TRUMP REVOLUTION OF 2016

The 2016 election made us all squirm. We had come to a point of flexion in our history...and we had to make a decision on which road to take. For the last eight years...we have experienced a stagnant economy, continued costly and ineffective foreign intervention, increasing hollowing out of the middle class, increasing wealth and income inequality, the growth of the super wealthy elite--insulated from the problems they spawned and secure that they would not be held accountable, uncontrolled immigration, and a generalized sense that all is not right with the nation and its elite governing class.

The American political system was not devised by our founders so as to represent the wishes and needs of the masses or of the nation as a whole...The founders formulated their political concepts from the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the anglocentric precepts of government prevalent at that time in the English speaking world. Perhaps one can glimpse the sense of their times by reading Gibbon's, 1776, "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire". Englishmen in the mid to late 18th Century formulated their political concepts and ideals based on the misguided view, anglocentric, monarchist, elitist views derived from a romantic reading of the texts off the ancient Roman Republic and Empire---in my view too much of Ciciero. Their goals, like the ancients, were to ignore the masses, keep power in the hands of the wealthy, the elite, the few, and arrange a system of "checks and balances" not to further democracy, but to protect the Republic from the potential ascendency and conflicting interests of competing cliques of the connected, the powerful, the wealthy landowners and of that period. Our Constitution spoke of our aspirations for a more representative government. but also acted as a straight jacket and stumbling block limiting their implementation. And so we have, as a people, struggled on into the 21 Century...stumbling and inching--now forward and a now to the rear aspiring for a more responsive, representative system, but seemingly never able to get there.

In the second decade of the 21 Century, by the 2016 elections, the dangerous weaknesses of this ancient and creaky system had become all too apparent. The meager government safety nets which had become part of our system in mid 20th Century were under attack or already abolished. These laws had been put into place in response to the Great Depression, the threat of Communism and to offset the natural tendency of raw capitalism to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. But by 2016 these laws had been compromised, undermined and bypassed or replaced by successive misguided leadership----of both parties Democrat and Republican. The US voter was faced with a political system dominated by massive amounts of corrupting cash donated by powerful and wealthy elites, Wall Street bundlers, major banks and swarms of lobbyists. As a result of the fact that this infusion of corrupting financial support for politicians and parties came from essentially one demographic element of the citizenry--the wealthy---both parties had almost identical political philosophies. Both Republicans and Democrats supported and advanced platforms acceptable to and often agreed to by the "megadonor class". Their agenda? Cut taxes, cut spending, cut entitlements, open foreign markets for US business (by fiat or diplomacy and when that did not work by war and invasion), encourage (or ignore) the open wound of immigration and uncontrolled borders, advance "free-trade" and globalism, and sing on to "trade deals" advantageous to the the multinational corporations, banks and Wall Street. Voters were faced with a choice between two parties...neither one of which cared about or represented the needs of a vast swath of the middle class, of working men and women, or indeed, of the well being of the nation as a whole.

Both parties were in the grasp of a few hundred individuals known as the "donor class"---wealthy elites like the Koch brothers and the single issue Adelsons who as multi billionaires could buy and sell candidates at will and set the political agendas of their political puppets. These few wealthy men and women had the finances to dominate the political story, pick the candidates, control the issues and the platforms. Their continued and growing dominance of our political system was assured to bring the nation into a form of oligarchy common in the banana republics of South America in the 19th and 20th Centuries. There seemed no savior on the political scene of the right or left that could alter this trend away from our stated democratic goals and toward political disaster.

Change was desperately needed...some exclaimed another revolution was necessary. "1776" saved us from the oligarchy and tyranny of the British monarchy and now we needed another uprising to rescue us from the cancerous growth of a powerful oligarchy within our own nation.

Revolution came in the form of candidate Donald J. Trump. He is an imperfect savior...but in 2016 he alone overturned the sinister hold of the megadonors. He shattered the power of the establishment Republicans and their obeisance to the monied power brokers, he finally ended the Bush dynasty, he poked holes in some of the establishment sacred cows, he smashed the power of the elites and their media facilitators. He eliminated the corrupt and corrupting Clinton machine, and its embarrassing "slush fund" Clinton Foundation engaged in machinations only to expand the wealth and power, of one family, and by a devastating political upset, even forced the Democratic party to rethink and perhaps revise their "right of center" and divisive "identity politics" policies.

In the greatest irony of all, the sinister forces which were moving our government toward decline have been brought to an abrupt halt on November 8, 2016 by a blustering, bloviating, energetic, multibillionaire, novice-politician from Queens, who has great difficulty with standard syntax, but also has the ability to think out-side of the box, to grasp a political opportunity, to communicate effectively and emotionally to the voters, and to lead.

Revolutions are tricky. They make renewal, regeneration and redirection possible. They provide opportunities for needed change, but require our close attention. Now that the political pieces are shattered we must all work toward putting them back together in a better, more just, more democratic and more responsive way so as to serve all our citizens, Moslem, Jew and Christian, rich and poor, black and white, urban and rural, poet and farmer.