Trump is going to win again, and I don't blame Republicans

So let’s start this with a bang. I think Mr. Trump will be reelected this Fall. I think he will lose the popular vote, as he did in 2016 (and as George W. Bush did in 2000) and that despite that he will still be reelected. If so, it will be the first time a 2-term president has lost the popular vote in each term, but these are heady days and nothing is as it once was.

Why do I think Trump will win? Because Republican voters are more unified than Democratic voters. I don’t believe for one second that we have swing voters anymore, voters who identify with one party and are willing to vote for someone in another party. What we have now are people who decide they can’t vote for the nominee in their party and either don’t vote, or throw away their vote to an Independent or write-in candidate. Because Democrats are less unified in ideology than Republicans, and unwilling to support someone who doesn’t cater to their specific interests, they will lose by defaulting on the election as they did in 2016.

I feel that Congress holds much of the blame for the political climate we have today. Since the mid-70s, Congress has become ever more polarized and less willing to compromise and work in a bipartisan way. Whether this is the result of the voting populace becoming more polarized, or a function of DC politics and the influence of special interest groups is open for debate. I tend to believe that there is a higher percentage of moderate voters in each party than there are moderate legislators. Regardless of the reason, Congress now views the world through a filter that allows no room for compromise and expects voters to support them - no matter how polarizing the legislation is or how inflammatory the rhetoric. Republican voters seem to be more willing to go along with this than Democrats. I think this is because the current Republican platform is narrower than that of Democrats.

Based on the state primary results, there are obviously still a large number or Democrats who are Centrists. Biden was the least progressive of all the Democratic candidates and won by large numbers. But if we learned anything in 2016 it was that Democrats are split by race, class and age into 2 large and very different camps and that the more progressive and Left-leaning side views the old-school moderates as being as hateful as the current crop of right-wing Republicans. This is like throwing the baby out with the bath water and the truth is that neither side can win an election by themselves. Republican voters on the other hand, seem willing to accept the span of ideology that currently represents their Party. (What this says about Republicans is scary, but that’s for another time.) You certainly don’t hear any large numbers of Republicans disagreeing vocally with the Party’s majority opinions in public, like you do from within the Democratic party.

So I won’t be surprised if Trump wins again and I won’t even hold it against Republicans if he does. I don’t expect them to change their minds, it would be tantamount to acknowledging they made a mistake in 2016. But to Democrats who are planning to “vote their conscience” this Fall I say, “you get what you deserve when we get another 4 years of Trump.”

The Death of Social Media During Self Isolation

Slack, you are dead to me. Twitter, I killed you off last year. Facebook, my passing fling with you was over before it even began. Instagram, I managed to wrest my account back from the asshat who claimed my email address, but I will likely never use it. I think all I have left are a couple group chats in Google Hangouts and some shared photo albums in Google Photos. I’ll probably keep the shared albums. My inadvertent quest to kill all of my social media interactions is almost complete, but how did it even begin?

I got an email, out of the blue, from my cousin in Belgium the other day. It was great! He told me how things were going over there during the COVID crisis and asked about how my we were all doing over here. I enjoyed it very much and it prompted a reply from me and several additional exchanges. These emails had personal engagement, interest in the recipients and expressed a genuine desire to communicate. Things which I find lacking in the vast majority of social media “interactions”. Why? Because the vast majority of Tweets, Posts, etc. are not attempts at true communication. Communication implies an exchange of information or ideas, but social media isn’t about exchanging information. Social media, for the most part, is all about providing ways to broadcast information. It was this realization a couple years ago that made me reconsider my use of Twitter and start to examine the ways in which I interacted with people via “push” communication.

Think about it. You Tweet, “Today I washed my cat!” and post a picture of the poor, wet animal. You don’t really think anyone is going to respond, but you really hope someone will. It will make you feel like you’re connected to People if someone tells you the picture was funny, or that you’re a good Cat Parent for enhancing its personal hygiene. It doesn’t really matter who the people are, just that you’re getting a response, but you hope that your inner circle of friends and family appreciate the humor and that you took the time to post something. You get a few responses and you’re hooked and off to the races. But sometimes, often in fact, you post about mundane shit, because lets face it, most of us are not living “Lives of Adventure” and are in fact occupied with mundane shit the better part of the time. Soon you don’t get responses to much of the inane crap you’re posting, but you keep doing it anyways because… well because. Then one day you realize that you never hear back from anyone anymore, including your friends and family and you also realize that it’s probably ok. You get in touch with a friend and have lunch together and catch up on all the mundane shit in a much more enjoyable way. Or you pick up the phone and call or send them an email, but you choose something that guarantees an exchange of ideas.

Now granted, not all of these platforms are exactly the same. Slack for example, is a glorified IRC channel that is intended for real-time communication and used by many workplaces as a way for people to ask questions or connect with remote coworkers. It works well for that. It’s also a handy way for people in clubs to stay connected between meetings and for like-minded people to hang out and shoot the breeze, or ask for technical help. But when the channel looks like the digital equivalent of crickets chirping, after awhile you forget about it and then eventually you stop turning it on on because… well CPU cycles and you have a cat to wash.

I’ve completely discounted until now the distasteful echo-chamber effect that social media has had on our lives as well. The disgraceful way in which propaganda and hateful speech is disseminated on these platforms (I assume there’s probably a Fox and Friends Slack Channel) makes it even less appealing to me now. You have to wonder what proportion of posts are complete bullshit? Mundane or even esoteric trivia is one thing, outright lies and hate mongering is something else.

One could argue that a Blog post is exactly the same thing. It’s after all just a much longer form of Tweet that’s being pushed out into the World. And that’s very true, but I would argue that Tweets are very much like coming across vomit on the sidewalk in the morning. You know that something happened there the night before, but none of the details. And you don’t have the option to avoid the sick on the sidewalk, it’s kinda thrust upon you. Here, dear reader, the choice is yours. And I don’t even own a cat.