There are really two distinct issues at hand. The first is having Trump as president. The second is why he was able to get elected. The reason why may really surprise you.
We have always gone to the streets to protest, because our system doesn’t listen to us better. I really like the San Francisco example of Critical Mass, a bike group event that happened once a month on Friday night in which thousands of bicyclists made it difficult for car traffic to get out of town. San Francisco was one of the first cities in the nation to start dealing with having a non-existing bicycle network. All smart cities are trying to create one today.
Protesting works when the ones in the saddle are afraid of being thrown out of that saddle. Protesting happens when the ones sitting in the saddle aren’t doing their jobs and hang with the Middle of the Road at all cost.
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Trump was able to win indeed. I almost don’t want to touch this, but I will. First, Clinton is a woman. Second, she was the wife of. Third, she had Bernie coming from left field. Fourth, she was sloppy with her emails. Fifth, she would have been a great president.
The truth is a combination of Trump only needing to win the swing states (yes, that’s all it took), and (too) many voters being fed up with the establishment (yes, that’s all it took). I read that ten percent of Bernie supporters ended up going for Trump, and perhaps not true, but indicative of the anti-establishment sentiment.
If they don’t listen to you, you protest! The sad part? The one picked by the protesters is someone who doesn’t listen — squared. The dumb system is now trumped by what is the full embodiment of the system’s character.
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So, what about the other countries?
Many of the countries we look at for comparison are inclusive democracies. We have an exclusive democracy. They cut up the pie of seats according to all cast votes, we have a 50 percent threshold before anyone can take up a seat. Their representatives are therefore representative of the voters. We are not that lucky.
Yes, France has more of a system like us (though they have more parties, they also have a presidency and that’s always winner-takes-all) and they love to protest just like us. Western Europe has no presidents other than France; these other nations are run by prime-ministers (chancellors).
When do people protest in these inclusive democracies? When a government is not representing the obvious full majority of the people well, such as with the Second Gulf War. Several nations joined the coalition with us and their populations took to the streets immediately because the truly vast majority (like 80%) didn’t want to invade Iraq.
Because their governments are better representatives of the voters, the outcomes are smarter. The outcomes are distinctly better when the majority of the representatives make the decisions compared to our majority of the winners make the decisions. This is the vital point, our system is majority-of-the-majority; theirs is simply majority.
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Lastly, our sad system.
We don’t have much control over our representatives. We have to pick between winner and runner-up before we even walk into the voting booth. We are not free to get the ones we really want. The winners do not represent us; they cannot represent us all. Change is possible.
This is US Constitution approved. We can start fixing our crummy system, today. We can have our representatives be more representative of us. No more winners. Instead, we can have true representatives of all voters.
Once in place, we don’t have to protest as much as we do today, because we are then represented on the inside. Today, we are not. We have just red and blue on the inside. We do not have green, yellow and orange. We are a limited, restricted, exclusive democracy. A Middle of the Road democracy in limited colors. We follow the red-and-blue brick road, and we listen to the Wizard of US.
To counter the lie in the title of your article: We are not the Land of the Free (but people are brave indeed). Call it stupid, but protesting when there is no other option to be heard is a brave thing to do. Let’s change the backward system. The first step can be taken today. We should be the Land of the Free indeed.
