it’s been two weeks since the presidential election and the entire world is still reeling from the pending and impending disaster of the second coming of trump or, if you prefer, the second maga reich. accusations of election fraud, voter tampering and hacking have run rampant and they’re likely true but they’ve been true for every election i can remember in every country that holds them so that shouldn’t surprise anyone. the last time there was a free, fair and uncoerced election at a national scale was… well, it’s never happened. it’s probably happened on a larger scale in this election than any other in american history but that’s not even one of the more significant issues at play here.
what is of particular importance is three things. first, what happened? second, what does that mean for the future of america and the rest of the world? third, what can we do about it so this four-year period doesn’t have the kind of death-toll the last republican victory caused?
we all know the basics of what happened. donald trump won the election on tuesday, november 5 with about 76.5 million votes, not many more than the 74.2 million he got in 2020 when he lost to joe biden and far fewer than the 81.3 million biden received in that election. kamala harris’ 73.9 million votes shocked political commentators because it represented the largest drop in voter turnout for the democratic party since records began, leading to speculation of election fraud. unsurprisingly, harris conceded the election without even paying attention to the numeric inconsistencies despite the rest of the party knowing something was obviously wrong. the extreme right rejoiced and it looked like the left might finally rise up and fight but that fight mostly got relegated to tiktok and instagram instead of the streets of american cities and homes of republican elites. after two weeks, that’s realistically where things stand.
but how did we get here? commentators have all espoused their own versions of the disaster within the democratic party and what’s happened in american society leading to this moment and nearly all of them have sided with very specific, clear-cut singular causes. they’re all wrong. there is a single overarching cause for the democratic loss but it’s not the economy, cost of living, misogyny, transphobia, antisemitism, immigration, abortion or gun control. and it’s not a simple cause because all of those things play their own parts in reinforcing the issue. the real issue, however, is stupidity.
by stupidity, i don’t mean that americans are inherently unintelligent. americans, like any other group of people, have the same capacity for learning, understanding and thinking as anyone. no more, no less. there’s nothing lacking and nothing special in american newborns. it’s what comes next that’s the problem. from systemic racism, injustice and poverty to progressively-diminishing educational standards that started at pathetic and have dropped like barrels of rocks since then, most american children have absolutely no chance to learn how to think objectively, critically, thoroughly or logically. some of that blame must be assigned to the parents but the vast majority of it must be attributed to a disinterested society and an anti-education government across all levels and jurisdictions.
that childhood and adolescent failure to instill educational values and thought processes is compounded by a society that values feelings, especially anger and hate, over knowledge and rational thought. we are encouraged to feel rage and lust, extremes of emotions instead of thinking things through. we talk about freedom of speech as if that means we should all scream our lungs out about everything around us without taking the time or energy to know anything before we even open our mouths. we certainly have that right but could those men who wrote in the eighteenth century have had any idea we would have had the wholehearted desire to live in perpetual states of uninformed but boiling anger, raging at the world around us as if we’ve just been doused in bubbling oil?
we’ve built a society where knowledge is treated like the plague, where education is undesirable and an indicator of deceit and evil. america is the only country in the modern world where people are proud to be uneducated and wear hate and bias as badges of honor. america, the epitome of a land of immigrants and racial mixing, has become a hotbed of racial violence and the most virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric since the crusades.
that, however, is a very general issue and the election is something extremely specific. to understand how the election went so very wrong, we have to look at the details and those details start several years ago.
