He is the best hope for destroying the noxious "New World Order" announced at the fall of the USSR. He is committed to dismantling the instruments of globalisation, which can only be a Very Good Thing. Americanisation has ineluctably resulted in global infantilisation. Hence ISIS.
His opponent is a clapped-out cyborg programmed to maintain the current corrupt and complicated system. The whole 'globalised', robotic world (led by the military-industrial complex, the World Bank and millionaires other than Mr Trump) wants her to win, and the tide is inevitably turning against the unbelievably vulgar and straight-up, in-your-face, refreshing, depressingly-honest, loony 'loose cannon' Donald McStrumpf.
In 2012, he claimed
that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese
in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” During this
election, he has alleged that Obama founded ISIS, that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, that the Department of Labor fakes its unemployment numbers... [read more]
Hillary Cyborg believes that people landed on the moon decades ago. But y'all know that the moon is made of green cheese with white and orange stripes, and only leprechauns can live on it.
The United States does not have a direct democratic voting system. It has an antique indirect system based on that of the Holy Roman Empire, called the Electoral College. This is a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of "qualified" citizens.
To win the Presidency a majority of votes cast in the electoral college is required, not a majority of voters in the country.
The way the college works is that the two parties select the delegates that will serve as electors, and the electors pledge to vote for the candidates, depending on their party affiliation: Democrat or Republican. So, when people go vote, they are actually going to vote for electors that have pledged to vote for a specific party/candidate.
Each state is allocated a different number of electoral seats, and so not every state is truly worth the same given that every candidate is racing to secure 270 seats (the minimum required to win the election).
The electoral college is composed through a procedure which is an undemocratic winner-take-all vote in 48 of the 50 states, so that the candidate with the higher number of votes in a given state will get ALL of the seats in that state. This is one of the reasons why third party candidates are a wasted vote: they simply don't count. It is also highly undemocratic. But the US was not founded as a Democracy, but as a slave-owning, elite-ruling Republic - hence the names of the only two parties. Ironically, the system was designed to avoid the problem of a two-party state evidenced in the 18th century by the screaming, shouting Whigs and Tories of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Britain (the other great arms supplier to the world) also has the electoral flaw of establishing representatives by 'simple majority', so that a party might win two million votes, yet have no representative in parliament.
Because of its history, most States in the USA have for some time been defined as either red (Republican) or blue (Democrat), because the majority of the people that go and vote in those states tend to stick tribally to either one or the other, no matter who is on the ballot. This has now created a polarisation of parties never hitherto known in a Western democracy since the 18th century. However, there are a few "swing states" that determine the outcome of elections, for they tend to change depending on who is on the ballot, and what policies are advanced.
Third party candidates, who attract an intelligent but misguided protest vote, have never succeeded because 1. they are not written into every state ballot, meaning that there are states that don’t offer these candidates given that they did not qualify; 2. have rarely collected enough votes to be even considered for electoral seats . So they always end up hurting one of the two candidates, for, in close runs, they can cause one of the other two candidates to lose a Swing State.
The system is obviously very deeply flawed and horribly unfair - quite apart from the under-representation in the electoral registers of African- and Hispano-Americans (not to mention the marginalised and reduced original inhabitants). Only a system of Proportional Representation would turn the US into something resembling a democracy. Even the UK, which also has a Winner-takes-all system, can accommodate a third party - while its constituent parts (Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) all have assemblies which are elected by the proportional system. Northern Ireland has at least 10 parties - though only three or four have an effect on the resulting local Assembly in Belfast.
It is ironic that the United States has an electoral system more unfair even than that pertaining in Northern Ireland before the Civil Rights Movement there, and the subsequent 30-year-long low-level violence that kept grabbing headlines, and massive financial support from white Americans who had little or no idea of what actually constitutes democracy - and for themselves probably don't really want one, anyway.
2 comments:
I liked your piece about the voting system. If Mr Trump publicly promised to systematically destroy all trace of the electoral college system that makes votes for candidates outside the duopoly effectively worthless, or said causes protests/pressure group material he might be a worthwhile candidate. If he made Proportional Representation the bedrock of the new system then fine, it would be a late content led announcement and a worthy one. And it would be an actual policy too. Alas too many of his announcements have been policy-free hot air which have inflated a febrile media circus and contributed to mud-slinging personality politics and he has been in the media for several decades, too long for old mud to not get slung at him. It will not take much old mud to stick to him to sink him and the Republican Party given how the system is gerrymandered.
Auban, rhetorically, philosophically, and logically, you have two essays here: one an encomium of a man, whose rise to political heights baffles and confounds, saddens and terrifies those of good will in the United States, those who "fact check" their conditioned views as much as they can, those who know that some things are true by common convention and scientific evidence, who know that non-stop lies and crowd demagoguery do not make a good political leader; the other is a rather good analysis of the American system of presidential elections, which until the election of George W. Bush worked rather smoothly, albeit not without enormous violence. The South in 1860, long before polling and television, knew it was powerless under the Constitution to stop the election of Abraham Lincoln, which the South knew was going to happen that summer, nine months before it started the Civil War. The electoral college, flawed as it is, is intended to acknowledge the sovereignty and importance, the regional integrity and individuality, of its constituent States (the United States despite its vast cultural and global adoration and its enormous military might is really very, very heterogeneous), who have their States' rights and their Federal obligations. As it stands now the system virtually assures the defeat of Donald Trump. As Donald Trump has shown so well day after day since July, ranting is not rhetoric, not logic, and not political philosophical policy. It is emotionally driven vitriol. Your rants on Trump and Clinton are not worthy of you. Look to narcissism, my friend, a habit of the public masturbator and outrageous skeptic Diogenes of Sinope.
Post a Comment