America.
Election.

“..Trump’s victory was such a surprise because the elites of this country have grown out of touch with the nation they live in. In Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart, he describes the rise in America over the 5O years of a new upper class that increasingly lives in a bubble. This upper class, less than 5% of the nation as a whole, holds positions that allow them to make the decisions about how the rest of America lives. They are CEOs & top executives, heads of nonprofits, top lawyers & judges, executives & editors who determine how the news will be covered, heads of TV networks & movie studios, top academics & scholars, heads of federal bureaucracies, & politicians.”

“..Since 1975, Western Illinois University has held a mock presidental election that includes thousands of students from many schools. Thus far, the mock election has 1OO% accurately picked the next president. But in 2o15, the university students voted overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders. Does that mean they like liberals like Clinton or outsiders like Trump?”

“It was a historic campaign - between a woman who happened to be the most qualified person who ever ran for president & a man who has never held public office before. The pettiness & viciousness of the campaign has left many of us feeling exhausted & more cynikal than ever.”

“Fast forward to November 2O2O & consider the following scenario: Despite the dire warnings, in some quarters voters have warmed to the white nationalist administration, especially in rural & suburban California, where the president didn’t in the end deport half the state’s workforce. Trump is now campaigning with a new push to make good on his 2o16 pledge to flip a few big-blue states red, & he might just pull it off. The not-normal has been fully normalized with the help of an agog & intimidated mainstream media eager to weaponize the Trumpian celebrity quotient into ratings - & the California Republican Party is on the rebound, with 1994’s disastrous anti-immigrant Prop 187 an ever-distant memory to voters.”

“In response to Trump’s election, Board of Education Vice President Shamann Walton said at the school board meeting Tuesday night that ‘we are on the brink of history repeating itself’. Walton said he know of undocumented immigrants & Muslims who now live in fear & has spoken to holocaust survivors. ‘In order for us to avoid all of that darkness in all of our too recent history, we cannot sit idly by & pretend that this is not hurtful’, Walton said. The lesson plan includes a clip of political pundit Michael Moore speaking about Trump on Democracy Now! & readings like W.E.B. Dubois on race in the 19th century.”

“Globalization, urbanization, & income polarization have gutted the middle class & pushed those with an education to higher income brackets in the cities. Those without expensive diplomas fish in an ever-shrinking pool of blue-collar jobs. Those trends are reflected in social gerrymandering that has seen Americans segregate themselves politically by moving to communities where people live & think like they do. Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like Minded America is Tearing Us Apart revealed how communities have grown increasingly red or blue across much of America. The result is primaries that produces candidates positioned deeper in the ideological end zones. At the same time, media outlets like MSNBC & Fox News have taken strong partisan positions (on the left & right, respectively) to carve out niche audiences.”