Strange and Strained Observations.

Its interesting, post election, to see the conclusions that people have reached regarding what just occurred.

Indeed, we should take heart at that.  People's prognostication abilities, even those of really bright people, often tend to be incredibly poor.  We all know this and exhibit it when we actually express surprise that a dire prediction, or a cheerful one, of the past actually comes true.  Most flat out don't.

Which doesn't mean that they don't have some contemporary influence, sometimes negative influence, at the time they're given.

A strong feature of this is to rationalize the recent results.  People who lost are convinced that its a milestone in the decline of something, just as people who've won assume its the turning point in something.  Sometimes it is, but rarely so.

So, with that introduction, we'll note a few of the more strained ones we've seen.

Victor David Hanson, the agrarian Southern Californian historian, whose histories I do like, but whose political analysis is frankly suspect, came out with the conclusion that the election has been a hallmark of decline because the "tradition" of "everyone" going to the polls on Election Day has been destroyed.

While he doesn't come right out and say it this creeps up on two arguments, one out in the open and another one that is not, that this past election has had about mail in ballots.

What people want to say, if they're opposed to them, is that they're an invitation for fraud.  This has in fact been the bloody banner that Trump started waiving before the election, but at least in this election that proved to be absolutely false.  

The other thing, which people don't argue openly, is a long held feeling that if you mail out ballots the poor and minorities will vote, and they'll all vote Democratic.

Well, that turns out to be false too.

Indeed, if anything, what this election demonstrated is that encouraging record numbers of voters by whatever means actually favors Republicans.  Going off of old models, the Democrats assumed, and understandably, that they were going to demolish Trump at the polls and take out the GOP with him.

They didn't do that.

Indeed, Republicans did really well at the polls.

And finally VDH's historical analysis is just baloney.  We've been moving towards a longer election season and mail in ballots for decades.  Arguably it started during World War Two when the country actually debated on whether to let soldiers vote or not.  It decided they could. . . by mail.  In the Western U.S. mail in balloting has been common my entire adult life.  In recent elections more and more people have availed themselves of that process.  Only in the East Coast was the "show up and vote" process the norm, and mostly because Eastern states are really slow to adopt innovations of that type.

And even if mailing out ballots does change the tradition, so what?  Does VDH want to go back to locked wooden boxes?  For over half of the country's existence the tradition was that only men voted, and for that matter lots of Native American men weren't regarded as citizens, even as recently as a century ago.

So that's just loss sulking, really.

In the same camp is Conrad Black, but with a different twist.

Black is a Canadian ex pat living in the UK who was convicted of some sort of crime in the US and pardoned by Trump.  He's wealthy and a Trump supporter.  He's also the founder of the Canadian National Post.

Black has issued his opinion that Trump backers should not despair as within six months Americans will be crying for the return of Donald Trump, leading to Trump Revolution Part Three (I'm not sure why its part three, but he feels that it is) in 2024, or even earlier.

Well, my prognostication on Presidential elections hasn't been great recently, so perhaps I should abstain from a prediction here, although I did get the results, but not the margins, right this go around.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that there were "no second acts in American lives" and that's largely true.  I don't see Trump coming back, although lots of Republicans are living in hope or fear of just that. 

Indeed, my prediction is that the next six months are not going to be good for Trump who is going to have to worry about Federal prosecutors in some areas who are still circling like sharks in some areas, and others in both the Democratic Party and the GOP who will be out for revenge.  Trump's going to have to endure an immediate assault on his reputation and he won't have the bully pulpit to lecture from.

Indeed, we really don't know what his own personal finances are like and there's been some speculation, which may be completely in error, that part of the reason he continues to fight to hold on to the White House is purely personal.  There's something to hide.  I don't think that will be the case or that this is his motivation, but we can be sure that there are going to be piles of memoirs and releases that start flooding out after January 20 and little of it is going to be complimentary.  If there's really anything to hide, moreover, its coming out.  Again, I don't think a dossier of photographs will be slipped under a door from the Russian Embassy, but I do think that Trump is set to be trashed more than any President, ever.

Additionally the ability of a departing President to really retain a grip on anything is pretty poor. The only ones I can think of are Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland.  And Roosevelt doesn't provide a really good example as he retained support of less than half of the Republican Party in his attempt at a post office run, which split the party.  When he left office the party was united behind him.  In very short order, it wasn't.  Younger Republicans who have been biding their time to run for the Oval Office are probably not going to wait.

Nor should they.  Surely the current President will be the last Boomer President.  He needs to be.  The grip of the Boomers on American politics has been excessively long and is growing exceedingly long in the tooth.  Indeed, Political lamented this last year in an article entitled:

How the baby boomers broke America

The most likely outcome in 2020 is that voters will yet again ask a baby boomer to fix what the baby boom broke.

The article correctly predicted the results, but this literally can't keep going on this way.

Which brings me back to Trump.  He's in his 70s now and doesn't look fit.  Indeed, he looks like somebody who has been living on stress and adrenaline.  In a little over a month, he's going to get a break, and like a lot of old fighters who get one, witness again Theodore Roosevelt after his last run, my suspicion is that he's going to be in situation of the classic Top Gun line in that his "ego is writing checks his body can't cash".

If that sounds rather dire, I don't mean it to be, but I've seen this too many times and with men a lot less controversial than Trump.  Something about the daily routine and even the daily struggle of hard stressful jobs either kills people young are keeps them going into old age.  Once they get a break, the rest sets in a rapid decline, and it does that to men who are in a lot better shape than Donald Trump.  Indeed, those who retire best are those that had other interests to go to.  There's no evidence that Trump does.

Not that I'm really terribly optimistic about Joe Biden and his ability to run again either.  He's a very old man that has worn out a lot of very young men.  My guess is he's going to be a one term President.  I suspect in four years he won't run again and Trump won't be in any shape to do so.  Trump may make a pretense at it, but time will have passed him by.

Another National Post commentator, whose name I've forgotten, who is an American ex pat declared that the election proved the US needed to "modernize" its election system by which she meant make the US system a parliamentary one.

You'd have to be delusional to think the US is going to do that.  We're not going to.

Indeed, ironically, for a columnist who wasn't impressed with Trump, if we did that, Trump would have remained the President.  If the House is our House of Commons, and its controlled by Republicans, and the Commons picks the chief executive, that would be the result.

Moreover, that writer cited Woodrow Wilson favorably noting that he preferred parliaments, which he did, and he was the only President who was an historian. That latter citation isn't really correct unless we mean an academic historian, and even at that its only marginally true.  Wilson was a lawyer by training and went back to school to study history after feeling that courtroom work wasn't his deal.  It probably wasn't.  Theodore Roosevelt, however, was also a published historian.

Wilson was also a racist and pretty ineffectual in the last year of his Presidency so he's not an ideal model for things overall.  Indeed, he was a pretty poor President in general.

Moreover, citing the Canadian example right now only suffices in comparison to the last four years, if you assume that the last four years were embarrassing, which half the country does, another half does not, and which most of the outside world does.  Canada's chief executive is the politically correct pretty boy Justin Trudeau, who most Americans ignore and whom Canadians ought to.

So, anyhow, a slate of interesting opinions.  My predictions are that all of them are going to be wrong.  What the future will hold, only the future will tell, but my guess is that we're going to have a moderately center left government for the next four years, most of the really dramatic stuff that people hope for or fear won't occur, although some of it will, and that in 2024 the contenders aren't going to be Donald Trump or Joe Biden.