Reflections on the Recent Election

     Pundits and prognosticators all over the media  are wringing their hands over the miraculous election of Donald Trump, projecting doom and gloom and everything else from a financial meltdown to a nuclear holocaust. In among all these rants some truths have peeked out, and I would like to share some of them.  First, due to the existence of the Electoral College, America is the only country in the world where the president is accountable to all the voters, not just those who voted for him.  In the voting process, the Electoral College functions much like the Senate does in the legislative process: it gives equal, or nearly equal, weight to each state, regardless of population size. Second, America is not, and never has been, a true democracy; we are a representative republic, where senators and representatives do the actual legislating for us. Throughout our governing process there are checks and balances built in, so that no one person or group can easily gain too much power.  This last item has become somewhat problematic, especially during Mr. Obama's administration, with the unchecked growth in the use of Executive Orders by the president, which at least temporarily by-passes the need to get congressional approval in the form of legislation.  The down-side of this is that Executive Orders can be eliminated instantly by the next president, wiping out any gains made by the  previous one. I suspect that Mr. Obama may live to regret taking this short-term approach to implementing his agenda, in that Mr. Trump, when president, can and probably will eliminate many if not most of  his predecessor's orders. I also believe that one of the reasons that Mrs. Clinton did not win, in spite of the apparent popularity of Mr. Obama, is that his policies did not please any group except his core base of socialist-leaning voters, most of whom live in the larger urban areas of the country.  From a population standpoint, more people in the urban areas appear to want these socialist policies, but from a country-wide standpoint, most of the people outside of the urban areas did not want any part of the agenda, which is why Trump won 31 states in the Electoral College while Mrs. Clinton only won 19. The real problem has been a suppression of real diversity, the diversity of thought. The people in power and the media who support them have pushed the idea that only one side is right, labeling anyone who disagrees with them as racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, misogynists or just plain stupid, none of which is true, and none of which helps to have a true dialog related to identifying and solving the nation's problems. So Mr. Trump won.  The media still doesn't seem to be listening, but I hope the people still do.