America will be the same country in 2020 that it was in 2016. The vast majority of the US is rural and suburban folks who have no access to information other than Fox News and Facebook. The Democrats are a mess right now and they're likely to do something stupid like run Clinton again or Wasserman-Schultz or some other establishment stooge that everyone hates. The Democrats won't even admit that they fucked up the 2016 election; instead they are blaming Russia and James Comey and everybody they can think of except themselves for Trump's win and Clinton's spectacular loss.
There is also a historical track record for this. America reelected George W Bush in 2004 despite his extreme unpopularity, his having started a ridiculous war that has still not ended, his bumbling mispronunciation of everything, and his having lost the popular vote the first time he won. We also reelected Ronald Reagan by the biggest landslide in history despite all his shit, and the Conservatives still play him up like he was a good president.
Whether they like to admit it, the vast majority of Republicans are in favor of Trump because he is aligned with their values. There are a thousand examples and I'm too lazy to list all of them, but to make a short list: Trump hates the environment, he hates "regulations" a.k.a. any kind of government oversight on corporate behavior including environmental cleanliness and workers rights, he's dumb enough to think pulling out of the Iran deal was a good idea, he's anti-Europe and anti-Canada and anti-healthcare, he likes to blame Obama for things, he gets all his information from Fox News, he's in favor of policies that funnel money away from the poor and over to the rich. By eliminating regulations, he is showing that he is against the Rule of Law; he wants to neuter the federal government's ability to say no to corporate powers and so hand the country over to billionaires and multinationals. Conservatives love this shit. Trump is the Republican party's wet dream, which is why their voter base went to the polls and overwhelmingly selected Trump over fifteen other (as Trump's friend Kim might call them) dotards who were either ideologically the same as Trump or more extreme. His popularity plummeted when he was first elected but now it's rising. No matter what Trump does, Fox News will claim it as a success. He's had a number of great publicity stunts, including this Korea thing. He's constantly in the media. His supporters love him like a cult, and - say what you will about the man - he is charismatic. He's turned the office of the POTUS into a show-business thing and America is eating it up. Even Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah are loving it.
There is nobody, nobody, the Democrats can come up with who will beat Trump in 2020. They had the chance in 2016 and they fucked it up, they dropped the football. Think of all the famous Democrats. The obvious picks are the Establishment favorites, such as a revamped Hillary Clinton or Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Maybe they could have gone with Al Franken but he's out. And he wouldn't have beaten Trump. The Establishment is still very much in control in the Democratic Party, so they won't dare running someone like Bernie Sanders - who would lose in 2020, though he could (not necessarily would, but could, unlike Clinton) have won in 2016, and they are not likely to run someone like Elizabeth Warren, who is more palatable than Clinton but still wouldn't beat an incumbent Trump in a general election. The only hope for the Democrats is to find some young guy (or girl), an Obama or a Macron type of person, someone with massive charisma and youthful energy who becomes famous at the last minute before the election as Obama did. This candidate would also have to distance him/herself from the Establishment Democrats, who did a spectacular job alienating half of the Democrat voter base during and after 2016. That person will need to talk about subjects which are taboo within the Democratic party, as Bernie Sanders did, which will piss Hillary Clinton off, and the Establishment Democrats will need to have the courage not to sabotage his or her campaign, which is not likely. Furthermore, all of the states with closed primaries need to switch to open primaries. It doesn't make any sense to prevent general election voters from participating in the candidate selection process. As it stands, the primary and general elections are two different worlds, and the exclusion of independent voters from the primaries was yet another nail on the coffin for a 2016 win for the Democrats.
Alternatively, the Democrats could follow the Republican strategy and do a "clown car" in the primaries leading up to 2020. The clown car strategy was the key difference between the Republican and Democrat campaigns, and ultimately it was the clown car that catapulted Trump into office. The Republican voting public had a genuine choice about which candidate they wanted to send to the general election. With so many candidates to choose from, Republican voters flocked to their man, and gave the United States a candidate that - perhaps for the first time in 240 years, and as a result of the emergence of social media - was genuinely chosen by the people. Granted, Trump was chosen by a bunch of ignorant "deplorables" who eat Fox News for breakfast, but that is America; Trump was chosen by the people.
