American voters were tired of the status quo

Editor, RE: “The world is one huge glass house” (The New Times, January 10). Everything the writer states may be true, but is predicated on what seems to me an entirely false assumption that the outcome of the US presidential elections (and for Congress both of whose chambers as well as the majority of gubernatorial contests went Republican for the first time in living memory) was determined—even modestly—by outside influences rather than American voters’ awareness of their dire economic circumstances which, as has usually been the case in previous elections, they blame on the party which holds the White House. In this particular election, the electorate was completely disenchanted with professional politicians, which is why the Democratic Party establishment could get their preferred candidate through their primary only through underhand tactics against the insurgent candidacy of Bernie Sanders, while the non-politician Donald Trump walloped a stable of more fancied professional politicians as if they were no more than nine pins. Interestingly, neither Sanders nor Trump were even really Democrat or Republican card-holding members, assuming those major party labels only for the convenience it afforded their presidential campaigns. It seems to me the very definition of “sore losers” to shift responsibility for the defeat of professional politicians from themselves to outside influences. How many American voters, for instance, even know of the existence of or care of Russia Today (RT), watch it or care about what it has to say about their politics or their current circumstances in which, for an all too many of them, the American Dream has become an existential nightmare even as a few well-connected plutocrats make out like bandits? It seems to me that, until the American elites in the US—and elsewhere in the West—realize the utter mess they have created in their internal governance as well as the misery they have unleashed across wide swathes of the globe in unceasing wars—bullets instead of butter, more and more voters in their countries will begin opting for more populist alternatives to the career politicos. People are not stupid; they know electing the same kind of people over and over again will bring them the same miserable results over and over again. This realization does not require outside powers’ hacking or any other kind of interference with the concerned countries’ democratic processes. You can fool some of the people for some time, but eventually they get to see for themselves that the game is rigged against the masses in favor of a few well-connected insiders. Then the plebeians’ fury erupts against those they blame for their misery. Does such a revolt portend better days ahead? Not necessarily. But people also get to a point where they believe the status quo or merely tinkering at the margins of the established order cannot bring them a solution to their problems; that a radical change—including jumping into the unknown—is preferable to their current status quo. Mwene Kalinda

Opinions

American voters were tired of the status quo