Life in Our Kakistocracy

Our Government, of the Billionaires, For the Billionaires….

In November 2016, voters in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania cast enough ballots for Donald Trump so that he won the Electoral College, even though Hillary Clinton garnered in excess of three million more popular votes than Trump. The people wearing red Make America Great Again hats were not necessarily all racists or anti-Muslim or anti-immigrants, but what the MAGA crowds were desperately hoping for was someone who would turn off the bi-coastal condescension and do things like create jobs, fight for health care that didn’t bankrupt them, and maybe restore pride in being American. The person whose voice resonated with them was Trump.

They knew he wasn’t perfect; far from it. But the Red Hats were not obsessive-compulsive about Trump’s imperfections; instead, they wanted someone who spoke plainly to them about what they felt they wanted : job stability; punchbacks to the perceived snobbishness of the media; a sense that Americans were back in control again. In a way, they were looking for a modern-day version of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the zeitgeist that American (read: white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and, implicitly, male) values were dominant once again.

We were tired of getting beaten in asymmetrical wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; of being viewed as the world’s №1…