On the Democrat side, there was no clown car, because unlike the Republicans, the Democrats had strategized and selected in advance the candidate they wanted. Of course it was Clinton. Everyone wanted Clinton in the White House. Obama, who should have known better, but chose Clinton due to his close personal relationship with her and her performance as Secretary of State. Elizabeth Warren, who really should have known better, but chose Clinton because she is a woman or something - and here I do not mean to imply that Elizabeth Warren is a relevant member of the Democrat Establishment. But as far as the Democrat Establishment was concerned, Hillary Clinton and only Hillary Clinton was to be crowned Queen Candidate in the general election. To give an illusion of choice, some charisma-free bureaucrat from somewhere like Ohio whom no one but himself now remembers was allowed to run and participated in a few debates.
And Clinton was competent. In a vacuum, she might have even won. She was not only educated, but informed. She was capable of processing information. Her scandals were so boring compared to Trump's. She was an Obama ally. Her corruption, her ties to Wall Street billionaires, her actual flaws would likely have been ignored by the Republicans, who would not have seen those things as issues, and they'd have been more likely to have focused on stupid shit like "Benghazi" and "But-Her-E-Mails" and then lost the election, even with Trump as their smirking mascot.
But the Democrat Establishment plan was upended by exactly the same societal forces that upended the Republican Establishment: Social Media.
It's worth mentioning that the Republican Establishment has not been upended at all. Marco Rubio made a fool of himself, but he's young. He can run again when he's 50, when he's 60, when he's 70. Ted Cruz was never relevant and lost every single state but Texas. The relatively sane Republicans, such as Ron Paul's brother or son or whoever that was, and John Kasich, never had a chance with Republican voters, because those candidates were relatively sane, so they didn't stand a chance among the constituency. Maybe Kasich won Ohio, I don't remember; it doesn't matter because Ohio still overwhelmingly swung Trump in the general. And the openly-nutjobbed nutjobs, like Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee, never had a chance, despite having the same views as Trump; they lacked his charisma and his showmanship.
Back to social media: The 2016 presidential election was the first election in US history in which social media played a major role in the flow and dispersal of information. "Fake news" is irrelevant because Fox News is fake news and they've been at it since the 1990s. Even as recently as 2008, Facebook had only just started to become popular around 2007. By 2012 Facebook was big, but Obama was bigger and Mitt Romney was so bereft of charisma that he forfeited the election before he even lost. (That's who the Democrats are most likely going to come up with in 2020: A Mitt Romney.) 2016 was the first election in American history in which humanity had a technology with which they could distribute information themselves. All previous elections before that were won and lost on cable news. Under ordinary American tradition, Fox News selects the Republicans and CNN selects the Democrats and they are pitted against each other in the all-out brawl we know as the general election. 2016 was different because the dominance of cable news over American politics was broken like breakfast eggs on bacon. Donald Trump has been running for president since at least the 1980s and 1990s, but nobody took him seriously because cable news didn't give a fuck about him and he never had a Twitter account with which he could shitpost his way into the American public consciousness, and there was no Facebook through which screenshots of his tweets could be distributed by those who would eventually become his political following.
The impact of social media on American politics has manifested itself on both the Republican and Democrat side of the spectrum, in the persons of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. On the Republican side, it was spectacularly easy for Trump to jump into the clown car, talk shit as he always does, and rise to the top as King Turd of Shit Mountain. Republican voters were given a real choice, and they chose Trump.
On the Democrat side, Sanders' campaign reached overwhelming popularity through Facebook activism groups and Reddit AMAs. Sanders went from being a totally unknown senator from a state of wilderness to having a massive cult following in less than a year. He talked about issues that terrified Clinton and the Democrats, and he mobilized the energy of the apathetic youth. People showed up in droves to give a shit about Bernie Sanders. In Miami where I'm from, where people pride themselves on not giving a shit about politics, groups formed with regular meetings about how to participate in Democracy; people did things like canvassing and registering people to vote. Hundreds of thousands of independents, including myself, joined the Democrat Party just so that we could vote for Sanders in the primary. He captured the zeitgeist. He was not afraid of Clinton. He had the charisma of Trump, but the sanity of a Democrat. The only problem was that on the Democrat side, there was no Shit Mountain. There was Hillary Clinton and only Hillary Clinton, having already been chosen by the Establishment. For the Democrats, the primaries were nothing but an annoying formality, a small hurdle before crowning Queen Hillary as the main candidate for the general election.
For decades, America has been a stagnant country. It's not even controversial to say our democracy has not been working. Our electoral process was controlled by the wealthy elite, the corporate lobbyist machine, and the clowns in the mainstream media. Everyone was aware of this, on all sides of the political spectrum. Everyone was angry about this. Everyone was sick of the Establishment in the Democrat, Republican, and Other sides of the spectrum.
