Michael Totten has some advice for president-elect Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

It can be boiled down to reverse the Obama doctrine*.

Totten doesn’t say that—not exactly, anyway. But his final paragraph indicates it:

All this advice is based on one simple principle””you reward your friends and punish your enemies. It’s the first rule of foreign policy, one that has been with us since antiquity and will survive until the end of time. Presidents who behave as though this rule doesn’t apply to them are as doomed to fail in foreign policy as rocket scientists who ignore gravity. Hubristically declaring that it would not do “stupid shit” like its predecessors, the Obama administration flipped this rule on its head over and over again””with Israel, with Russia, with Iran, and with Turkey””with disastrous results every time.

So turn things around. Again: Reward your friends and punish your enemies. Tattoo that rule on the back of your eyelids if you have to.

Please read the whole thing.

I actually think Trump has the anti-Obama Doctrine principle down pretty well. It’s the details and the execution that’s hard, and all those black swans that threaten to arrive on the scene.

[*NOTE: I can’t say for sure, but I actually believe I may have been the first one to use the phrase “Obama Doctrine” for Obama’s tendency to stroke enemies and kick allies. I first used it in this post from September of 2009.]

George W. Bush, portraitist

The New Neo Posted on by

I find George Bush’s continuing dedication to painting to be quite fascinating. I like his paintings and think he’s improved since he began. Now he seems to be concentrating on portraiture; this is what an art critic has to say:

They are (Chaim) Soutine-like portraits, thickly painted in what I would call “high-amateur” mode by someone who has clearly studied a little art history and worked with an art teacher…

Beyond Soutine, they also remind me of (paintings done by) a number of emerging artists in New York like Erik Hanson. His portraits are remarkably similar (to these). If I walked into some Chelsea gallery and saw this as a precocious 24-year-old Yale graduate (and saw these paintings), I’d say: “Oh, this is an interesting take on portraiture in 2014. Nothing wrong with that at all.”

Here are a few examples of Bush’s portraits of world leaders, as well as some paintings of his from a new book he’s put out to benefit veterans: Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors.

bush-olmert

bush-bush

bush-threesome

bush-bush-ii

bush-veterans

Trump and Priebus and Bannon

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you’ve probably heard that president-elect Trump has announced some appointments:

The president-elect announced Sunday that he has selected Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to serve as chief of staff in his incoming administration.

In the same announcement, Priebus’ appointment shared top billing with the news that Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon will serve as chief strategist and senior counselor to the president.

“I am thrilled to have my very successful team continue with me in leading our country,” said Trump said in the emailed statement. “Steve and Reince are highly qualified leaders who worked well together on our campaign and led us to a historic victory. Now I will have them both with me in the White House as we work to make America great again.”

The dual selections are likely to send two separate signals to those closely watching Trump’s transition into power.

Indeed. For people who are scrutinizing the Trump appointments for indications of Trump’s ideological and practical intentions (that would be most of us at this blog), this tells us that for now he’s keeping the team of strange bedfellows that brought him here, with the more establishment representative (Priebus) elevated over the hard-hitting alt-rightish guy, but only slightly elevated.

Some people are going to be disappointed and/or fearful/angry about one of these appointments. Some are less than enthused about both. I’m not a big fan of Priebus but I have no real objection to him and I hope he’ll have a grounding and tempering influence on Trump, whereas Bannon raises red flags for me. However, I’m happy that Bannon was not named as Chief of Staff but instead drew the strategist position, which tends to be filled by a political operative good at the messaging part of the equation rather than the setting of policy itself. However, I’m not so naive as to say that such a person doesn’t ever have an effect on policy, though; I would imagine that he/he does.

Who is Bannon? See this for his Wiki: interesting facts in his background include naval officer and then Goldman Sachs investment banker (a similar Goldman Sachs background for Heidi Cruz was considered anathema by many in the Trump wing during the campaign). You can see at Wiki that there are allusions to Bannon’s possible anti-Semitism, and of course there’s his characterization as supporter of the alt-right. But to get to the bottom of those accusations and how much reality there is behind them in terms of the existence or degree of Bannon’s own bigotry as well as his ties to the more extreme white-supremacist wing of the alt-right is a very daunting task at this point.

So for the moment, the Bannon appointment remains a troubling warning sign that may or may not end up meaning anything dire.

One thing we can be pretty sure about is that Trump will have no trouble firing someone with whom he becomes displeased.

Et tu, Oprah?

