When people are upset, you ‘can’t reason with them’. A marriage counselor taught that when upset, people often change how they ‘code their messages’. When this happens, they go into trances dominated by stress.
Jim Turner
As the quarrelsome year of 2016 passes, 2017 arrives with the possibility of strength in administration and principled criticism in opposition by all Americans, including the more than half who disassociated themselves from the Presidential election.
Comedy Central’s Samantha Bee and virulent conservative Glenn Beck? Together? Approaching one million views, “Strange Bedfellows – Full Frontal” with rebel Samantha Bee hosting ultraconservative Glenn Beck makes a Transpartisan point.
Transpartisans, people from all walks of life and all political hues committed to solving problems together, can affect political reality. They can do this by constructively integrating the Founders’ checks and balances with the powerful democratizing information tools permeating our daily lives.
In the years since the Declaration of Independence, celebrated by Lincoln at Gettysburg, ascendance to Presidential office has wrung disbelieving fits of fear from concerned Americans.
Trump won. Electoral vote 306; popular vote 62,693,993. Clinton lost. Electoral vote 232; popular vote 65,260,513 (and counting). (CNN, Dec 5, 2016). “Voter Eligible Population That Didn’t Vote: 95,899,115 (41.4 percent of total eligible voters.)…there were 251,107,404 people who classify as members of the voting-age population; therefore 115,449,897 of the voting-age population (or 46.3 percent) did not vote.” (Click here for reference). The voting age population includes non-eligible voters such as 2.5 million felons, thus the difference between voting age population and eligible voters.
Barack Obama and Donald Trump share a common aversion to ‘nation-building’ in foreign policy.
Progressive critics of President-Elect Trump are producing a blizzard of warnings about authoritarianism both in the President-Elect and in many of his followers. They are right to be concerned about anti-democratic sentiment from any source. Similar authoritarianism can be part of mass demonstrations against the new administration. We need to worry about this.
We heard a transpartisan side to Donald Trump’s victory speech and reprint parts of it here to mark a first step in Trump’s presidency and as a measure for it as it unfolds. We suggest that as transpartisans we take up the invitation.
It is impossible to comment on this election without retreating into clichés. Everything that could be said has been said. How should transpartisans be looking at what happened? What might reality look like with Trump as President?