Who's to Blame?

Trump's 2016 victory was not the fault of polls and pollsters who were simply wrong. His victory was the victory of the real America over the America we like to imagine. His victory was the triumph of the America which is uneducated, unimpressed with ideas bigger than self-interest, unable to discern truth-telling from propaganda. Let's not pretend this is something unusual. It has happened ever since the democratic electoral system developed in the advanced world. The French who elected a representative body to reform the country in 1789 managed in 1849 to vote for a scoundrel who took the country into disastrous foreign entanglement, Napoleon the Little (III). The Germans, of course, are the clearest example of a country optimistically believed to be at the top of science, knowledge, technology and philosophy who found their saviour in Adolf Hitler. The rest of Europe wasn't much better. Italy loved Mussolini, in some ways the best Italian ruler since the emperor Augustus but one fatally flawed with Trump-like bombast and immoderation. The British, with their usual understatement, did not elect scoundrels in the period before WWII, only mediocrities which let truly evil men elsewhere prevail. Trump represents perhaps the real America, the one we wish were not there, or here.