In no particular order . . .
- Many American voters simply want to extend their middle fingers to the establishment elites. Trump is that middle finger.
- He has bought the Christian Right’s votes by packing the courts and making the overturning of Roe v. Wade possible.
- The economy is booming; many will ignorantly credit Trump for that.
- He has bought the support of big business with massive tax cuts, deregulation, and zero action to counter climate change.
- Many white people support his attacks on people of color; many more simply ignore those attacks because they just don’t care much about the problems of brown people and foreigners.
- The polls are meaningless because Trump supporters will either lie to pollsters or refuse to talk to them at all.
- Nothing has been done to counter the massive propaganda machine of Fox News, Facebook, Twitter, and the Russian intelligence services.
- Nothing has been done to stop dark money from flooding into the American election. You can bet that the Russians, the Saudis, and the Israelis will be heavily invested.
- Some of that dark money will finance a 3rd-party candidate on the left who will siphon votes away from the Democratic candidate.
- No one the Democrats nominate will be able to withstand the onslaught of lies thrown at them by Trump and the Fox News / social media propaganda machine.
Is that enough?
No there is more! It is important to mention that nothing has been done about gerrymandering and other forms of illegal domestic tampering with election turnout (removing registered minority voters, etc.) and fraudulent election returns (read easy to hack electronic voting machines). I actually put these issues way above outside interference via social media – There is also domestic interference, again probably a bigger problem – aka Cambridge Analytica and others using facebook/amazon/google-based data. These domestic issues in my mind are a much bigger problem. Oh, I forgot, the electoral system itself that renders the presidential election turning on only 3-4 states…
Voters need to be engaged this election cycle. There are ongoing efforts to address gerrymandering, election interference, etc. Will it be enough? That remains to be seen. No one will take anything for granted but I am hopeful a majority will reject the corruption, environmental destruction, continuing erosion of civil rights, increasing income inequality, and lack of civility not to mention the complete lack of moral compass in international relations and the formenting of race and class warfare.
Reading Leonard Krieger’s Kings and Philosophers: 1689 – 1789 has turned my attention to institutional structures—economic, financial, governmental, technological, educational, social—and how they, along with dominant personalities, shape history. What institutional structures are producing the current difficulties in Western democracies? Where are they taking us?