I am encouraged by my readers to try to balance my negative with some positive. I will try to do that in the near future with an Optimist's Manifesto. Honestly, that one will be very hard to do.
This one, tragically, is all too easy. In fact, I am going to strive to hit the highlights, because to go into any depth on this, to follow all the trails of doom and gloom and nastiness, would likely be a volume as long as my first two books, if not longer.
On December 19th, the Electoral College will be putting into place the most unqualified and dangerous President in the history of the United States. They will ignore the 2.7 million vote margin Clinton has over him. They will ignore his constitutional violation of multiple conflicts of interest. They will ignore the cabinet of deplorables he is assembling whose major interest is to mute or dismantle the agencies they work for and ready them for private plunder (America's For Sale!). And worst of all, they will ignore the treasonous level interference of Russia in our elections, all to install that man as their puppet.
Yes, the Electoral College will ignore all this. It no longer fulfills any real constitutional function, and will act as a rubber stamp to something they know will end the Republic. And if anyone is hoping it will change, you can forget it. The abolition of the Electoral college has now become a partisan issue, and support for it's change has fallen to a new low as Republicans rally around it.
Electoral
Our election system now lies in ruin. It has been hijacked by a man who shows us you can win by constantly lying, by never showing your tax returns, by intimidation and bullying, and by appealing to our very worst instincts. And I don't see how that can be patched back up. Once you demonstrate that demagoguery works, how do you restore decency? Future candidates will behave in the same way, if not worse.
It has also been demonstrated that voter suppression works. With the court-mandated repeal of the teeth of the Voting Rights Act, with Republican dominated governments throughout the country, with an Attorney General in Jeff Sessions committed to the destruction of civil rights, and a conservative majority Supreme Court, voting will become more and more restricted. The true election rigging takes place here, more so than voter fraud or hacked machines. And it's been handed carte blanche to overrun our electoral system.
Citizens Untied will not be repealed, and the purchase of our elections by the wealthy and corporations will accelerate. You think he was an independent agent? Look at his cabinet picks and you tell me.
Domestic
Every cabinet pick has been someone dedicated to the destruction of their agency. Jeff Sessions will roll back civil rights rather than enforce them. Betty DeVos will eliminate public education and allow a publicly funded Christian Right to control our children's minds. Ben Carson doesn't believe in the Fair Housing Act, or that the government should be involved in that process. Andy Pudzer, suggested as the Department of Labor Secretary, will act more as the Secretary of the Department of Management, a man selected to enforce the very labor laws he has chronically violated as CEO of Hardee's. It is rife with Wall Street big shots, the very people he complained that Hillary Clinton would select.
So we will see all our laws and protections, all our regulations both good and bad, destroyed. Is this a libertarian takeover? Not really. The government will be transformed into one by the wealthy and for the wealthy, a true oligarchy. Yes, I know we've been tilting that way for quite while, but now the tilt is over. We are officially there. And we are likely to never go back.
The selection of Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff indicates the agenda of Paul Ryan and the most conservative Republicans will get full play in his administration. All the government programs that the middle class has relied on will be under serious attack. This includes Medicaid (almost certainly gone), Medicare (will be fought, challenged, benefits reduced or privatized), and Social Security (I know changes to this will be fought tooth and nail, but the important thing to realize is that as long as extremist right Republicans are in charge, it will be under constant siege).
There may be an infrastructure package at some point, but indications are that it will mostly be tax credits and boons to contractors and the wealthy, and not primarily a jobs program. I guess the hope is that some benefits will "trickle" down. Yeah. Because that kind of thing has worked so well before.
Predicting future economies are difficult things, but I don't see this working out for very long. The recession of '08 could happen again, this time earlier in the administration, and without the ready remedies to fix it. Tariffs in the teeth of recession? Ask Herbert Hoover how well that worked out.
The manufacturing sector will never come back. What we keep will be at greatly reduced wages. And the way he talks, I thin he'd be A-okay with that. It's not just globalization, it's also automazation. West World, here we come.
Environmental
Global warming is real. It's a scientific fact, and it doesn't matter whether you "believe" it or not, it's really happening. It's already too late to completely stop it's damaging effects. Now we can only mitigate it, or we can ignore it, or the very worst is that we can do things to accelerate it. Guess which one he's doing?
And this is damage that even when we wake up, it may be too late to reverse. The cost to the planet and our environment is immeasurable. It will be the last legacy of his administration, even if everything else is reversed.
I can't emphasize this enough. The planet is in jeopardy, and the election of him has almost certainly sealed it's fate. This is one of the reasons I find it so hard to be polite to those who voted for him. You ignored it and destroyed the planet for our children. How do I forgive that?
For those who were worried about the cancer cluster in Waycross, or the coal ash pollution in Wayne County - good luck with that. You voted in people who couldn't give two squats. Best wishes as you deal with an EPA that will just laugh in your face.
Foreign
Velcome to Amerika, the newest member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics! Da, Comrade!
What will our foreign policy be? In some ways that seems hard to determine, He has spoken at times as an isolationist, and at other times with great aggression. Maybe the one rule to go by is...how does it benefit our new mother country, Russia?
We may step back from Syria and let Russia take the lead. I don't know.
What it does sound like is that we will torture again. We will bomb indiscriminately (if you think Obama and the drones were bad - you ain't see nothing yet!). We will pursue and kill members of the families of suspected terrorists. Muslims in America may be forced to register, just because of their religion. In other words, we will be the bad guys. Sorry to break it to the American exceptionalists out there, but we have abandoned our position as a force for good.
There will be no more pretense of aiding democracy and humanitarianism. There will only be the self interests of our oligarchs, in both our country and in Russia.
War with Iran seems very likely. That is a particular interest of our potential Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis.
He has shown total disregard for diplomatic protocol, blundering his way into crisis after crisis, primarily interested in promoting the health of his own businesses.
The most frightening of all is his belligerence towards China. In the sixties and seventies, I would read science fiction stories where the USSR and the USA would unite to defeat the People's Republic of China, often in bloody nuclear wars. I thought they were speculative fantasies, impossible exaggerations. Now?
Now, I'm not so sure.
Why not? If the worst could happen in our electoral system, that our nation has installed a failed reality star, an authoritarian who admires dictators, a narcissistic racist sexual predator with the emotional stability of a seven-year-old, then that opens the door to a Pandora's Box of infinite nightmares.
I don't know how to cast a light on that darkening window.
But next week, or as soon as I can, I will try.
God help us all.
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