Trump
does not represent us because our US elections do not represent the will of the
people.
The
election of Donald Trump does not represent some kind of change in the basic
structure.
When
talking about our elections, it only makes sense to talk about them in the big
picture of the legal and social environment they occurs in. No US election takes place outside of the
basic parameters of our system, which includes official and semiofficial
practices.
We are
a republic of the dollar bill. The
campaign fund raising, lobbyist catering, paid political advertising paradigm
is the prevailing practice from Oakland School Board, to The Donald’s
manipulation of his ratings to get free air time. Our new senator will have a dollar per day
target, as will every senator you like and every one you hate. Those “different” views will be crossing the
street to dial for dollars every day.
More
than the monopoly of our two semiofficial political parties, this auction of
the candidates directly to the affluent classes pre selects who we ever see on
the ballot.
Most
Americans know this, overtly or just emotionally and hold a low view of
politicians partly based on it. Most Americans usually don’t vote. Abstention got more adherents that Hillary or
Donald, as it usually does. Abstention
won every seat in Oakland in 2016.
And
vote for what? Ask a voter who they will
vote for and you will usually get some kind of strategy influenced answer. The voting public and the non-voting public
have both been convinced that certain people CAN NOT WIN and the public voting
results bear that out beyond anything a self-fulfilling prophesy could account
for. We do not vote our values. We do not vote our beliefs. We vote for the
person we think can win that will do us some personal good, or maybe some
social benefit.
Or we
vote against the bogeyman. Each election
has escalated the bogeyman factor of the opponent for each voting group. For many of Americans the evil end of the
world was back in 2008 and they called him “not their president” and for many
of us it ended in November.
Our
elections as a universal suffrage democratic expression of the people’s will
never began. It cannot have ended.
Our
elections are a business, run by the professional vote marketing agencies who
are not advocates of any ideology, not advocates of democracy, but just
advocates of their candidate winning the game of a majority of the limited
number of votes cast. If that means
getting the other side to vote less, fine.
If that means being loose with the truth fine. More than anything that means what it means
in the rest of our advertising world: brand image and market share.
More
officially, we have not made many of the reforms of the nineteenth and
twentieth century, so we cannot claim that we respect the popular vote.
Much is
made about the popular vote, minus abstentions, when discussing the Electoral
College by those same Democrats who had nothing to say about this when we got
two minority vote presidencies of Bill Clinton.
Would it be so hard to use the popular vote and hold a run off, as many
nations do?
Nothing
is said about the popular vote selecting the House of Representatives which is
majority Republican because they gerrymandered the Democrats majority of votes
into a minority of seats. Why doesn't
the press talk about this? Is
gerrymandering so sacred that it cannot be mentioned?
When
the Democrats talk about what they are going to do during Trump 1 do they say
much about the moral authority of representing the majority of the people? Is that throwing too many stones around the
glass house that allows both groups to keep their share of the pie and keep the
monopoly of the franchise between them?
This is
the same press that is owned by the same media that sells the political class
that obscene amount of advertising space every two years. I don't know a lot of businesses where it is
OK to bad mouth clients, especially big, influential clients.
Certainly
nothing is said among our experts about the alternative of proportional
representation. It would not be so hard
to elect the House based on percentages of popular votes by party. But that would break the calculation of who
can win. If you knew that the percentage
of your votes for a minority party would elect that same percentage of seats
into the house, would you feel so forced to vote for an official party?
It
could even be that if we made all the votes count, more people would vote.
Donald
Trump does not represent the American people because none of our government can
legitimately make that claim.
Don personally extends his gratitude to the people of North Oakland for their support, positive engagement and their votes. 