Mr. Crawford
You are avoiding the issue of strong and soft for any political party. Soft support can be swayed not to vote. Most negative political advertising is specifically designed to convince the soft support of the other political party is not worth the trip to the polls. It works in Canada; it works in the USA. If it didn’t work and didn’t get the results the parties were looking for, they would stop doing it. How many of the 50% of American who normally don’t vote don’t vote their preference because they have been influenced by negative advertising? Hard to say. But the campaign professionals know what works to win elections.
I had an aunt who the pollsters just used to love calling. She could spend hours answering their silly questions. She had an opinion on everything. But she never voted once in her life. Polls don’t measure the ambition to get to the ballot box and cast a vote. Yes, maybe 55% of Americans favour impeachment. But how many will cast a vote in 2020? How many will cast a vote if Mr. Trump can somehow find an angle to expose the D candidate as a flawed person? I would not count on that 55%.
I don’t believe in red and blue states. In any state, the non-voters outnumber each party’s strong and soft support. In most elections, if 10% of the non-voters decided to cast a vote in a more or less unified way, they could flip red to blue or vice versa. In 2015, Kentucky elected an R governor with a 52–48 split. This is not a state that is just frothing with R’s with no D’s to be seen anywhere.
The R Party will keep Mr. T as long as it feels he can deliver an electoral success for them. If it senses that Mr. Trump can convince 50% not to vote or have an interesting angle of attack on the D candidate, they just may back him for a lot longer. But there was a small shift in Kentucky that was just big enough to cause concern. The drama shall continue.
If the R Party does manage to dump Mr. Trump, the social/political forces that put Mr. Trump in the presidency are still there. The next populist leader will be younger and smarter than Mr. Trump. He/she will learn from the Trump mistakes. USA should be thankful it can learn from the Trump presidency. But voting D is not the ultimate answer.
When I read your other article, it reminded me of that book (that you recommended) I am currently reading. What I am getting out of this book is (1) that real political change only comes after a violent revolution, (2) the victors outline the new change, (3) the new ways are OK at first, (4) but fail to adapt to the changing society mostly because of entrenched vested interests, (5) eventually resulting in political decay and (6) another violent revolution.
In my TDG book, I had already sort of described this cycle. Maybe I need to be be more explicit.
If a near-future civil war is indeed our historical destiny, then I have to ask why are you bothering wasting your spare time in internet forums? You — and the thousands of anti-Trumpers pounding on keyboards — are not powerful enough to break this historical cycle.
The TDG must be built in a non-violent way. It will need time to mature to the point where it can handle the complexities of governance in a competent manner.
If you don’t believe the TDG has any viability, then stop wasting your time on Medium trying to convince trump supporters of the errors of their ways.