Remarkably, it was the Republicans, and not the Democrats, who pulled through in our first social media elections. It was the Republicans who broke through the stagnation within their own party - and they lost nothing. All the big Republicans are still in power. Paul Ryan retired on a fat paycheck. Mitch McConnell is still at the top flinging shit at Democrats who are no longer in power. The Republicans are pushing an agenda identical to the one they had before Trump became a visible candidate. People keep asking "Why don't the Republicans speak out against Trump?" What kind of bullshit is that? Why on Earth would they speak out against their star player? Trump is a better Republican than everybody else they came up with. He's got the extremism of Cruz and Rubio, but the charisma of a real celebrity who can say racist and sexist things directly from his smartphone to the American people before breakfast without ever getting in trouble. He's a Republican superhero, and his policies are aligned perfectly with theirs. Nothing could have been better for the Republican Party than Donald Trump.
The Democrats have nothing. They won't even acknowledge that they failed. Despite being the clear better option to any educated person - the minority of Americans - the Democratic Party has played stupid power games and fucked itself. Arguments can be made that they did or didn't intentionally sabotage the Sanders campaign through a wide variety of implicit and explicit means, including closed primaries (implicit - a structural problem that needs to be fixed, as it can be observed that Sanders won more states with open primaries) and preventing large groups of people from voting in places like Nevada and Brooklyn (explicit - the Establishment will never admit this to the American people directly, but if they say it in private e-mails, oops, the Russians did it! Russia Russia Russia!).
And furthermore. This blame the Democrats have that they are heaping onto Russia is only hurting themselves more. They are not apologizing. They are not admitting their mistakes. They refuse to accept that American people in the overwhelming geographic majority of the country went to the polls on Election Day and selected Donald Trump. No. In Democrat World, Hillary Clinton lost her entitled position in the Oval Office chair because Russia. Did Russia shitpost on Facebook and Twitter? That's irrelevant: Everybody shitposted on Facebook and Twitter. That's what Facebook and Twitter are for. They are for shitposting. Why is Russian propaganda any more toxic than the propaganda that comes from Fox News and CNN? Did Russia hack into the US electoral system and artificially inflate Trump's numbers? No one is saying they did that. What US intelligence agencies are saying is essentially that Russia shitposted on Facebook and Twitter and thus misled the American public. They made fake accounts pretending to be Americans and started dumb online fights that would have happened anyway. They spread misinformation that had a pro-Trump slant - shit, all they had to do was repost articles from the Fox News website to accomplish that. Had Russia supported Hillary Clinton, Trump still would have won, because he represents the American people in a way that Hillary Clinton never will: He says things which are racist and sexist, he is poorly educated and ill-informed about almost every major issue, he likes to talk shit, he wants you to believe that climate change is not a real thing, he's in favor of bringing back coal, he's willing to violate common sense by pulling out of the Iran deal because Iran is full of scary Muslims. Trump is the Republican Party's golden egg. He is their grandchild and their grandfather. He is their product. He is the perfect representation of everything that has happened in America outside the major cities since the end of World War II.
It was not the Russians who fueled Christian extremism in the United States. It was not the Russians who cut funding to education, who banned the teaching of evolution and critical thinking in public schools. It was not the Russians who decided it would be a good idea to let university tuition skyrocket, cutting off access to higher education to the majority of Americans. The Russians didn't come up with this system that keeps students eternally in debt. Did the Russians decide that America should be the only developed nation on Earth without access to healthcare? Did the Russians knock on doors and convince one hundred and fifty million Americans to disbelieve in climate science? Did the Russians make American teen pregnancy rates skyrocket by enforcing a policy of abstinence-only sexual education and restricting access to birth control? Those genius Russians. Was it the Russians who destroyed every vibrant American city center in the entire country, to replace it with congested highways and warehouses, dispersing the population into desolate suburbs where people spend their lives watching Fox News in isolation? Did the Russians stifle American urban growth, trapping it in suburbs, and thus preventing the progressive ideas that occur in cities from spreading? Was it the Russians who turned all of our major city centers into the parking lots they are today? Did the Russians ban abortions and birth control to increase the population size in a climate of declining industry, thereby creating a situation of mass unemployment and angry, ignorant, isolated people who live and breathe Fox News and Breitbart and are ready to vote for a candidate who spews the same ideas they've been fed? Are the Russians been behind all this?
Or was it decades of Republican policy that turned America into what it is today?