barack obama was a distinctly polarizing figure and a turning-point in democratic politics. before obama, the democratic party had been a centrist party for decades. kennedy, johnson, carter and clinton were all centrists, contrasted against nixon, ford, reagan and both bushes on the right. compared to european and asian nations, america has always been heavily skewed to the right and treats centrist politics like they’re on the extreme left but there’s historically at least been a balance between centrists and conservatives. with obama’s policies, however, he was shockingly skewed to the right and could easily have been mistaken for george w bush returning to office for another two terms. instead of governing by insisting on good policy, he governed by popularity, compromising and negotiating to gain the likes of the masses and passing lots of legislation but it all passed because the opposition didn’t really have much more than details of problems with it. it could easily have been a republican in the white house. worse than his betrayal of not just the left but the center, however, was that obama decided he didn’t want to have to deal with anyone holding him back from achieving a complete ideological shift in the democratic leadership. while not strikingly intelligent, obama was at least competent and capable. so he picked a running-mate who was out-of-touch with reality, too old to be a threat and with absolutely no understanding of international relations, economics or the realities of politics. he selected joe biden, a little-known senator from delaware. he hadn’t done anything for people to have strong opinions about and he was prepared to go along with anything obama said, mostly because he didn’t appear to understand any of it in the first place to form an opinion about it. so, despite being the equivalent of the old donkey just waiting to die in the back pasture of political insignificance, he became vice president of the crumbling superpower.
people are often critical of the fact that he didn’t accomplish anything as vice president, which is unfair. the fact that he didn’t accomplish anything in thirty-six years in the senate is absolutely significant and shows his mindless incompetence. but the vice president is realistically just a backup in case the president dies in office and isn’t supposed to accomplish anything. even the democratic party knew he was a bad candidate for president, however. so, when it came time for obama to exit the stage, they realized they needed a better candidate than either him or his limp-noodle veep. they turned to hillary clinton. intelligent, well-spoken, educated, experienced, clinton wasn’t exactly a leftist but she was a return to real center politics and a hope for better lives for the people who had been neglected for years at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. when the republican party inexplicably ran a rich gameshow host with a history of sexual violence and the intelligence of a naked mole-rat on crystal meth against him, the world breathed a sigh of relief, the country thought it would finally get its first female president and an absolute blowout and the destruction of the republican party was predicted. many of us on the more extreme side of the left were skeptical and cautioned people not to take it for granted, that they needed to get out and make sure donald trump’s brand of entertainment-as-politics and white supremacy didn’t make him an extremely attractive candidate to the huge right-wing contingent in the country. the election came closer and the race got tighter and people simply didn’t show up. people like to pretend it had something to do with email leaks but what it really came down to was the left’s apathy, the center’s disinterest and the right’s devotion.
trump’s win shocked america and the world. four years later, women’s rights were in tatters, more than a million americans were dead because of a pandemic that could have been contained if not for the trump administration that led to more than seven million dead worldwide. the supreme court no longer cared in the slightest about average americans, the justice system had decided to give up on logic, ethics and thought and turned instead to mythology and theocratic nonsense and education had gone from abysmal to religious indoctrination in the guise of patriotic subservience. in other words, america turned itself into a nation where the alpha bros and karens were running the show. the world wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry but mostly just panicked.
even a nation of proudly-uneducated self-declared rednecks had had enough of the clowns putting what was left of the country through a meat-grinder in front of their eyes so, when the democratic party held their wet-noodle former-vice-president up, it didn’t matter who it was. they just had to get rid of trump and turned out with the largest democratic vote count in american history – still a small fraction of the actual population but at least a show of support for the anti-trump camp. the result was less than ideal, however. instead of a resounding victory and a wildly-successful candidate storming into the white house to right the ship and put the country back on track, dragging things back to the center, what america got was another jolt to the right from even where obama was. it wasn’t as obvious as it would otherwise have been because trump was so far into the delusional christian-nationalist pocket that mussolini would have seemed moderate by comparison. still, even biden managed to stabilize economic indicators and the country started to return to job growth and even some social programs, though those can all be attributed to the few house democrats who were still paying attention to the actual state of the country instead of spending their days ranting in the media about international affairs they didn’t bother to learn about before mining them for talking-points and popularity incentives.
