I don't see so much of a collapse of the bipartisan system though. If you look back at the history of the parties, what's happening now is not inconsistent with what has happened in the past: one party will be in power long enough to become the establishment, and then they become complacent, corrupt, and "old" in terms of ideas and policies. The opposing party then re-establishes itself as the reform/change party, and has its run. Since its a lot easier to blame the establishment, then to blame your own shitty policies, it is much easier for a "change candidate" to get elected in times like this. Then, slowly, the party that lost is forced to re-analyze itself, and adapt to the new party's ideas. rinse/repeat. Over time, it has this flip-flopping appearance, but this is in a very inefficient manner what keeps the whole thing in check.

The thing that allows this to work is, in the past, the losing party and its members says, "okay, election is over, let's let this guy do his thing and have faith in America and in the process".

Obviously, now, we have something very real that is saying "This is not America, and this is not how it is supposed to work!". I'm disappointed that culturally, this time around, the tried and true "American" ideals of following the process and hoping for good things to happen has died, and been replaced with excuses and negativity and accusations of foul play. There is a very dark force behind all of this, I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it is not the best for America (no, it's not Russia).

I heard a theory that made the most sense though to explain the phenomenon: at some point in the campaign, it was figured out that creating a virtual "demon" for people to fear had a massive effect. Trump had the wall/refugees/terrorists thing. Hillary then, countered by painting the same target on Trump himself: "If he gets elected, deplorables will run the country, and anyone who isn't wealthy white person will be trampled". This latter was supposed to be easily defused once Hillary won, and came in to vanquish the foe, and save America. But this didn't happen; the bomb was not defused. And now we have millions of worked up folks believing that literal orange Dorito Hitler is president and wants to do very bad things to America and its people. This idea has not been let go, nor could it be once Hillary lost. And with the media complicit, there is no end in sight, really.

Of course, all of this is probably just symptomatic of a larger issue, which probably lies somewhere between corruption, globalism, and a changing world demographic who doesn't want America to succeed (or, more appropriately, wants it to become something else that it is not-- more like them) and is more than ever easily able to expose the ideas to the world via internet and media. This will get more and more pronounced in the coming years, unless something reverses itself.

Edit: To add why I think it will take some time is that first, we have to go more toward socialism and let that play out for a while-- I don't think things get really bad until we go down that road for a couple decades. Then yeah, you're right, at that point something will trigger a recession/downturn and we could go down fast. But we're some ways away from that happening.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/2017 03:07PM by Jib.