The Best Analysis Yet of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

This article by Jason Linkins is the best analysis I've yet seen on the recent U.S. presidential elections.

One particularly astonishing, delightful, and even funny, aspect of the article is that is written in the vocabulary and concepts of the “educated” - the very people whom it identifies as the problem. I could barely believe it. Here are all the advanced tools being used to tell the truth, rather than to cover it up.

The “Comments” which follow the article, with a few remarkable exceptions, are not worth reading. I often find that letters to the editor and comments following blog pieces contain contain valuable insights that develop the theme but not so much in this instance.

I recall seeing the video of a young person asking Hillary as she passed if she would consider releasing to the public one of those quarter-of-a-million-dollars speeches she gave to the Vampire Squid. The young person did not use the term “Vampire Squid,” but was very respectful and straight. You could see from the look on Hillary's face that she was bright as could be, that she knew what was being asked. I wonder if she even suspected at that moment, as I did, that it was all over for her now, that she had just been destroyed.

The idea that the educated, the respected, the well-paid, are the problem seems just not to be deeply or widely understood. Such people are often referred to as “the elites” or “the professional class” or “the establishment.” The idea just isn't really believed. I often find while discussing the situation with my neighbors who are “angry” about the situation – say, of knowing that they will never be able to get for themselves or for their children proper dental care or even clothing, never mind education or “security.” They complain, are angry, but they still don't, underneath it all, realize nor believe that the professionals, the doctors, the well-paid, the respectables, are not truly competent. I include the humane qualities in the definition of competency.

I have long, earnest talks with these neighbors, and I see that they may recognize that the local car mechanic or roofer or painter or hair-dresser is an incompetent fake but they just rarely grasp that a well-paid professional is a fake. They still trust the authorities and experts and the “successful.” It's as if they haven't grown up in some way and feel that there is still a parent, a grown-up, who is still there.

Larry Summers comes to mind now as I close. Chief Economist at the World Bank. Secretary of the U. S. Treasury. President of Harvard. Highly-Paid and Extremely wealthy. Much-published. Very bright. Educated. Articulate. Connected. Can argue any point and win. A Democrat. 

My neighbors just can't seem to imagine that it's all waste, and actually turned against us.

I was talking with a house-painter yesterday who has serious medical problems, absolutely no money, and who is an enthusiastic Trump voter and supporter. His view of why he can't get medical care is that medical doctors are not getting paid enough, that all the regulations and Obama and malpractice insurance have made it impossible for medical doctors to make money, and therefore he can't get medical care. The poor doctors don't have enough money – that's his belief – they are in the same predicament he's in.

“What Is To Be Done?”

“What is to be done?” seems to have been the revolutionary question in Russia. Lenin wrote about it after Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who wrote about it in response to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I remember reading in Sun Yat-Sen how he realized that it was the most important, long, time-consuming question for China.

I find it to be my own most frequent, even constant, everyday-life question. “What is to be done?”

The answer certainly isn't the common, selfish, “my will be done,” and its not easy to say “Thy will be done,” since we are often not certain what Thy will is. I remember going through a period, in my thirties, when I felt, “OK, Lord, just tell me what to do and I'll do it,” and of course no answer came - The Lord didn't do what I told him! Ouch.

I think the first time I really encountered the question in a big way was in the local community in which I grew up in Massachusetts, not far from Walden Pond where Thoreau wrote so beautifully about it. The answer certainly wasn't even one of the things that everyone around me thought was important, like sports or respectability or money or fame, as Thoreau catches so eloquently in the first pages of the book:

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars--even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

But it is not possible to find the answer just by “going to the woods.” One has to go out into the booming, buzzing world of life affairs in order to understand self and Other, as Thoreau actually did, too.

I am certain that any child or youth who seriously asks the question, “What is to be done?” is going to be called “lazy” because it is so complicated and difficult that it takes a long time. His or her parents would feel relieved if only their lazy child “would get all this searching out of their system,” settle down, and get on with career and the stable life.

The idea used to be, and still may be, that a young person of eighteen years of age could somehow know enough about self and Other to stop searching and to choose a path, a career, to be followed all the days of one's life.

Then there are commitments such as pleasing parents, or supporting a family, and busy-busy-busy activity which hides, or evades, or renders moot, the original question.

