rollingstone | One of the underpublicized revelations of the financial crisis, for
instance, was that millions of Americans found themselves unable to get
answers to a simple questions like, "Who holds the note to my house?"
People want more power over their own lives. They want to feel some
connection to society. Most particularly, they don't want to be dictated
to by distant bureaucrats who don't seem to care what they're going
through, and think they know what's best for everyone.
These are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, they came out in this
past year in the campaign of Donald Trump, who'd exposed a tiny flaw in
the system.
People are still free to vote, and some peculiarities in the
structure of the commercial media, combined with mountains of public
anger, conspired to put one of the two parties in the hands of a
coverage-devouring billionaire running on a "Purge the Scum" platform.
But choosing a dangerous race-baiting lunatic as the vehicle for the
first successful revolt in ages against one of the two major parties
will have many profound negative consequences for voters. The most
serious will surely be this burgeoning movement to describe voting and
democracy as inherently dangerous.
Donald Trump is dangerous because as president, he'd likely have
little respect for law. But a gang of people whose metaphor for society
is "We are the white cells, voters are the disease" is comparably scary
in its own banal, less click-generating way.
These self-congratulating cognoscenti could have looked at
the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with
them, and what they could do to make government work better for the
population.
Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as
baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give
Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the
absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate
anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect
wrong ending.
Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for
an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy. And you thought this
election season couldn't get any worse.