The New Neo Posted on by

Almost as soon as the Trump win had occurred, I began noticing that, among former Trump opposers left and right, it was shaking down into two camps: the optimists and the pessimists. The optimists were saying some version of “wait and see.” The pessimists were saying that the political apocalypse was coming soon or was already here.

The question of what causes a person to fall into each group could provide prodigious fodder for several doctoral dissertations in political science. Although I don’t know the answer, my guess is that it’s some combination of the person’s degree of liberalism versus leftism, as well as general personality traits on the optimism/pessimism continuum, whether the person belongs to a group that is likely to feel especially threatened (for example, Muslims) and/or is close to a member of such a group, as well as how open the person might be to changing his/her mind about something.

Oprah Winfrey turns out to be in the first camp, falling among the optimists:

The TV host tweeted on Thursday a picture of Donald Trump at the White House with President Barack Obama with the caption ‘Everybody take a deep breath! Hope lives.’

She also told Entertainment Tonight that seeing President Obama and President-elect Trump together had ‘given her hope’.

Predictably, some of Oprah’s fellow celebrities do not like her for this, and refuse to share her sentiments. Some responses that are rather typical:

Celebrities have turned against Oprah Winfrey after she expressed hope in the wake of the election…

Heather Matarazzo wrote: ‘Oprah, you can take a deep breath and hold it while the rest of us literally fight for our lives right now. #smh.’

Grace & Frankie’s June Diane Raphael also urged Oprah not to ‘normalize this man’.

‘Minority children are already being targeted,’ she tweeted.

One leftist approach is starting to shape up, and it will be (as one might have expected) to attribute every bigoted act that occurs in America during the Trump years (and some that don’t; see this) to Trump.

Has the number of such acts actually increased? I don’t know; maybe yes, maybe no. However, it stands to reason that they may have. Most of the people at this blog are aware that there is cause for concern that the more bigoted wing of the alt-right (and its hangers-on) will feel greatly empowered by Trump’s win. And when you’re talking about school children, there’s also a kind of imitative fallout from some of Trump’s own worst behavior and/or speech, and it stands to reason it would bear some fruit (I’m talking about things like kids threatening to grab a girl by the you-know-what). I’m sure schools will crack down hard on the latter sort of behavior, if such things occur, and I’m equally sure that the left will make hay of any incident it can.

This would be the same left that seems unable (actually, unwilling) to connect the dots on—just to take one example—the increase in crime in many urban black neighborhoods known as “the Ferguson effect,” and to connect it to the left’s own behavior:

When officers disengage, the result is not a boon for black lives, as the Black Lives Matter movement would predict. Rather, criminals become emboldened, leading to this year’s bloodbath, whose victims have been almost exclusively black and, far too often, children and innocent bystanders.

Oprah is not alone among former Hillary-supporters in trying to inject a post-Trump note of patience and guarded optimism. But there are others who either are unable at this point to join her (I’ve already discussed them here), or (among the more activist and leftist) who have an investment in continuing to fan the flames of discord.

Leonard Cohen: he was ready

The New Neo Posted on by

After giving us the gift of his music for nearly fifty years, Leonard Cohen has finally gone home:

His son issued this statement on his father’s death:

“My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records,” Cohen’s son Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. “He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor.”

I’ve written so many pieces on Leonard Cohen that I’ve probably said most of what I want to say about his life and his work. His death was expected, but it leaves a hole in the world. His music fills some of that hole. Although music is incorporeal, it is very real.

Here are some YouTube offerings from Cohen. I’ll do this in chronological order. First, one of my absolute favorites—the younger, handsome, melancholy, resonant Cohen of the Famous Blue Raincoat:

A few years later, we have Cohen on the Tower of Song. Some of the lyrics that seem especially poignant today:

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I’m gone
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly
From a window in the Tower of Song

Here is the elderly Cohen, his voice deeper and deeper still—impossibly deep—from an album that just came out (like David Bowie, he released a swan song). The word “hineni” is Hebrew for “Here I am.”

You can go to YouTube and keep going for days listening to the Cohen oeuvre and watching the documentaries and interviews with a man who was always humble, always thoughtful, usually humorous, and often wise. This one focuses on what I call the Dustin Hoffman years (yes, when Cohen was young he was a ringer for Hoffman):

What can I say? If anyone tried to get ready, Leonard Cohen did. Here is part of his last interview:

RIP Leonard Cohen.

