election would go, but I was wrong enough. After Comey made his first announcement on reopening an investigation of Clinton, I thought Trump might win but still would not be favored to do so. Before the announcement I was likening Trump to Todd Akin and figuring his candidacy probably  was sunk.  

The very  good  news is that the country will be  spared from Hillary Clinton and from  four more years of Obama’s policies.  We dodged a bullet there. We will have to see if in doing so we fell down and hit our heads on a rock.

There are opportunities for good things to happen.  Most of the worst things Obama and his administration did were done by executive fiat and can be reversed or ended by executive fiat. (The main exception is Obamacare, and the congress seems likely to kill it by legislation). If Trump puts effective managers with the right direction into various agencies,  we could see important relief from the depredations of bureaucrats and regulators,  a more conducive environment for growth and prosperity,  and more freedom in general.   If Trump really is skeptical of efforts to police the Middle East, we might at last see an end to fifteen years of mainly unnecessary war.  If he means what he says about appointing constitutionalists to the courts, there would be  important and lasting benefits for the nation from that alone. 

Of course there are also opportunities for bad things to happen. Trump is impulsive, arrogant, blustering, often unthinking,  and has shown an authoritarian streak.  There are good reasons for wondering what his actual principles are.  Some of his proposed policies  are completely wrong and will need to be rejected by the congress and/or the courts.

Still he is what we have, and we might as well be optimistic and hope for the best while being prepared for other results.  At least he is not Hillary Clinton. With her there would have been almost no reasonable hope for  good outcomes from her actions and decisions on just about anything.  With Trump, who knows? 

Saxons and Normans

In the last few days I reread Ivanhoe by Walter Scott. It is a really good book, better than I remembered, with well presented and interesting characters, a good story, and a humane, thoughtful, dispassionate, and enlightened viewpoint.   Quite apart from the quality and enjoying of the novel, one of its themes struck me as I was thinking about the political situation in this last week before the election – the conflicts between the subject Saxons and their Norman overlords.

The book presents the Saxons as cowed by, resentful of, and hostile toward the rulers whom they believe have no legitimate authority over them, while the Normans are haughtily disdainful of and oppressive toward a population they see as uncouth, barbarous, and inferior. Many Saxons resort to outlawry as their only means of defiance, and many Normans use  their privileged status to commit crimes and outrages against their subjects and common decency  with impunity.

It seems to me that many Americans are starting to see themselves in a role similar to that of the  Saxons and the political and bureaucratic ruling  class in a role similar to that of the of Normans, and that this explains some of Trump’s unlikely success.  One can see reasons why they would.  The people running this country give a good impression of viewing ordinary Americans as uncouth, inferior, and not worthy of consideration.  They  certainly are privileged to ignore or violate laws and to get away with things which would get others into serious trouble.  Information from Wikileaks and other sources about Hillary Clinton and her associates has made that clear enough to be noticed even by many  who don’t always pay attention.

While those in charge may not worry about this (particularly if Clinton gets elected anyway),  they should. They should because their game depends on  having a high enough percentage of people who  believe  the rules are generally fair and fairly applied  and the government generally legitimate and worthy of respect and allegiance.  A modern technological  and industrial society is not medieval England. It cannot be run successfully by intimidation and brute force. If enough hard working, responsible, productive, self-supporting  Saxons  decide there is no justice  for them in the Normans’ system and start to see themselves not as citizens in a free  commonwealth but as subjects owing their despised and arrogant rulers nothing, some things will go badly,  even if none of them takes to Sherwood.