A comment on Robert Reich’s status went a bit long.
Trump is a manifestation of poor education in the US exacting its price on the US and the world. The chickens have come home to roost. The wide-spread, wrong-headed notion that a strong leader is the way to get the change you want in a complex system, has manifested in the personages of Trump and Sanders, the demagogic “outsiders” who are believed by the uninformed to be capable of effecting change on a system by themselves.
While Sanders elected alone would fail just as Obama failed to live up to the dreams of the people who voted for him in 2008, Trump is quite capable of wrecking the system all by himself if he is elected.
It is much easier to destroy than it is to create.
At this point in this election all that is left to hope for is that the Democrats can pull out a win. It would be nice to think that they could gain a sweeping victory that would bring in enough progressives to alter the system in a positive way. It would be nice to hand the Republicans such a crushing defeat that they are forced to re-invent themselves into a opposition party that doesn’t deny science and embrace religion as its starting point. The Bernie or busters are going to make that possibility as remote as they can, unfortunately.
The Bernie or busters are not interested in reforming the system any more than the Tea Party Trump supporters are. They want to re-invent it, which is just one step more than simply destroying it. They tell themselves they’ll be happy with a Trump presidency because at least the status quo will end. Both the Trump supporters and the Bernie or busters don’t really understand the kind of misery bringing down the US system will create. I’m becoming afraid we might just find out how deep that well of misery is.
The fix for this is so much more than just reporting. Being able to predict what the population will go for in an election is beyond the capacity of polling and reporting when the citizenry is so woefully uninformed as to vote for a demonstrable liar like Trump is. That is not even scratching the surface of the problem. First you have to educate the voting public on just how blind this faith in a strong leader is. The journalists who inform us on politics cannot be held responsible for the failure of the education system in the US to actually educate the population to the dangers of dictatorship. As college educated people the reporters of course discarded the idea that the average American would fall prey to a demagogue like Trump. It’s obvious he’s lying and has no clue what he’s talking about. Why would anyone take this orange hate-monkey seriously?
…Unless of course you believe that a strong leader is what we need, in spite of the obvious fact that a system as complex as the US government cannot possibly be run by one person. Then all bets are off and the people who want a guy who pretends to have all the answers have control of the mechanisms of statecraft through the selection of the next head of state.
We’ve been so busy propping up dictators in other countries that we’ve forgotten we might be subject to one ourselves. That fate is now just the flip of a coin away.
