I’ve been reading post-election analysis all day. It’s exhausting, infuriating, debilitating … and necessary. When an outcome is wildly off expectations, it’s important to understand what really happened, otherwise you could expend a lot of effort “fixing” the wrong things. There sure are a lot of people who are confident that they know what happened, I’ve been reading them all day. Then I suddenly realized that these are precisely the same people who turned out to be so spectacularly wrong in predicting the outcome. Hey, maybe I should pay attention to people who were right all along …
There were some early, correct predictions, by a prescient pollster (March 2016), a hack blogger (May 2016), a partisan policy expert (August 2016), and a politics professor (Sept 2016), but two sources stand out for their entertaining writing and strong post-election advice.
Michael Moore predicted a Trump victory in July. He precisely identified the four critical “Rust Belt” states that were vulnerable to a Republican flip. Everything he said in his analysis turned out to be exactly correct. So we should probably take his post-election advice pretty seriously, you should read it on his page but I’ll paraphrase here:
- Reform the Democratic Party nomination process.
- Ignore the media sources that got stuck on their false narrative before the election.
- Get active in telling Democratic Congresspeople to obstruct the Republican administration.
- Get over your surprise and stop treating Trump like a joke.
- Remember that the popular vote went to Clinton. The populace wants liberal policies.
Solid advice, pretty straightforward. The tone overall is combative and spirited; I’m a little unhappy about how it implies we need 4 more years of complete legislative gridlock, but I suppose that’s the fight we must sign up for if we fear that Trump will try to fulfill his campaign promises.
But … why would we assume that? Trump never fulfills promises that aren’t to his advantage, why would he start now? This is the perspective of the other guy who got it right in a really interesting way, Scott Adams. Famous as the creator of Dilbert, he’s become an oddly narcissistic but really entertaining blogger. He predicted a Trump victory in August 2015, by far the earliest correct prediction. He says that President Trump will preside over the most direct democracy in the history of our republic. In Adams’ view, campaign promises mean nothing to Trump. He says what he says to get what he wants. He got elected by one set of people, now he’ll govern another set of people. He’ll say whatever is needed to placate the largest set of those people that he can, regardless of whether they elected him, and that generally that set will lead to kind outcomes. Trump is a con man, which actually makes him a safe choice for President, because he has no intention of hurting his real-estate interests around the world, or his self-centered media business.
Reading Adams is going to be infuriating for many, but the practical advice there is actually pretty similar to Moore’s: be active with your neighbors and representatives, especially on social media; ignore the pundits who were wrong all along; remember that the majority of the country wants good outcomes for as many people as possible. I kind of want to slap him upside the head, but I can’t say he’s wrong.
ginsudo 