Right now, it’s possible for every single person in America to vote, notice that they’re voting for the lesser of two evils and that there’s some option they can imagine that they’d like better, and wonder how many others feel the same way. Having power filtered through only two major parties means they’ve got no way of knowing what the public will really is. It leaves room for people to suppose that they have more, or less, support than they actually do. It leaves people feeling disenfranchised and willing to vote for anyone who seems to offer a way for them to be heard.

We’re pretty worried, over here, about whether Brexit and Trump and Australia’s draconian immigration policies are a sign that there are large numbers of New Zealanders that we, too, are not hearing. But on the other hand, with proportional representation, it’s easy to respond to that with “Yes, they’re here, they’ve been around for a while, they’re called New Zealand First, they get between 4% and 13% of the vote depending on the year, giving them power quite often tanks their support as people realise they don’t really like them all that much, any more questions?”

I can understand why you’d be frustrated by people talking about changes they want without having any way of implementing them, don’t get me wrong. But it seems like actual system change, in America, doesn’t even have a spokesperson. At this moment in history, with so many people dissatisfied, can you not even get that much? Not one Democrat who holds or ever has held elected office, who would advocate for these changes? Not one Republican, except for of all people Donald Trump, who agrees the electoral college is stupid and thinks he could have won without it? Not even one Green or Libertarian to say, hey, maybe we could break the two party system by changing the system, rather than by electing this one person president?

Maybe Americans don’t really want to change the system at all. Maybe that’s what it is. If so, far be it from me to tell you how to run your country, but … I don’t get it.

I fear the risks of a Trump presidency as I have feared nothing in our politics before. But he will be the president, thanks to a crude genius that identified all the weak spots in our parties and our political system and that spoke to a host of voters for whom that system promised at best a sustainable stagnation under the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite.

Fiddling while Rome burns? Of course, I don’t see that Trump can do much to improve the lives of his core constituents. Does that mean he’ll ratchet up the scapegoating?

And then there’s an observation I attribute to Scott Alexander (by way of Tyler Cowen): For all we know, the election was decided by noise in this system. The popular vote appears to have been very close, so close that any number of relatively small events could have flipped the electoral count one way or the other. This is STILL the country that elected Barack Obama to two terms.

Can’t say that I’m terribly happy about that either, but it’s complicated (e.g. his eulogy for Clementa Pinckney may/should go down in history as one of the great political speeches) and I’ve said enough.

In July of 2004, I reached retirement age, and that milestone caused me to start work on keeping a vow I made in the spring of 1956: to improve our government and economic systems. I started searching the Internet for sites that were doing the same, or had already solved the problem. I did not, and have not, found any. I found your blog in 2005 and was glad to see that you were identifying problems in a way that convinced me that you really meant business. I have come here ever since. At the same time, I found that many other blogs were also identifying problems. So, every morning I would rise at 5:00 and read the posts on my list of favorite sites. The list changed over the years, but yours remained on the top, chiefly because of the initial fire I saw in your posts. But, as the years went by, I found that none of the blogs I followed ever advanced beyond the problem-identification stage—including yours. The same is true today, although some of the fire has returned after a long absence.

You express your unhappiness with those who are focusing on small points while failing to develop comprehensive solutions. I share your frustration. I have experienced it almost daily now since 2004. Back then it was, or should have been, obvious to the most casual observer that we were headed toward an environmental disaster. I was made aware of this by Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” in the early sixties. I have been an avid birder since 1948 and her book hit me hard. And it did not take long to see that our government and economic systems were not designed to deal with that sort of long-term crisis. This became the focus of my design project. I wanted to design systems that could undertake centuries-long projects and sustain them to completion.

The problems were obvious, and I went all over the Internet landscape in an effort to get people interested in discussing solutions—and I have failed. You want to be taken seriously, and so do I. I do take you seriously, I have from the start. But, you have not taken me seriously. This comment is not the first time that I have made this plea, and here it comes again. You want something to be done. I think that you want, though you haven’t really said it, to see a plan that answers four questions: Where do we stand? How did we get here? Where do we want to go? How do we get there from here? I have a plan that answers all of these questions. It is unclear how much time we have to act on my plan, but it is clear that there is a real drop-dead date. If you know of a better plan then jump on it. I will do all I can to help. If you want to try your hand at developing your own plan, then I wish you well, and I will help. But if these two approaches are not available, then please consider my plan. Doing nothing is suicidal.

http://cs.brynmawr.edu/~dblank/blog/understanding-election-data/

I think “organize” can include further exploring questions, like those that Pat describes. Much to do!

BUT

If we want to make our way through this, don’t we also have to know what the problems are and let those who are amenable to helping (even some trump voters) know that this stuff is going on? Don’t we need to know what we want institutionally? Don’t we need to try and get the media to cover such things?

So yeah, we need to focus a little on the electoral college and the fact that for the second consecutive time in a presidential year the party that won the popular vote for the House will be behind by 30+ seats. We need to focus on the racial animus and misogyny that scares us so much. So maybe its an excuse as you say but it could also be part of that journey to find shelter and two days after an election we can’t know the difference.

First, you were right and I was wrong. I’ve spent a lot of time linking about your various election posts and, up until Tuesday, I thought you were wrong to emphasize 2016 as a year of rupture as much as you did. I was wrong.

Secondly, reading this post, I find myself thinking about (Bill) Clinton* in 1992 — that was his pitch, that he was somebody who could win the election.

There is inevitably some tension between short-term and long-term goals. The thing that was so encouraging about Obama’s relatively easy victories was that it offered the hope that liberal Democrats could spend more time thinking about long-term goals and less on short-term.

After this defeat, the Democratic party will inevitably change shape — and I think it will change in directions that I like, but I’m not sure. But it will also, as you say, need people who are ambitious and ready to run right now, even if they aren’t completely trustworthy, and I’m not looking forward to that.

* Side note: at some point during the campaign I saw a comment, “my hope is that Hillary will be good enough as president that people will think of Bill as the ‘other’ Clinton president.” I agreed completely.