We live in this world. This world now has social media. Why did social media benefit the Republicans while it hurt the Democrats? Because the Democrats were not willing to change. Neither were the Republicans, of course, and their party tried to keep Trump out of the election for sure. But it was that difference - the Democrats stopped Sanders, but the Republicans could not stop Trump - that gave Donald Trump the White House.
But wait a minute. The Senate and House are full of Republicans, too. So are the state governments. Did the Russians do that as well? Has Vladimir Putin been stalking the cornfields of Missouri at night, whispering into the ears of Conservative voters? Why should he? Fox News is doing that job for him. Now they have access to Facebook, which opens up a world of misinformation that Fox News never could have dreamed of - such as Breitbart. And the gentleman with the gay frogs. And all the conspiracy websites about Illuminati and aliens and YouTube comments and all these bizarre things that could sooner or later become a part of mainstream American political discourse. If Mr Putin had tried to influence the election, he wasted his time doing so, because Trump would have won anyway, and Hillary Clinton's team made sure of that. She had no support! All of the Republicans - fifty percent of the country - loathed her for stupid reasons such as that she is a Democrat and a woman and close to Obama and "pizzagate." And half of the Democrats - an additional twenty-five percent of America - disliked Clinton for real reasons, such as her proximity to the Wall Street billionaires who caused the 2008 crash, and her anti-environmental stances such as support for fracking (okay but at least she believes in climate change!). That's a maximum of twenty-five percent of Americans remaining, who are willing to vote for the former Secretary of State, with seventy-five percent against. Sure, Bernie Sanders was not perfect. Now that the Chinese have consolidated their power in all of Afro-Eurasia, it seems that staying in the Trans Pacific Partnership would have been a good idea. Clinton was willing to change her position, to lie and say that she was against the TPP during the campaign, because the cool candidates were against the TPP. And that's why nobody voted for Clinton: Everybody fucking knew she was a big liar. She wasn't trustworthy. She kept secrets. She told the public one thing and e-mailed her colleagues a different thing, and when exposed she cried "Russia! Russia! Russia!" and the mainstream media echoed it but it was 2016 and nobody gives a shit about the mainstream media anymore because we have Facebook and Reddit and Twitter now and we can talk to each other in a way that was never before possible in all of human history. Did Facebook influence the election? Of course it did! It facilitated human interaction in a way that American urban planning does not. It got humans to talk to each other. And what do humans talk about on years during which there are big elections? They talk about politics! Some of the biggest subreddits are specifically there for people to talk about politics. And you better believe that people who go on Reddit, or Facebook, or Twitter, to talk about politics, are going to have their views shaped by what they read on their online platforms. This is different from 2008 because before social media, our political views were handed to us by the mainstream media, which also lied to us. So is the social media world an improvement or a devolvement from the previous status quo? It doesn't matter, because nothing short of a full-scale nuclear war or a 1984-style internet lockdown will return us to the world without social media. The Kremlin has the right to go shitposting online. So does the White House. So do Canada and Europe and John Smith from Canberra and whoever the fuck else has access to the internet. It's freedom of speech in an anarchic international order. America exists in a world that has Russia in it. Russia will shitpost on Twitter. That is what Russia will do. This is reality and you have to face it. This is the world we live in. Hillary Clinton refused to face it, and when she lost the election she had lots of blame and no responsibility. Bill Clinton just showed up on the Stephen Colbert show the other night and blamed "Vladimir" again. If America is to be a strong democracy, it needs to revitalize its education systems in all 3,000 counties, from elementary school to high school to university, and it needs to make education accessible, as Europe does. Sanders was right when he pointed to Denmark. If the Russians have such a powerful propaganda machine, why couldn't they install Le Pen in France and Wilders in the Netherlands? Could it be because those countries have strong democracies and America does not? A corrupt DNC has no place in a strong democracy. Russia will say what Russia will say, it's America's responsibility to be strong enough to conduct the democratic process with integrity at home no matter what the propaganda machines of other nations are saying. The only way to achieve this is through an educated population trained in critical thinking skills. That is not the direction in which our country is headed. And all of this is based on the assumption that America's support for Trump was imposed on us from outside by a hostile force, and did not develop organically within the United States by the American people ourselves. America's dislike for Hillary Clinton comes from America. We already mistrusted her on both sides of the political divide, long before Russia allegedly exposed her e-mails. Clinton was applying for the job of President of the United States and she couldn't even handle a routine hacking from a foreign power. Why should we have voted for her? Because she wanted to escalate the Syrian war? Her public and private personas were too different from one another for her to ever be widely admired. Say what you will about Trump - he's dumb - but there is nothing that goes on in that little head of his that isn't all over his Twitter feed for all the world to see. Trump doesn't "tell it like it is" in the sense that his statements and reality often hold wildly different accounts of what's going on in the world, Trump "tells it like it is" in the sense that every human being on Earth knows exactly what's going on in Trump's brain at all times. We all knew Trump was going to pull out of the Iran deal. We all knew Trump didn't mean it when he cancelled his meeting with Kim. We can all predict, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, how Trump will react to any given situation. Trump is Trump, with the door open or closed. He's shitty, and he's going to fuck up the economy through deregulation, and his service is to the rich men of this country and not to the dotards and poverty-stricken human beings who voted for him, and he's doing everything the Republicans want, and he's picking fights with Canada while making friends with North Korea - but we know all this about him already. Trump has no secrets. Even the things he tries to keep secret, like his tax returns, are not secrets because we already know he doesn't pay taxes because no billionaire pays taxes, except the cute do-gooder billionaires like Bill Gates, probably. Maybe if the Democrats pick Bill Gates they can beat Trump in 2020. But even that seems unlikely. The Democrats are the party for the poor, even though the poor votes against the Democrats.