It's a wonder that the most basic question ever gets seriously asked, if at all.

Walt Whitman on Elections in the U.S.A.

TO FOREIGN LANDS

I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle of the New World,

And to define America, her athletic democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.

 - Walt Whitman, in one of his “Inscriptions” to “Leaves of Grass.”

The recent elections in the United States in which the both candidates of the major parties were highly disliked has resulted in immense uncertainty. No one knows what is going to happen. You could see when the results started coming in on election night that the professional commentators, “journalists,” pundits, media people – with very few exceptions – had absolutely no clue. These professionals made funny jokes with each other as it was happening, witty and self-effacing remarks, but you could see that, underneath all the phony wit, that they were adrift, and unworthy of their paychecks.

One of my correspondents, a Mexican studying at a U.S. university, recently wrote to me asking for my opinion of the elections, and all I could write back to her at the time was that the only thing I can say with certainty that there is deep uncertainty right now.

The place where I go next whenever I need to deepen my own sense and understanding of the U.S. is the writings of Walt Whitman, rather than any contemporary writer, or Alexis de Tocqueville or anyone in between. Whitman “got it” comprehensively and in detail. I feel safe in saying to a student or anyone outside the USA, that if you can grasp what Walt Whitman is saying in Leaves of Grass and in Collected Prose Works, you can understand the US. Both books, incidentally, are available free to download from here at the Gutenberg Project.

Sigmund Freud, for all his sophistication, said in 1909 that "America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, but a mistake," whereas Whitman really knew the people of the U.S. Whitman was fired from his job at the Department of the Interior in Washington for publishing “Leaves of Grass,” but you have to go through that kind of thing, deeply, in order to understand the essence of the U.S. The killings of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. were very much central to the struggle in which the US has always been engaged as were the struggles to stop the Viet-Nam war and the invasion of Iraq.

So I have found myself reading a lot of Walt Whitman during the last few weeks since the elections and here is the one passage that I would share with you, from his “Democratic Vistas,” written almost 150 years ago, in November 1868:

Once, before the war, (alas! I dare not say how many times the mood has come!) I, too, was fill'd with doubt and gloom. A foreigner, an acute and good man, had impressively said to me, that day—putting in form, indeed, my own observations: "I have travel'd much in the United States, and watch'd their politicians, and listen'd to the speeches of the candidates, and read the journals, and gone into the public houses, and heard the unguarded talk of men. And I have found your vaunted America honeycomb'd from top to toe with infidelism, even to itself and its own programme. I have mark'd the brazen hell-faces of secession and slavery gazing defiantly from all the windows and doorways. I have everywhere found, primarily, thieves and scalliwags arranging the nominations to offices, and sometimes filling the offices themselves. I have found the north just as full of bad stuff as the south. Of the holders of public office in the Nation or the States or their municipalities, I have found that not one in a hundred has been chosen by any spontaneous selection of the outsiders, the people, but all have been nominated and put through by little or large caucuses of the politicians, and have got in by corrupt rings and electioneering, not capacity or desert. I have noticed how the millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics are thus the helpless supple-jacks of comparatively few politicians. And I have noticed more and more, the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the government, and openly and shamelessly wielding it for party purposes."

Sad, serious, deep truths. Yet are there other, still deeper, amply confronting, dominating truths. Over those politicians and great and little rings, and over all their insolence and wiles, and over the powerfulest parties, looms a power, too sluggish maybe, but ever holding decisions and decrees in hand, ready, with stern process, to execute them as soon as plainly needed—and at times, indeed, summarily crushing to atoms the mightiest parties, even in the hour of their pride.

In saner hours far different are the amounts of these things from what, at first sight, they appear. Though it is no doubt important who is elected governor, mayor, or legislator, (and full of dismay when incompetent or vile ones get elected, as they sometimes do,) there are other, quieter contingencies, infinitely more important…

What is more dramatic than the spectacle we have seen repeated, and doubtless long shall see—the popular judgment taking the successful candidates on trial in the offices—standing off, as it were, and observing them and their doings for a while, and always giving, finally, the fit, exactly due reward? I think, after all, the sublimest part of political history, and its culmination, is currently issuing from the American people. I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human-kind, than a well-contested American national election.