A view from the center.
To borrow a bit and to my friends on the left, why shouldn't you worry? Because the Republican Party just fielded its most galvanizing candidate since Reagan. One singularly tailored to best bring the decade long doom and gloom, mistrust of government institutions and beltway politics to fruition. One expert at mining the even longer festering contempt for a declining status quo among the middle class. It did so against an opponent whose popularity within her party was more driven by necessity than interest. And it still took the philosophical gerrymandering of the EC to produce a win at odds with the popular vote, for the fifth time in electoral history. Let that much sink in mid-angst and calm down, stop choking the streets with anguish and providing unintentional fodder for those dedicated to painting you with the conduct of the thuggish margins who will inevitably use any unrest as a vehicle for mayhem.
The world isn't coming to an end, but the party that divested you might well have seen in this election a glorious death-throe. Couple the reality of that historically unlikely victory with the reality that the rising tide of solidly left leaning millennials and minorities can begin to carry more of the electoral process in coming cycles. All the Democratic Party really has to do is regroup and get ready for the next time up. Stop sabre-rattling and venting and begin the work of sounding a hopeful, inclusive, compassionate vision of a united people and a government engaged primarily with the welfare of its citizenry. Take back the "looking out for the little guy" mantle you so easily allowed a billionaire to usurp in your clamor of disorganized special interest. Get your base to the polls and the future is almost assuredly yours.This hiccup of an election is still largely the product of an aging, fading minority within the electorate, whose monolithic, but energized approach still needed a confluence of historically unlikely help to triumph in the moment.
If you're a conservative, you have two alternatives. You can simply savor the day and momentarily roll back any number of left driven institutional notions, until the inevitable wave of youth and minority growth within the population washes over you and undoes your reversals in the midst of your own inevitable undoing, or you can strike a new note, actually grow your base, incorporate a conservatively progressive approach (and no, those words aren't or shouldn't be oxymoronic) and compete by finding a voice that incorporates their self-interest and advancement in a demonstrable fashion. Do that and the political landscape may continue to be an interesting battleground of ideas, instead of the present New Orleans style funeral march for your ideology and party.
To borrow a bit and to my friends on the left, why shouldn't you worry? Because the Republican Party just fielded its most galvanizing candidate since Reagan. One singularly tailored to best bring the decade long doom and gloom, mistrust of government institutions and beltway politics to fruition. One expert at mining the even longer festering contempt for a declining status quo among the middle class. It did so against an opponent whose popularity within her party was more driven by necessity than interest. And it still took the philosophical gerrymandering of the EC to produce a win at odds with the popular vote, for the fifth time in electoral history. Let that much sink in mid-angst and calm down, stop choking the streets with anguish and providing unintentional fodder for those dedicated to painting you with the conduct of the thuggish margins who will inevitably use any unrest as a vehicle for mayhem.
The world isn't coming to an end, but the party that divested you might well have seen in this election a glorious death-throe. Couple the reality of that historically unlikely victory with the reality that the rising tide of solidly left leaning millennials and minorities can begin to carry more of the electoral process in coming cycles. All the Democratic Party really has to do is regroup and get ready for the next time up. Stop sabre-rattling and venting and begin the work of sounding a hopeful, inclusive, compassionate vision of a united people and a government engaged primarily with the welfare of its citizenry. Take back the "looking out for the little guy" mantle you so easily allowed a billionaire to usurp in your clamor of disorganized special interest. Get your base to the polls and the future is almost assuredly yours.This hiccup of an election is still largely the product of an aging, fading minority within the electorate, whose monolithic, but energized approach still needed a confluence of historically unlikely help to triumph in the moment.
If you're a conservative, you have two alternatives. You can simply savor the day and momentarily roll back any number of left driven institutional notions, until the inevitable wave of youth and minority growth within the population washes over you and undoes your reversals in the midst of your own inevitable undoing, or you can strike a new note, actually grow your base, incorporate a conservatively progressive approach (and no, those words aren't or shouldn't be oxymoronic) and compete by finding a voice that incorporates their self-interest and advancement in a demonstrable fashion. Do that and the political landscape may continue to be an interesting battleground of ideas, instead of the present New Orleans style funeral march for your ideology and party.