By the way, we are now in the era of celebrity presidents. The second black president is most likely to be either Oprah or Kanye West. The precedent has been set, I'm calling it now. We're going to see a few more celebrities in the White House before the public gets sick of it and starts electing boring guys in suits again. Personally I'd give my vote to a president Marshall Mathers, even when he tries to convince us all not to vote for him. We are the internet, we can make this happen. Mr 305 will be on the ballot, too. I would vote for Will Smith if he can prove that he is not a Scientologist. And if you think Twitter presidencies are bad, you are not going to enjoy when Instagram starts putting people in the White House. President Kanye will make Trump look the way Trump makes George W Bush look. Everyone who is on the internet now saying Trump has dementia will come back during the West Administration and say things like, "At least Trump was an adult." The rule of Republicans is that every subsequent president makes the previous Republican look sane. George Bush made Ronald Reagan look sane, George W Bush made his father look sane, and Trump is doing a fine job now making George W Bush look sane. So the next Republican president will be another nightmare that will make us all remember Trump fondly.
To prevent this, America has to be educated. America is not educated, because America does not have access to education. America lives paycheck to paycheck in desperation, under the Sword of Damocles, constantly running from the precipice of eternal homelessness and invisibility in the streets. America is terrified because it has no healthcare. America starts bleeding from weird places and the procedure is to drink some water and hope it goes away, while Europeans in that situation just go to the doctor. America's kids aren't learning biology because the bible says fuck dinosaurs. America's high school graduates are getting fast food jobs to support their families and then getting into crystal meth on a record scale. America is desperate for auto repair money, because America has close to zero walkable urban centers per state and no public transport, and therefore very little human interaction and abject car dependence. America is losing its middle class. According to NPR, America's middle class has been shrinking constantly since the 1960s and in 2015 crossed below fifty percent of the country. America has the developed world's lowest life expectancy and the highest rate of maternal childbirth mortality, because America does not go to the hospital to give birth. America is crazy-addicted to prescription opiates right now for some reason. Oh right, it's because it's cheaper for insurance companies to allow doctors to prescribe opiates than to give real treatments and surgeries. Hillary Clinton would have you believe this is Vladimir Putin's fault. And that is why she is not the president.
America is not a country that will go to the ballot box and make smart choices. We are not educating our kids, as Germany and Finland and the other Europeans are educating their kids. America is punishing its kids with Marianna Trench-loads of debt for trying to get educated. And so when Mr Trump - commonly described as the poor man's idea of the rich man and the dumb man's idea of the smart man - comes along and says "Vote for me!" America will say, "Wow, what a rich man and a smart man! I will vote for him!" And if your only source of news is Reddit you'll see everyone collectively complaining about how fantastically incoherent Trump's policies are. But if you look at America, America loves Trump. America will vote for Trump again. His only competition is the Democrats (because rather than a proper democracy we have a two-party system) and the Democrats fucking suck right now. Maybe we'll get a Democrat in 2024. Or maybe we'll have so many Republicans in elected positions by then that they'll blow away term limits like the seeds from a dandelion flower, bye bye term limits, there they go, and Trump will be reelected two and three and four more times like his beloved heroes Xi and Putin and Erdogan and little Kim. And it will be up to the European Union to save the world.
