Well, that was ugly

On the morning after, the Democrats are rubbing their eyes with astonishment at how they could have possibly lost so badly to the party of Louis Gohmert, Mitch McConnell, or James Inhofe, among the other knuckle-draggers that define today's Republican Party.  "How can we lose?  We're smarter than they are.  It must be an example of voters ignoring their self interests," say the hard-core Democrats who want to blame everyone except themselves.

By the last week before the elections, I was getting something like 40 emails a day imploring me to work harder or give more money to the noble cause of electing Democrats.  They assured me that the heavens would fall if they did not win.  But they have been winning and as nearly as I can tell, Democratic Neoliberalism and warmongering is remarkably similar to Republican Neoliberalism and warmongering.  Like in all the rest of the western democracies, the choices presented to the voters on the important issues like the economy and climate change by the major parties are nearly identical to ensure that nothing of substance changes no matter who gets elected.  Don't believe me—ask the French voters who simply could not believe that Hollande would be as bad as Sarkozy.

Nevertheless, it is profoundly depressing to realize you live in a country that seems stuck on stupid.  I particularly dislike this now quite obvious reality because I most certainly did NOT grow up in such a country.  This was a country that once routinely accomplished great things.  For example, within a decade of my birth, medical science figured out how to cure TB and perfected not one, but two effective vaccines against polio.  Facebook is an interesting sociological phenomenon and it made its inventors rich but compared to eliminating the scourge of polio, it isn't much.

Far worse than creeping irrelevance, the global attitudes towards "USA the creator of TB cures" has been replaced by "USA the empire everyone loves to hate."  I am someone who would rather not live in a country that feels compelled to annoy, enrage, and otherwise provoke just about everyone else on the planet.  I am hardly alone in this and yet we who would rather just solve problems have no one to vote for.

And that seems to be the lesson of last night—anyone who thinks that there are solutions for the big problems to be found in that cesspool that is electoral politics is likely to be extremely disappointed.  Yes there are issues that must be addressed politically.  But it is most unlikely that the massive flaws in the thinking of the neoliberals and the neoconservatives will be addressed within the structures of the existing craven and corrupt political machines.

So I'll be sitting in my corner banging away at my drum in a effort to describe how change can happen without hoping for a political miracle.  It's a lot of effort but I still feel compelled to expend it because the problems do not disappear simply because the political systems cannot comprehend their seriousness.