The America not many People Saw Before
Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, India, November 10th, 2016
Salaroche


"Have Americans gone mad?" A Russian friend asked me yesterday morning, "how could they have elected that guy?"

I told her that millions of them had probably gone mad many years ago and that, just like many other witless people, they had just been hiding their true selves under false pretentions of normality. All that Trump had to do was to lift their veils so that they could all see the light of day.

There really isn’t much else to say about the 2016 presidential election. What’s done is done and all that remains for us to do is hope for the best. The American people may have made the unparalleled blunder of the 21st century, but that will only be known for sure as the next few years unfold.

And ... who knows ... things could turn out to be not as bad as they seemed they would in these past 18 months ... (If wishes were horses ...)

In any case, the year 2016 has provided us with two super surprises. First that of Brexit in June in the UK and recently that of Trump in the US. In both occasions the science of political surveys has been seriously discredited, since in both cases the results were entirely opposite to those predicted by the surveys.

The mentality of the masses has changed in a hitherto unpredictable way, and politicians such as Cameron in England and H. Clinton in the US were clearly unable to adapt to those changes, so they lost in their political bets.

Hillary Clinton deserved to win the election because she has all the qualifications and experience needed to perform well as president, but her electoral campaign was conducted in an entirely conventional manner.

The problem with it was that her opponent was an uncommon character of a kind previously unknown in American political spheres who also led a highly unconventional campaign reflecting the extent to which his followers are fed up with conformity to the country's political traditions.

H. Clinton, then, lost the election because she was unable to recognize the essential characteristics of the political moment in which she had to perform.

People in charge of conducting surveys or polls also have a very good lesson to learn in all of this. Obviously their science and techniques have very serious flaws that have made them lose plenty of credibility.

Who in the future will want to plan their electoral campaigns based on similar political surveys and predictions? Anyone doing so would risk making a very serious mistake, just as Cameron and Clinton did.

In short, the people of the UK are currently in trouble looking for a way to go forward in the least damaging way possible for them and the Americans may very likely find themselves in a very similar situation in the near future.

The good news is that, this time around, neither of these two peoples will have anyone to blame for their problems since whatever fate awaits them it will have been them who imposed it on their own selves.

In the meantime… the beat goes on…

Salaroche