Political Karma — The Coming of the Democrat Trump
Tags: Predictions, Politics, System, Technology, The Future

Karma doesn’t exist. Sorry to break it to you. Shitty people live amazingly fulfilling lives. Terrible people are just like you — some of them are miserable and feel guilty, sure but many of them are happy and satisfied with their villainy. There are two elements to Karma that make it impossible to exist: one, the dichotomy between what you believe you deserve and what other people think you deserve is often times a wide gulf. How much of the story do they know? Two, whether you believe someone is a victim of karma or a soon to be a recipient of it depends on what propaganda you’ve been digesting about the story, i.e. which side you’ve mostly heard. Mother Theresa it turns out wasn’t that great of a person. That surprised me. When does Karma decide to strike? How do you know the person a victim of it hadn’t already paid their karmic punishment.

There is one place karma may actually exist and that’s in American politics. I’m sure it exists in many other political systems. For example great periods of peace seem to be followed by extreme violent periods. Following the Pax Romana comes the dark ages and the crusades. The modern US presidents always seem to be a reaction to the last one. The measured, boring (thank the Gods) Biden is a reaction to the bull in a china-shop Trump that was trump’s first four years. Has it really only been four?

Unfortunately I think it might be going in cycles. It starts at least with Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a unique personality who came at the low point of republican politics after Watergate. He lost a couple primaries, too by being just a little too early. He was something new. You know how you know why? Because the republicans essentially became him afterwards. He may not have seemed that unique at the time in 1980 but by 1988 he was considered the face of the Republican party. In some ways he still is that today, at least in the anti-trump so-called RINO crowd.

All this time people who were not ever really represented by Ronald Reagan were left simmering. There was certainly no place for them on the left side of the ridiculous two-party system. The 80’s was born. That decade was a full tilt acceptance of greed and insularity. Even though it seems like the 80’s was a right-wing paradise I believe in reality these people making tons of money were democrats but in who greed trumped all other concerns. I’ve worked with a lot of executives and none of them were religious zealots, trying to act morally and ethically in all decision making. If they exist, they’re unicorns.

The Republican party has been living under the mask of Ronald Reagan for decades. It doesn’t fit. It probably never fit but now it’s getting older and looking like it’s been stitched together a thousand times, cheaply patched up. Only the vaguest outline of Reagan can be seen on the mask. People keep trying to be tied to Ronald Reagan in order to get their connection to the people. W is tied to Reagan through his father. And it worked, but barely. By the time of Jeb it all just fizzled out. Instead of coming up with a competent, different, type of person throughout the years, forging their own personalities, they essentially pushed what amounts to the seventh clone of Reagan in Jeb and he got destroyed.

Because from in this pool of unhappy Republicans, of conservatives that no longer recognize Ronald Reagan as their cult of personality version of the native American spirit animal, comes Donald Trump, a man every bit as unique as Ronald Reagan. I don’t even want to get into it. He’ll soon be gone, for now. For at least four years. Imagine if Trump had had a halfway decent fucking publicist and the capability to know that he doesn’t know everything in the world about everything. Imagine if he sought the imput of smart competent people instead of just rich celebrities. Or if he was able to keep his mouth shut and stick to the script as well as Reagan did. If he was a little prettier. Imagine if…

The reality though is that Reagan lived exactly the way he wanted to live. So does Trump. Trump’s appeal is a direct consequence of the way Reagan was believed to be, that squeaky clean white washing. If Ronald Reagan himself came back around today he wouldn’t get very far in either party. Both of them were once democrats. It’s difficult to imagine any scenario but one particular thing being what tipped the scales, trauma or other type of awakening. Or having absolutely no real beliefs at all, which is still in the end left leaning. It’s such an overbearing disbelief that even doing what’s right is meaningless. I think Reagan is the former and Trump the latter. It’s why he never bothered with a publicist or he was so terrible a person that some hapless publicist did the best damn job she could. If there is a publicist award, give it to her. I can’t be bothered to look up Trump’s publicist. I’m just spitballing her. Anyway…

In the same way that the Republicans ran off the Reagan name because it was perceived he was so well loved, the Democrats are about to run off the Trump name because they think he’s so reviled. They’ll do this probably for decades. From inside the simmering group of democrats who don’t think Trump is all that bad, who believe some of the stuff in the same way that republicans didn’t feel like they fit in with the Reagan dynamic, is going to grow and grow. Just like the republicans, the democrats are going to ignore those who don’t fit. They aren’t everything that Trump isn’t. Isn’t all of it kind of ridiculous anyway? They’ve never met an end that wasn’t busy justifying some poor mean.

And then there will come from the depths of the democratic party, the Democrat Trump. What does someone doing the things that Trump tried to do but for left-leaning causes look like? We need to identify areas where Trump proved our system was weak and look for similar areas a president on the other side might “attack” and shore all of it up.

I’m happy Trump’s done but I don’t want to have to fight the left’s version of him in a few years. I want any and all future presidents of the USA to have the exact amount of power they’re supposed to. I don’t ever want to worry about whether a president is going to try and usurp power again. I want to believe the safeguards are in place But more importantly I want to see with my own eyes that they evolve with modern society.

We’ll have a few years hopefully, but we’ll need them.

This what our politicians need to do now. There needs to be a strategy in place to make sure whatever changes in technology happens, democracy remains firmly in place. This might be something like the doomsday clock, but in reverse. When technology evolves enough — the printing press, the train, the phone, the car, the tv, the vcr, the computer, the internet, 3d printing, AI, etc — adjustments need to be made to ensure democracy is not threatened, that the system works like it’s supposed to.

We need a team of young people. Preferably under thirty but ideally late teens to early twenties who are exceptionally gifted at the newest technologies. You can give them another job once they’re twenty-five, but nobody older than that should be in this committee. Let them name themselves and let them decide what’s an appropriate name. Or at least let them make modifications to the name you suggest. Make sue the committee is large enough to afford all sorts of diversity.

They need to figure out when technology has changed society and adjust accordingly. The kids will know because their parents will have been doing the modern equivalent of asking them to program their VCR, which is where it started getting speeded up. Let them pick their replacements at 19. It’s going to start in some “classes” of society and spread in different ways. That’s why we need diversity.

If you’re reading this spread the word. cut and paste or just say it yourself, whatever. We need to push this as far as possible. I know it’s easier to hide your head in the sand. But now is not the time.

tl;dr: a democrat version of trump is coming and we need to make sure the weak areas trump revealed on the right are not also on the left. Democracy must adapt to technology. It’s meaningless to take a vote when you control what the voters believe.