Trump’s parting electoral tantrum puts the exclamation mark on the fundamental flaw of democracy that his presidency has revealed: that a poorly informed electorate can willingly choose its own demise (even as it recites platitudes to the contrary).
Two institutions are most implicated in this flaw: public education and the mass media. In well functioning democracies, both of those institutions are supported, at least in part, by the state, which is in turn supported by people according to their abilities (through taxation).
In the United States, institutionalized greed (private and corporate) wedded itself to reality-denial (of an evangelical, millenarian religious sort) back in the 1970s-1980s in a marriage of convenience that set out to destroy the very notion of a shared public sphere, including public education, publicly accountable media, public lands, and all the rest. Trump’s entire domestic agenda amounted to destroying the last vestiges of what was left.
Now he is trying to bring down even the semblance of democracy, in case anyone anywhere still believes in it.
His secret motto might be: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. In Trump we see our own illusion of selfhood, ego, possessor of a reality we can’t possibly take hold of, let alone control. When we look at the bumbling Trump through the eyes of the Gita (or the Dharma, or the Bible properly understood, or process-relational philosophy), we realize a kinship between him and us, and the sadness that comes with that realization. A sorry sight, but passing. The only response, as always, is compassion towards those who are needlessly suffering, and joyful action to remedy it.
(His own suffering is not needless, but karmic. It will resolve itself, but its effects will be lived with by others.)