the senior democratic leadership quickly realized their mistake in nominating biden to run instead of a stronger policy candidate with a better understanding of domestic and international affairs like pete buttigieg or elizabeth warren. they couldn’t admit it to the world but, as biden’s health and mental function dramatically depleted in front of the american public, they had a decision to make. would they let him continue to make a fool of himself, the party and the country by pretending he was fit to lead, much less fit to run for another term? he was unwilling to step aside so they made their fatal mistake, not pushing him out. they’d already done it once in favor of hillary clinton in 2016 but they backed down and let methuselah play another round of campaign golf. i theorize it was actually kamala harris pushing him to run because she knew he couldn’t possibly go the distance and she’d have to step in. she couldn’t possibly have won a primary contest so her only chance to be the nominee was to time it perfectly and sacrifice the country for her ego. which, of course, is exactly what she did.
the democratic leadership had already made the error of running a useless vice president in 2020 so they never would have done it four years later, given a reasonable option. but, with a few short months remaining, things were moving very quickly. when biden suddenly endorsed harris instead of a better candidate, they showed their lack of understanding of the situation and just let her run. a public primary could have been arranged or, lacking that, at least an open convention. i’ve written extensively about the many better options and there’s no need to rehash that issue but there’s a significant irony to the way the election ended. the democratic party had the option to run the governor of michigan or the governor of pennsylvania, possibly both on the same ticket. they’re both wildly popular in their states. the two states that decided the election in favor of trump but that were overwhelmingly won by their governors in their own races, leading to the conclusion they’d at least have carried their home states in the general election. while neither of them would have been my first choice for the nomination, they’d both have made reasonably good leaders and could have run rings around harris in all respects.
something that’s useful to keep in mind at this point is that there has been a lot of criticism of kamala harris for invalid reasons. she’s intelligent and well-educated. unlike biden, a blithering incompetent from the beginning of his political career who appeared to think international relations were a race to the bottom and a reason for constant compromise and negotiation against your own self-interests and ethics, harris was competent and qualified. those who say she had the necessary experience, however, appear to have misread her resume. one term in the senate after a career in law-enforcement means she was an experienced and qualified prosecutor and successful lawyer. but biden had done the same thing his mentor obama had in his vp selection. he picked someone who couldn’t do him any damage but wasn’t a future president in the making. having met and worked with many intelligent and capable black women, i have absolutely no doubt a black woman would make a great leader. just not that particular one. instead of a national icon, we ended up with a karen-in-chief trying to fight off the poster-child for the cult of white pride and caucasian jesus.
but that’s not why she lost. nobody loses the presidential election because they have bad policies, because they would make a bad leader or because they were simply terrible people. in fact, those are usually reasons politicians become successful in the first place.
kamala harris was a bad choice for the democratic nominee for all those reasons but there were far more generalized and societal reasons why she actually lost the election. people weren’t voting for or against harris. they were voting for or against trump. yes, a different candidate could have shifted the electoral math enough to make a difference in the electoral college – the governors of michigan and pennsylvania in particular – but that doesn’t explain the ridiculously-high numbers voting in support of a convicted felon who was obviously guilty of causing the deaths of millions.
that’s where stupidity enters the equation.
cnn ran an article the day after the election called “what just happened? it was the economy, stupid”. and they were both completely wrong and a little right at the same time. the first thing to note about it is that there’s nothing wrong with the american economy at the moment. it’s actually doing better at the moment than it’s done in decades. it’s growing, job numbers are up, investments are up, the stock market has rebounded after the pandemic, companies are posting record profits and american assets are larger than they’ve ever been. so why does everyone think the economy is so far down the toilet it’s halfway to the ocean in a river of excrement? because the strength of the economy isn’t an indicator of the two most important things in the lives of average americans where money is concerned. those are the cost of living and the purchasing power of the dollar, both of which are actually inversely-related to the strength of the economy.
as a capitalist, free-market economy like america’s grows, the rich get richer at a much faster rate than the middle-class, who also gain at a faster rate than the poor. what that means is that, the more economic growth there is, the larger the gap widens between rich and poor. it doesn’t quite grow exponentially but it does grow like compound interest. in other words, it grows faster and faster as time goes on. when we talk about how strong the economy is, what we’re talking about is how rich the country is overall. but, if a larger and larger slice of that pie is owned by a tiny fraction of the population, those whose slices are getting smaller and smaller end up feeling the pain while the rich are sacrificing them for profit.
