The Rodney King Election

Let me try another argument for why it is wrong to make much of Hillary's lead in the popular vote.

As of 12:30 pm, 12/13/2016, Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 630,877 votes.  It sounds like a lot.  In any state-wide race, like for the U.S. Senate, this kind of lead would be decisive if not overwhelming.  After all, the lead, itself, is larger than the entire populations of Wyoming (586,107) and Vermont (626,042) and nearly the population of Alaska (738,432).  But, in a nation of 324,720,797 people, who cast 127,203,552 votes, Hillary leads Trump by 0.5%---one half of one percent. Think of it this way.

Imagine the U.S. Senate is split exactly 50/50:  50 Democratic senators and 50 Republican senators.  Now, imagine that one senator changes his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican.  Now the split is 49 Democrats and 51 Republicans.  This creates a two vote difference in favor of the Republicans or a 2% advantage.  So, one senator crossing the aisle gives the Republicans a 2% advantage.

Hillary has a 0.5% advantage over Trump.  Her popular advantage is 1/4 the size of the Republican advantage in the example I just gave.  In other words, Hillary's advantage does not even rise to the level of one senator crossing the aisle.

Friends, there is no ground swell of popular support for Hillary Clinton.  Judging by the presidential vote, alone, we are one seriously divided nation.  That's all.

Furthermore, if you look at the larger political landscape, as I have argued in my blog essay, "Humility",  the reasonable assumption is that the American people have rejected the Democratic Party, and they have rejected Hillary Clinton with it.

The strange problem in the 2016 election is that the rejection of one candidate does not proportionately translate into the acceptance of the other.  The two candidates are structurally different.  Hillary Clinton was the leader of the Democratic Party.  If you reject the party you reject Hillary.  One clear result of the 2016 elections is that the American people have rejected the Democratic Party.

Donald Trump was not the leader of the Republican Party.  He may be that, now, but if he is that leader (and I am not sure that is true), he became their leader by beating them to a pulp with a spiked club.  I have in mind the grisly images of the annual fur seal hunt on the ice floes off Newfoundland.  (Look up those images only if you have a strong stomach.)  Thus, where rejecting the Democratic Party implies rejecting Hillary, favoring the Republican Party, as Americans clearly have done, does not instantly translate into accepting Donald Trump.

So, the result of the 2016 presidential election, alone, is unclear.  The only way to make sense of it, I think, is to put it into the context of all the elections:  state and national.  In that context, the American people rejected Hillary, and we are left with Trump by default.

It's a hell of a thing.  I desperately hope we will have greater clarity next time.  But that's where we are, today.  We have to accept Donald Trump, and all I can do is quote the notorious Rodney King:  "Can't we all just get along?"

Humility

The election of November 8, 2016 was a grinding experience for everyone.  A lot of people think Hillary is an awful person but Trump is worse, and voted accordingly.  A lot of other people think Trump is an awful person but Hillary is worse, and voted accordingly.  I don't see anyone actually celebrating the outcome.  At best, some people are feeling relieved.  Others are feeling an impending dread.  None of this is good. 

Worst of all, there are some vicious, malicious people rubbing salt into the national wound.  They are advancing their hatred of the American people by promoting the idea that Donald Trump stole the election and is, therefore, an illegitimate president.  It is important to understand why they are wrong.

Looked at narrowly, there appears to be an injustice done.  If you look only at the votes cast for Trump and Clinton, it appears that Hillary won the popular vote but the presidency is unjustly awarded to Trump.  There are several ways to think about this.

As of 10 am, 11/12/2016, four days after the election, the NY Times reports that Hillary leads Trump by 574,000 votes.  This does sound like a lot.  The entire state of Wyoming has a population of only 586,000 people, and a lead of 574,000 votes in any state-wide election, in any state, would be decisive.  But, in a country of 323 million people, in a national election that saw 127 million votes cast, a lead of 574,000 votes is about 0.46% of all votes cast.  It is far more meaningful to say that our nation is divided, than to suggest that the election was thrown to the undeserving candidate.

Another measure of the popular resistance to the blandishments of Hillary Clinton is campaign spending.  For many years people, especially on the political Left, have bemoaned the connection between money and politics.  The idea is that money too easily influences the weak minded.  This connection is still valid.  And yet, Hillary spent actually twice the money of Trump, to produce her 0.46% lead in the popular vote.  And her vaunted "ground game" came to nothing.  Well, not exactly nothing;  imagine the election outcome if the spending pattern were reversed or, at least, more even.  There is the distinct possibility that Trump would have garnered a dramatic advantage over Hillary.

