Post#1029 » by K_ick_God » Mon Oct 17, 2016 8:29 pm
Depressing election for many but here are some reasons the glass is half full:
1) Trump has tepid or token support among the Republican leadership, with few if any meaningful exceptions.
2) He fell apart under scrutiny, his past caught up with him -- the rigors of a democratic election season ultimately produced their intended effect.
3) He's not a young man.
4) He's deeply undisciplined and myopic at best; somewhat or very self-destructive is far from an unfair assessment. Just as reasonable to think he'll spend the next four years rationalizing his loss in ever more exotic ways as it is to expect a tightly focused shadow government to emerge. With a smaller megaphone, why would he suddenly start executing better than he has?
5) Americans, and maybe especially Republicans, typically avert their eyes from election losers.
6) As Ross Douthat argues, there are instructive lessons in Trumpism; but it's not like the Ryan vision is fundamentally incompatible with small-business, middle-class capitalism. Yes there is a conflict to be confronted on an approach to entitlements but assuming these would prove difficult/impossible to dramatically reform by legislation anyway, regardless of Trump, this could simply be the acceleration of an inevitable political reckoning. Tacking toward the middle with incremental steps forward for the conservative cause seems like the best way to inoculate the party and the right against Trumpism, and there's no shame in winning.
7) Already R leaders are disputing his rigging claim. This will grow into a unified chorus of dismissal on Nov. 9.
8) It's easy to get caught up in the hysteria of so many shameful moments, but the post-mortem is very likely to consider a more balanced survey: A TV-trained carnival act used celebrity and name recognition to gain a first-mover advantage that hardened as his oppo-research-less rivals (and their voters) were frozen in disbelief. Then he scorched earth to keep it.
9) More than a particular flaw of American democracy, it's a flaw of the human life and condition that many are not paying nearly as close attention to daily politics as the ones who are glued to it (among whom the outrage seems greatest). So name recognition, the superficial tough guy routine and, yes, very easy answers to very hard problems, are of course going to hold outsized influence. In the final analysis, if Trump were a less objectionable person and/or a more capable actor and/or could pick his spots better to shift between substance and attack (he’s done a piss poor job of this in the general) and/or really believed more in the things he spouts AND the country was viewed by most to be in fairly dire straits, then that hypothetical Trump could rise to the presidency and threaten the system itself. We might as well simply accept that any democracy is still dependent on a bit of good fortune and the more or less good intentions of its principal players. And while this point is not wholly reassuring, it is more so when you consider that there is at least some strong relationship between these ‘moderate democracy’ and ‘not in dire straits’ things.
10) In the end, he was the first choice of about 33% of the primary voters in a party with about 39% of total registered voters. Many others came aboard for the feel-good Hillary bashing. No she's not the bogeywoman. She's a flawed but hardworking public servant who cares about something other than herself, and will scrub the details in her decision-making process and the challenges facing the nation. That could include standing up to the jobs of fixing Syria, Obamacare, etc.
RIP mags
