Donald Trump will be our president for the next four years. We are living through unprecedented times. It’s hard not to see this as a huge protest vote—with several sometimes competing things being protested. The effects of globalization. Job insecurity. Alienation from others and anxiety about the future. Anxiety about rapid and continuous cultural change. Anger over elite privilege. The list goes on. I doubt if Donald Trump is going to change anything in a direction that fixes those problems. The fact that Elon Musk loves him, and Jeff Bezos is willing to play ball with him by shutting down the Washington Post editorial board says that he’s ultimately very friendly to large corporations. The stock market is going up.
As confusing as this is for some of us, Harris would not have changed things very much, though she might have lent some predictability to the system. We have to hope that this event causes leadership in the country to really reassess their own priorities. Surely it is becoming clear that our problems are deeper than some of the superficial issues that are used to capture people’s attention, whether illegal immigrants “invading” the country, or woke professors agitating at elite universities, or abortion or gender identity issues, and probably project 2025 (let’s hope). Our inability to control our economic environment and our economic future is closer to the heart of the problem, and our spiritual void is probably at the heart of that.
I will not be online Thursday for my regular monthly session, but I will be starting sessions on themes from my book on November 18. I want to talk about the deeper problems that need to be addressed.
Political Philosophy 