Any day of the week I can tune in to mainstream media and listen to an elite pundit, liberal or conservative depending on my mood,  whining and opining about the threat of a second Trump presidency. 

“The guardrails won’t hold” 

“It will be the end of democracy as we know it”

Blah, blah, blah.

On a lucky day, rarer as the election grows closer, someone will use the power of their national platform to contemplate why roughly thirty percent of the country is solidly behind Trump and a majority looks likely to grudgingly support him in November. But their conclusions are predictably disappointing. 

“The country is deeply polarized”

“It’s the white supremacists”

“It’s the people who don’t really believe in democracy”

Yeah, sure. Whatever. These people exist. Probably a lot of them vote for Trump. It’s comforting for the pundits to point this out because it makes the problem one of morality instead of money and as a bonus it gives them a sense of righteous superiority.

Here’s the truth. The system is broken. Everybody knows.

Maybe you know because you’re rich and you see how sloppy the government is with the tax money it makes you pay. Maybe you’re poor and everyday you see how the system is levered to destroy your attempts to make things better for yourself and the world around you. Maybe your skin color gets you discrimination from the government or a college. Maybe the social, familial and environmental destruction our system requires is too much for you to take. Maybe you’re homeless and you know the billionaires have multiple empty houses, some of which were bought with money they made selling you the opioids that landed you on the street in the first place. The list goes on and on.

My personal favorite is this graph (wish I could find a more up to date version). 

What these lines say, in the simplest terms, is that the citizens of the United States, as a whole,  have been systematically robbed since the early 1970s.

Increasing productivity is how a country gets wealthier. In other words, you improve how you do things so you can get more results with less effort. When the country is a democracy and the people, (the demos in ancient Greek), aren’t sharing in the national good fortune, then you’ve got a problem in your democracy because the purpose of a democracy is never, self-evidently, is never to make the rich richer. 

Where were those elite pundits over the last forty years while the country was being robbed? A lot of them were cheering it on because the world was supposed to be flat, or history was over, or the meritocracy was going to make everything good for everyone, or the free market was the only solution to humanity’s problems, but mostly they were getting rich themselves, and it’s really hard to point out the flaws in a system while you’re benefiting from it. 

And now the demos are frustrated. After decades of theft while the talking heads justified the actions of establishment politicians perpetuating the thievery, it is an entirely logical assumption to believe that the solution must come from outside the system. With every politically incorrect comment and offensive statement Donald Trump polishes his image as an outsider capable of tearing down the system that doesn’t work for most people. And the elite pundits, working themselves into hysterics over Trump’s outrageous performance further validate this image. They are so scared of having Trump destroy the system that benefits them that they can’t see how they are helping him to do it. 

I don’t think Trump is an outsider because I don’t think a billionaire who has exploited and benefitted from the system his whole life can ever be an outsider. And I don’t think there is one chance in hell that he has the tools or even the interest to change the system so it will be better for average people. And furthermore, I don’t think most people supporting Trump understand that the result of tearing down a modern, industrialized civilization is almost certain to be worse than perpetuating the existing system. That’s just my two cents. Guess we will find out in November if I am on the winning or losing side of this opinion as decided by the electoral college. 

But if Biden gets reelected it won’t solve the problem that fueled Trump’s rise. The broken system will still be broken.  We need someone capable of evolving this system into something better. Neither Biden nor Trump is capable of that.

However, if Biden gets reelected it will create a new problem for the elite pundits. Watching their confused disappointment as Trump fades and they seek a new outrage to hyperventilate over, while mostly ignoring the larger problem and their complicity in it,  well, at least that will be a small, bitter amusement.