Another rant from a liberal, plus some words of hope

The New Neo Posted on by

Get ready for an awful lot of the f-word in the following video, which is by a guy who detests Trump and would have preferred Sanders. But this rant is actually very good. I think he may just be learning what most of the left—of which he is a part—is all about. I’ve been seeing a fair amount of this sort of thing from unexpected sources ever since Tuesday, as the Trump win (and the larger GOP win to go with it) sinks in:

I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon among some of my liberal friends, as well. Although some are still reeling and understandably frightened of the loose cannon Trump and some of his more extreme campaign promises/threats, others have made a quick adjustment. Surprisingly quick.

I’ve already related the conversation I had with a Hillary-supporting Democratic friend of mine on Election Day evening, before any but the very first dribble of returns had come in, the conversation in which she had added—as an aside to her fervent wish that Trump would not become president—a simultaneous and contradictory feeling: “But I’m almost hoping he does win, because I’m very curious what it would be like. It would be exciting.”

That surprised me at the time, and I took it to be a unique and idiosyncratic reaction of this particular friend. But subsequent conversations since the election with a few of my other liberal friends—the ones who’ve made a rather quick adjustment—have convinced me that this sentiment of hers was more widespread than I’d supposed. Now that the election is over and we have President-elect Trump, these people have voiced discontent with Hillary and with Washington. They’re all been somewhat encouraged by what’s gone on since Tuesday. And one even said to me that maybe this would be a wake-up call to both parties to not continue to ignore a bunch of people who’ve been ignored and hurting for years.

I know that this is the traditional honeymoon period for a president-elect. But whatever honeymoon aspects this has—and it most definitely has some—are further enhanced by the fact that this was a honeymoon that was unexpected and unplanned by most people. It’s as though we expected to spend some time in the hospital having a colonoscopy, and after doing all the nasty prep and getting to the point of lying in the hospital room with the IV about to be inserted, instead a brass band came into the room and the drum majorette announces that we need to get up, because instead we’ve won a free trip to a luxury resort in Hawaii.

Now, that resort might be a bit tawdry. It may not be the exactly perfect hotel we would have chosen it we’d had our druthers. But hey, it’s a whole lot better than that colonoscopy.

It may be a silly dream, and it may soon be time to wake up. But the relief and tentatively burgeoning hope so many people are willing and eager to experience underscores what stress both sides have been under, perhaps without fully realizing it, not just for the Obama years but for the Bush years as well. Maybe, just maybe, this improbable, unusual, weirdly-coiffed and spray-tanned reality show president is here to tell us to lay down that weary load, if only for a moment, and enjoy a feeling of national wonderment that we’ve arrived at such an odd place, and to hope that America’s good luck might just be holding out after all when most of us least expected it.

[NOTE: I don’t know exactly where the following item goes, so I may as well put it here. I was watching Fox News last night, and I saw a clip of a recent interview with Trump (I think it came from a forthcoming “60 Minutes,” but I’m not sure). Trump was being asked about the phone call he got from Hillary when she conceded, and he said something that seemed astute, telling, respectful, and even perhaps (dare I say it?) empathetic. He said the call was very hard for Hillary to make—“harder for her than it would have been for me, and it would have been very hard for me,” and then went on to say a few nice things about her.

The guy can turn on a dime, from Hillary-love to Hillary-hate to Hillary-understanding. But of course, we already knew that. But right now I’ll take it, because showing a little graciousness to the other side now that he’s finally won can only help us all in the end.]

Election 2016: fear itself [Part I]

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a lot of post-election fear out there on the part of many liberals who voted for Hillary Clinton.

Not all of them by any means, as I think I’ve made clear in other posts. But along with some my liberal friends who are quickly adjusting and even already welcoming some of the possibilities they’re now sensing in Trump’s impending presidency, I have a lot of other friends who are in various states of alarm and grief.

I’m not talking about celebrities like Streisand. I’m not talking about people making a spectacle of themselves, or destroying property in their anger. I’m talking about ordinary folks who are liberals, some politically active and some much less so, who were genuinely frightened by Trump’s demonstrations of impulsiveness, cruelty, and some of his stated policy intentions during the campaign. And they have every right to be frightened; he gave them an awful lot of fuel for their fearful fire.