that’s a great theory, of course, when it’s discussed in general terms like that. but a concrete example makes it far clearer. let’s look at how we shop for groceries and consumer goods. you go to a supermarket and spend money on food and go online and spend money on clothes, electronics and whatever else you happen to want. it’s your money and you get to choose what you spend it on. most of it is being spent at large companies, however, like walmart or amazon – among thousands of others. if those are american companies, which many of them are, the profit they make on your purchases increases the value of those companies and their owners (shareholders in most cases). you continue to make your salary and spend it on the things you want and your salary remains the same number of dollars. but, as those companies and their owners make more profit, the economy grows. there’s more money in the system because you’ve just given it to them in return for your food and other products. you keep having to spend your money but, as the size of the economy increases, the value of each dollar drops. instead of having to spend twenty dollars for something, now you have to spend thirty. but you’re still making the same amount or close to it. maybe you got a 5% raise – but your groceries might be 50% more expensive. the more you buy, the more the economy grows but, the more the economy grows, the less your money is worth and the less you can buy. in other words, the better the state of the economy, the more money you need to make to be able to live in it. and, for the overwhelming majority of average citizens, salary will never even come close to keeping up with inflation. in the last seventy-five years, we’ve gone from a single working-class salary being able to support a family of six to two middle-class salaries not making ends meet for a family of four.
that’s not the fault of any single person or presidential administration. it’s the result of a free-market economy with no checks and balances on the wealthy to ensure the bottom 90% of the socioeconomic ladder don’t get crushed by economic growth. it is, however, the fault of a particular mindset. they call it “trickle-down economics”, the idea that economic growth is good for people at the bottom of the economic pyramid because it means the rich will employ the poor. that theory was proposed over a century ago in various forms and repeated many times since and we’ve known it was a lie right from the beginning. economists are known for not agreeing on anything but just about all of them agree on this. that the only way to prevent economic growth from leading to hyperinflation, the collapse of the middle-class and the complete crushing of the working-class is through extremely high taxation of the rich and strong regulation on companies to prevent it.
the argument isn’t over whether that’s the solution to the issue. the argument is between those who want the rich to get richer at the expense of everyone else and those who want the working-class and middle-class to actually thrive. we usually call the first group free-market republicans and the second socially-minded democrats.
people on the right love to put forward an idea that the problem with the working-class in america is that there are no jobs and there are no jobs because they were manufacturing jobs sent overseas and agricultural jobs given to immigrants. while most manufacturing jobs were indeed sent overseas and agricultural jobs were often given to immigrants, that’s not the issue with the survival of the working-class in america because the premise is completely false. the problem isn’t that there are no jobs. there are lots of jobs. they just don’t pay enough to live on. we could have a 100% employment rate and the problem wouldn’t actually improve. in fact, that would probably lead to even more rampant inflation and an increase in the cost of living at an even higher rate.
there are only two possible ways to make it possible for people to live without the disastrous cost of living we’re currently experiencing at the grocery store and elsewhere. one is to make the prices go down. the other is to make the salaries go up.
the government can force businesses to pay higher salaries or lower prices but neither is feasible. price regulation in a free-market system just leads to anarchy and an increase in black-market and organized-crime activity. forcing businesses to pay higher salaries just leads them to fire a bunch of people or go bankrupt because they can’t afford the salaries.
there isn’t a lack of money out there, though. the problem is that the money is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people and companies instead of distributed to the people who actually need the money to survive.
but that’s where the political confusion comes in. the american working-class has been sold two basic economic lies by the republican party. the first is that the economy is bad. the second is that a better economy would be good for the working-class and lower the cost of living.
