To Laugh or Cry

I am not a US citizen so I will not be voting on Tuesday. I would have liked to have taken part in the 2008 and 2012 election, if only to have been able to say I had played a part electing Barack Obama. His 2008 campaign was exciting, optimistic and uplifting. This time I am thankful to be able to disavow, utterly and completely, any involvement in something so sordid, so depressingly uninspiring, so shameful, so deserving of contempt and ridicule.

Vladimir Putin's attempts to swing the election toward Trump are (probably) motivated in part by his antipathy toward Hillary (she criticised the integrity of the Russian electoral process while serving as Secretary of State), but also because in Trump he has found someone whom he parade in front of Russians, as he rigs his elections, to say "that's what freedom and democracy looks like". Authoritarian regimes all over the world must be rejoicing at the ugly spectacle that is this general election and the extent to which it has sullied the ideal of the democratic process.           

How we got here is complex but George Packer, talking to Terri Gross this week, provided one of the most interesting explanations for the rise of Trump. He noted that the the working class were gradually deserted by the Democrats, who saw the decline of the power of trades unions and sought to shift their power base so the professional and educated liberals. Of course the unions were in part decimated by globalization and off-shoring, policies promoted by Bill Clinton. This was coupled with the general shift to the right of previously left-leaning parties (just as with "New Labour" in Britain) to gain the centre ground as their 1960s policies were being seen as increasingly outdated and irrelevant.

Packer also noted that the 90s answer to the rise of off-shoring, recently termed "Educationalist Elitism" by Hillary Clinton, was a college education. This was to be the way that the West would compete in the "knowledge economy" as manual jobs moved out. But that solution turned out to be doomed since the West doesn't have a monopoly on intelligence and its educational system has no distinctive competencies. So we are no more competitive in the knowledge economy than many other countries, and certainly not China and India.

If there is anything good to come out of this...

Well, I have to say nothing comes immediately to mind. Something did occur to me as I sat down to write, but now its gone. Time will tell.