POTUS Election thread

[a completely inoffensive name]

I deliberately held off on posting here, not just because my soul sucking job demands all my time for crappy pay but because I am not strong enough to think beyond the talking points until they stop filling the room.
With a day to think about the demographics of Trump's win and the obliviousness of multiple groups to his rise, I think that there is another angle at play here that needs to be discussed. We can blame the Dems and the Republicans and the media all for failing to see the dire state that the white working class of the rust belt is in and how they are going to respond in the booth. But I think that we all know that Donald made good politics by telling them he will bring their jobs back, but he is making (if he follows through) terrible economic and geopolitical decisions.

Our situation reminds me of Ecclesiastes 9:12 (I am trying my best to read the Bible and see what others see in it). In the past twenty years we have found ourselves caught in a net of globalization and more importantly, automation. These rapid changes in technology are simply too overwhelming for our institutions to fully mitigate the negative effects. Any talk by the Dems or GOP on re-training coal miners or assembly line workers into the next generation of green technology technicians is a joke. These people have no viable path to the same standard of living that their demographic had in the past (and neither do the well educated either). The answer is not to cater to them, since their struggle breeds the kind of sentiment that promotes the kind of unstable, possibly xenophobic strongman leadership that was just elected. in my opinion, the political elites need better structures for deciding viable candidates that are able to both listen to the needs of the public without being wholly subservient to them and that starts with reforming the primary systems that the parties use.

What the replacement is, I do not know. Back room deals of the 1800s clearly proved unable to meet the basic demands of the public who grew more progressive for every gilded age candidate that attempted to stomp on labor. But the primary system clearly failed not just in one way but two. The GOP structured their system with too much freedom and power for the public in the hopes of setting up a snowball effect for their establishment candidate and preventing drawn out fights (ex. Romney v Santorum). This allowed a populist movement to capitalize on the state of fragmented establishment candidates. Trump was winning entire states delegates that voted 60% or more against him! On the other hand, the Dems showed just how terrible it is when you limit the voice of the constituents too much. Hillary was never what the people wanted, but it was what the elites had agreed to in their internal power struggles. They stacked the deck in her favor and as the hacked emails show, they actively rigged the system to suppress the candidate who was speaking to the people's demands. The DNC might as well have said forget the primaries, we will just let you know when to vote for her.

There is something wrong with the political calculus our politician's make when making choices and I do not think it is because of anything inherently wrong with them as individuals or groups. The current decision making structures seem to promote oddly constructed moves that ultimately leaves an angrier and more polarized society. This in my opinion is a much bigger threat than Hillary simply writing off white working class voters. What we saw was an across the board failure among all establishments left and right to break this type of thinking, which was the only way that an individual like Trump could ever be granted the keys to the oval office.

EDIT: Fuck, I am a terrible writer. Why do I repeat the same adjectives a million times.