there are other pieces of disinformation out there, too, though. one is that american manufacturing is good for america. the only reason there was ever an american manufacturing sector was because the entire rest of the world was destroyed from fighting two world wars at the beginning of the twentieth century. america has never been able to compete in manufacturing for two reasons. the first is that american workers expect to be well-paid because american cost of living is so high. workers in other parts of the world have much lower expenses so they can work for much less money and produce the same goods at a fraction of the cost but at the same quality. the second is that america has an extremely low level of general education. that means that american workers are, on average, less skilled than workers in india, china, japan or south korea. that’s not to say that every korean is better educated than every american or that every chinese worker is more skilled than every american worker. that’s not the case across the board. but we’re talking about the least-skilled, least-educated segment of the american population and there’s no comparison with asian countries. they have better education systems and lower costs of living so american manufacturing can’t compete. and there’s no way to make it able to compete without destroying the american economy in the process and sacrificing the working-class.
which brings us to the trump plan for building a new american manufacturing sector that appears to have been the main reason people fell for his disinformation. the only way to build a manufacturing industry for a country that can’t compete on a level playing-field is to build high fences. america will never be able to compete in the world manufacturing market because there will be better quality products at better prices from other countries. but it can manufacture its own goods if it’s willing to pay a very high cost to do it. that cost is tariffs. that’s something that’s been talked about during the election but most people don’t understand what tariffs are, how they work, how they’re paid or what the result will be for both the american economy and the american working-class.
tariffs are taxes on imported goods. imagine you’re going to buy a car and you are trying to decide between an american car like a ford and a south-korean car like a hyundai. we’ll make the example simple by just giving two options. a ford explorer starts at about $40 000 and a hyundai santa fe starts at about $37 000. they’re similar vehicles, similar sizes. you may have a personal preference but they’re direct competitors and most reasonable people will prefer the hyundai for the simple reason that it’s $3000 cheaper. i won’t get into the pros and cons of the specific vehicles because they’re just selected for their economic examples in this case, though anyone who knows me will certainly know which i would buy if both were the same price. we don’t need to think about why these two vehicles are different in price because it doesn’t matter. that’s the price they are. at the moment, whichever car you buy, you’ll have to pay taxes on. those taxes will be proportional. they vary by location but let’s imagine they’re 10%. so you pay $4000 tax on the ford and $3700 tax on the hyundai. again, everything is telling you the hyundai is a better option. that’s where tariffs come in. if the american government wants you to buy the ford instead of the hyundai, they can increase the price of the hyundai so you’ll want to buy the ford instead. what trump is talking about is massive tariffs. his people have been throwing around numbers like 60% tariffs on imports from asia, for example. let’s see how that works out with our ford/hyundai example. a tariff is just a tax so our ford is $40 000 plus $4000 sales tax. our hyundai with the tariff of 60% is now $37 000 with $22 200 tax from the tariff plus $5920 sales tax. so the ford costs $44 000 and the hyundai costs $65 120. in other words, now you buy the ford instead of the hyundai and ford makes a profit instead of hyundai. but what has that actually done for you, the consumer? instead of paying $40 700 for the hyundai including tax, you’ve now spent $3300 more on the ford. with the hyundai now costing over $65 000, ford doesn’t have to keep their price at $40 000 anymore to be competitive, either. they can raise their price to perhaps $55 000 and it’s still cheaper. the american consumer now pays dramatically more for the car. in addition, that means ford, an american company, makes dramatically higher profits. that increases the inflation within the american economy and drops the value of the average consumer’s salary, making groceries more expensive in a cycle. a car is an easy example to work with but that same pattern applies to all imported goods. if a blanket 60% tariff is imposed on asian imports, which is where almost every consumer product used in america is made, that would increase the cost of those products to american consumers by at least 60% while also dropping the value of american salaries at the same time, making that 60% increase feel like far more. most americans buy asian-manufactured electronics, clothing and toys every year. don’t forget, a tariff is a sales tax. if you’re the one buying the goods, you’re the one paying the taxes. how that works on the accounting books is complex but the idea is simple. a 60% tariff means you pay 60% more for those goods. which likely means you won’t be buying a new phone, laptop, tv, shirt, pants or dress anytime soon if those tariffs are imposed.
what this should tell you is that, if you’re voting for trump because of the economy, you don’t understand the economy and what you think you’re talking about is cost of living.