Along this line, you must also consider that Donald Trump ran into unprecedented head winds.  He ran against the ENTIRE political establishment.  Obviously, he ran against the Democrats.  He also ran against the Republicans.  And he ran against the pundit class and against the entire Fourth Estate.  That the entire political establishment worked against him, and still he won, has to tell you something about the deep well of support that Donald Trump enjoys among the American people.

Finally, a broader view of the political landscape suggests there is no injustice, in the first place.  While votes for the presidency suggest an exactly divided nation, the results of elections for the  House of Representatives, for the U.S. Senate, and for state governments, reveal a more coherent electorate.  The American people have clearly rejected the Democratic Party.  As Vox.com reports, eight years of Barack Obama have reduced the Democratic party to “a smoking pile of rubble.”  We can reasonably infer that the American people also rejected Hillary Clinton.

To believe otherwise is to believe that the same people who installed so many Republican state legislators, governors, congressmen, and senators, would have looked upon the standard bearer of the Democratic Party that they had just roundly rejected and exclaimed, "Yeah!  That's our gal." 

I don't think so.  The American people rejected Hillary Clinton. Period.  Their acceptance of Donald Trump is another, more complicated, matter. 

People on my side of the political divide are entitled to feel some relief at the outcome of November 8.  People on the other side of the political divide should be feeling some humility.  Nobody has anything to celebrate.  Introspection, on all sides, should be the order of the day.  And what certainly should not be tolerated, is this small, vicious, malicious element in our society already working diligently to “rub raw the resentments of the people.”

Dayenu: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Donald Trump

At Passover, Jews sing the traditional song, "Dayenu".  The title is the Hebrew word meaning, roughly, "It would have been enough for us," and the lyrics go something like this,

If He had brought us out of Egypt, dayenu.
If He had executed justice upon the Egyptians, dayenu.
If He had executed justice upon their gods, dayenu.
If He had slain their first-born, dayenu.
If He had given to us their health and wealth, dayenu.

And so on for about ten more stanzas.  It is an expression of gratitude to G-d for all that He has done for the Jewish people.

Please forgive me if I sound a tad sacreligous, but even though Donald Trump was not my first choice, and he is certainly no one's idea of the ideal president, dayenu is sort of how I feel towards him.  Please let me explain.

I had the premonition some years ago, and in this political cycle I am thoroughly convinced, that issues are irrelevant to our political discourse.  We are in a post-issues political regime.

Debating issues, e.g., education policy, is merely a distraction.  Debate conveys the notion that education policy is maleable.  This has not been true for a very long time.  The Vested Interests (whom I call "The Education Mafia") have grown very large, very powerful, their roots run very deep in our society and in our politics, their ideology is ossified, and education policy will not change, now or ever, as it has not changed for the last thirty years, despite the evident fact of its abject failure.  Education policy is what the Education Mafia want, and nothing will change so long as the Existing Order remains intact.

In other words, policy is no longer the problem.  Policy has long since stopped being the problem.  The problem is the Existing Order of ossified special interests.

You can repeat this idea many times.  Large parts of the population want to restrict immigration, but restriction will not happen.  Large parts of the population are horrified by abortion-on-demand, but abortion-on-demand will continue.  Nobody cares, one way or another, about the statistically non-existent transgender "community", and people certainly do not want to re-organize their lives to accommodate it, but "they" will make you care.  And so on. I am not arguing whether any one element of public policy is right or wrong, I am just observing that things are as they are, whether you like it or not, and that is how it's going to be until something radical happens.

Always, there is bound to be some wiggle room between what people want and what public policy is.  In a democracy, however, when public policy becomes sufficiently disconnect from the will of the people, when that divergence becomes too great, we have a very serious problem.

We have a very serious problem.

The only solution I can imagine is that somebody, somehow has to break the back of the Existing Order.  And, until that happens, please don't bore me with policy discussions.  Such discussion are irrelevant and as pure a waste of time as one can imagine.

Enter Donald Trump.

In the 2015 presidential primaries, the Republicans had a number of hacks, like Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham, and several exciting candidates like Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Scott Walker, men of real substance and accomplishments who held out the possiblity of real reform.  I would have been happy with any one of them.  My man was Ted Cruz.

However, what was of overarching importance was the defeat of the Establishment Republicans.  I'm sorry that Cruz, Walker and Jindall lost in the process, but Donald Trump did not merely defeat the Karl Rove/Jeb Bush wing of the Republican Party, he humiliated them.  Rove/Bush spent $130 Million and never got above 7% of the popular vote.  This was deeply gratifying and, for this reason alone, I am grateful to Donald Trump.

If Donald Trump had only defeated the Rove/Bush wing of the Republican Party, dayenu.
If the Republican Party is destroyed or radically reformed because of Trump, dayenu.

And now, if Donald Trump can do the same with Hillary Clinton and the criminal front group that is the Democratic Party, dayenu.