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.