and, if you’re voting for trump because of the cost of living, you have just put yourself in a position where your cost of living is about to skyrocket but that’ll be great for trump’s rich friends and supporters because, the more costs go up, the more companies like tesla, amazon and walmart make. which brings us to an interesting aside. trump’s primary economic advisor, elon musk, owner of tesla, stands to be the greatest beneficiary of automotive tariffs because his company would suddenly go from being relatively expensive to the financially-viable option for new vehicles. trump’s administration is the very definition of conflicts-of-interest but that one takes not only the cake but the entire bakery.
cost of living was definitely the main issue at play in the election but, for some reason, the democratic party was completely unable to make anyone understand just how bad trump’s policies would be for working-class and middle-class americans, mostly because of the confusion between economic growth and cost of living increases. average americans have made a religious ritual out of not understanding things and this is the clear outcome. it didn’t help that there was no realistical democratic plan to fix the cost of living issue, either. lower taxes on the working-class and middle-class with massive tax increases on the top 10% of the economic ladder would absolutely help and help immediately. there are other things that would improve the situation, too. but that one is so obvious yet so neglected in democratic politics it has to be seen as a blatant failure that could have improved harris’ chances at being elected.
the issue of abortion is the other one people talk about as a driving force for presidential politics and, to a certain extent, it is. but what this really comes down to is a more fundamental question. is america a secular republic or is it a christian nationalist theocracy? it has nothing to do with the actual tenets of any religious scriptures. abortion was actually commonplace in biblical times and moses, jesus and muhammad collectively said nothing about it. what this has to do with is the christian nationalist conservative agenda. they don’t like women making choices about their own bodies and this is a convenient way to ascert domination over women. the latest pew research polls say about two-thirds of americans support unrestricted abortion. that’s an overwhelming majority. yet trump got more votes. that wasn’t about abortion. that decision was about misogyny. when given the option to pick either a woman or a convicted felon with a history of sexual violence against women, the american public chose the criminal then blamed it on the price of eggs. which, by the way, is about forty or fifty cents in most states or between $5 and $6 per dozen. i’m not exactly certain who thinks women aren’t worth $6 a dozen but that certainly appears to be what the electorate has said.
another hot-button topic has been transgender rights. openly trans and gender-divergent people make up a very small fraction of the population, perhaps 4%. that’s less than a third the size of the black population in america. yet the fear and hatred of trans and nonbinary people has been a massive issue for discussion in this election to the point that trump talked about it in every single appearance he made on the campaign trail. he didn’t even bring the economy up at every speaking engagement but he managed to find a way to talk about trans issues even when asked about his criminal prosecution. why do americans hate and fear gender-diversity so much? much like homosexuality, gender-diversity has been around for thousands of years. it’s been documented in ancient egyptian, mesopotamian, jewish, roman and greek societies to name only a few. yet it’s suddenly a massive issue in american politics, which leads me to believe it’s being used as a smokescreen and this actually has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with pandering to the christian-nationalists.
trans and gender-divergent people are so prevalent in the population, you definitely know at least a few, whether you’re aware of it or not. yet the fearmongering is intense all of a sudden when it comes to this election. yes, someone’s gender or sex might be important to you if you’re looking to explore their genitals in search of pleasure but when else would the contents of someone’s underwear be of interest to a stranger? does what’s in my pants or anyone else’s make a difference to your daily life? i can guarantee you’re not going to ever have reason to know what’s down there on my body so why all the interest? is respecting someone’s identity so difficult? i’m sure nobody is trying to force you to change your gender or modify your genitals, are they? none of us on the left have the slightest interest in removing your phallus or separating you from your sperm collection. you’re welcome to your gender and your body just as they are. if your issue is with body-modification, i wonder why you’re not protesting in front of tattoo shops or piercing studios when those modifications are far more visible and dramatically more common. it appears this is just another diversionary tactic like screaming about shark attacks to get everyone off the beach instead of telling them there was an oil spill.
