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I used to think I was a conservative, but I’m not. Because I live mostly among liberals, my instinctive need to disagree with the crowd made me think I’m a conservative. Turns out, I’m just contrary.
In general, mobs are wrong. So, if voter turn-out is mob-driven, and the voting crowd becomes mob-sized, the votes are probably wrong, too. More people voted for Trump in this election than in the last one. No one with a working brain can possibly believe that a massive turn-out for the worst person ever to occupy the office is a good thing, that it is something to be extolled as “democracy in action.” It isn’t. Trump’s voters are what the writers of Deadwood called “the hoopleheads,” people who are riled up but don’t have a clue how to solve their problems. They are straw-graspers, not patriots.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Hoopleheads are an important electoral bloc; their interests should be served by our politicians. But the object is not to win their votes. The object is to calibrate their apathy to their ignorance. Donald Trump is president because Mitch McConnell broke the government and Barack Obama didn’t have the political chops to make him pay. Comprehensive immigration reform, workable healthcare, and massive infrastructure projects were right there for the doing, but the GOP decided that judgeships…