people sometimes talk about positions on israel as being a determiner for votes but, given that both candidates have weak and fuzzy positions on israel at best and both appear to want to push an unfeasible two-state solution, it seems unlikely that would be the deciding factor for most people. if one candidate had been extremely pro or anti-israel, that might have swayed some people. but both candidates are painfully bad for israel in the longrun, despite what many israelis seem to have been duped into thinking. the vast majority of jews voted the way jews always vote in america – democrat.
the final and perhaps most controversial issue of the election was immigration. which is interesting because the talking points and ads about immigration coming from the harris campaign sounded exactly like what anyone would expect from a right-wing republican candidate. secure the border, reduce immigration, catch illegals, etc. not exactly what we expect from the center but the democrats are no longer a centrist party and have skidded deep into the right as the republicans have gone so far right they’re almost falling off the scale. instead of the democrats fighting for more immigration and support for undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers while republicans fight for less immigration and more border security to prevent immigration, what we’ve seen is a huge shift. now the democrats have taken the old republican position of limiting immigration, tightening border security and increasing enforcement. and the republicans have gone to the extreme of proposing mass-deportations and wholesale elimination of immigration.
america wasn’t built to be a country of the brightest and the best. american settlers were the bottom of the barrel, the rejects and losers from europe who faced prosecution, death, societal hatred and extreme poverty at home. they traveled to america to escape – as immigrants. more immigrants arrived from asia and slaves were ripped from africa and deposited in america to suffer for generations. also immigrants, though often not willing ones. the non-immigrant population of america is about 2%. that means that, for every fifty people you encounter, one of them isn’t an immigrant. if you’re american, you’re probably an immigrant. there’s a 98% chance you or your family immigrated from europe, asia or africa. yet america is one of the most aggressively anti-immigrant nations in the world and the strongest voices against immigration are often coming from inside the house, the white european immigrants.
you have been convinced immigrants are stealing your taxes, committing all the crimes, taking your jobs and benefiting from social programs for the unemployed. if that makes sense to you, read it again.
undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes every year but don’t qualify for any of the programs those taxes pay for. they can’t get social assistance, housing assistance or medical care. they pay taxes but can’t vote. in other words, they pay the taxes the government can spend on you but can’t spend on them. not to mention, if you think immigrants are lazy criminals yet they’re the ones taking your job, what does that say about your employability compared to an undocumented, lazy criminal? the american economy was built on exploited immigrant labor and would collapse without it. from actual slaves to undocumented immigrants working for almost nothing, if american agriculture and construction had to employ non-immigrant labor, the cost of living would skyrocket. not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in the economy undocumented immigrants bring to america every year by making and spending money, buying things and living in america. practically speaking, the fastest way to grow the american economy would be to double the number of immigrants entering the country every year, not deporting the ones already inside.
realistically, the presidential election was nothing short of a dumpster-fire on an unimaginable scale resulting from a democratic party that doesn’t know what it’s doing combined with a country that has chosen to be stupid for so long it doesn’t understand what it’s just done to itself. people think they’ve voted for the economy when what they’ve voted for is a second great depression and the rise of white supremacy and christian nationalism. they’ll see it in time.
what does this mean for the rest of the world? it means nobody will ever be able to count on america again or take the country seriously. nato was once the american alliance and now it seems america is likely to abandon it. once a leader in supporting the rest of the world, america now doesn’t even want to defend its allies or fight terrorism. all the trump administration wants to do is fight a trade-war against china it can’t win and shouldn’t start. not to mention it seems to want an actual war against china in the south-china sea and that won’t be good for anyone, least of all the american people.
what can we do about it? i have thought long and hard about it but, sadly, the only things that can fix the problem would be completely illegal for me to suggest.
i will leave you with one thought, though. in the late eighteenth century, a right-wing conservative religious leader, king louis xvi and his entire leadership and government was summarily overrun and publicly killed, leading to the creation of the first french republic. we call this the french revolution. it worked because the working-class people of france wanted better lives and futures for themselves and the children. more freedom.
take from that what you will.