I see quite a bit of mockery of these people all around the right side of the blogosphere, from those who are understandably high on the amazing victory that Trump and the GOP have just experienced. Schadenfreude is a popular emotion because it feels so good, and I’m not meaning to rain on anyone’s celebratory parade or to reiterate Trump’s flaws for no reason—I feel hopeful and optimistic right now myself. But I’m very aware of the very real fears of many liberals, fears that I could come to share if Trump’s worst side comes back into the ascendance and stays there, and if some of his worst suggestions (ones he has mostly walked back, thankfully) come to pass.

These are real people to whom I’m very close, several of whom I love very very dearly. After the 2012 election, when they knew how bad I was feeling and how hard I’d worked against the result of that election, some of them were very kind and comforting to me, and none of them rubbed anything in.

So I ask you not to totally forget that there were things that Trump said and did that stoked fears, fears that were even aired at times by a lot of conservatives on this blog (and even many Trump supporters) prior to the election. Remember also that, because most of us here agree with many (not all, but many) of Trump’s stated political aims, we have the luxury of being happy about the GOP Congress along with this presidency. It’s much easier for us to hope for the best and jettison the worst.

Liberals are in a very different position.

A commenter here wrote:

Is professing to be afraid [of Trump’s victory] virtue-signaling? Or do they believe their own propaganda?

For a small minority I suppose it’s virtue-signaling (they’re probably some of the ones posting sobbing videos in order to publicly demonstrate their fears). But not for the people I know, and I know a lot of them. For them it’s very real and very sincere, and it should be very understandable even to Trump supporters.

And for the most part it’s not the result of propaganda, either. There was real evidence—from Trump’s own words—of things which people are genuinely fearful about: his apparent mocking the disabled, his original vow to deport all illegal immigrants (which would necessarily include children), his seeming acquiescence to setting up a registry of Muslims (he walked that one back almost immediately, but many people don’t know that and still remember it with fear), his proposal to stop all Muslim immigration and even (initially) to not allow Muslim citizens or legal non-citizen residents to return to this country if those people leave were to leave. There’s also reason for some people to be afraid of the end of Obamacare, which can be a terrifying thought if its subsidies are the only way a person believes he or she can afford insurance and/or has a pre-existing condition, and doesn’t trust the Republicans to keep those features. For some, ending gay marriage (through SCOTUS appointments), ending abortion (same mechanism), and the whole drift towards conservatism is frightening and disheartening in a very personal way.

These things may not frighten you. In fact, you may highly approve of many of them. But it’s not “virtue-signaling” for a liberal—or anyone affected, for that matter—to be frightened about them. I think that, as time goes on and as Trump’s actual policies and plans emerge, the vast majority of these fears will be allayed. But we don’t know that for certain—and most definitely, they don’t know that at all.

There’s also the alt-right, in particular the bigoted and hateful wing of the alt-right. Whether or not you believe that Trump is in agreement with them (I certainly don’t), he gave them subtle encouragement and they certainly think they’re on the rise. Even without any official Trump stamp of approval or encouragement, they could become very cocky and cause trouble, in the streets or elsewhere. This is another very real fear that I don’t think deserves any kind of mockery.

And then of course there’s Trump’s impulsive nature and some of his impulsive and/or ignorant words about nuclear weapons and the nuclear triangle. Again, you may not agree that he’s that unstable—especially at the moment, when he’s been acting calm and presidential—but there has been plenty of reason that someone could be genuinely afraid of those things. Trump’s own words and character during this campaign season have engendered the fear, and it will naturally take time for trust to build, particularly in those who were on the other side.

As for me, I feel very hopeful at the opportunities this election has opened up, although I don’t know that Trump and the GOP Congress will be able to pull any of it off. But with change of this magnitude—and a president completely untested in political office—a certain amount of anxiety is in order, even if you’re on the right.

Maybe because I was once on the other side, I have no trouble whatsoever imagining how it would feel to be a liberal Democrat and to have watched those election returns on Tuesday night. So I’m asking for some compassion for frightened liberals, and I hope more people extend it, if they really want to Make America Great Again.

[Part II, an examination of the response of Schadenfreude, will be coming soon.]

[NOTE: By the way, some of the fearful are even children, who have picked up on the swirling fear around them, not always from family but some of it in school and social media. I think that’s especially sad and especially worthy of compassion.]

Veterans Day, Armistice Day

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

Yes, indeed, I am that old—old enough to just barely remember when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day. The change in names occurred in 1954, when I was very small, in order to accommodate World War II and its veterans.

Since then, the original name has largely fallen out of use—although it remains, like a vestigial organ, in the timing of the holiday, November 11th, which commemorates the day the WWI armistice was signed (eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month).

I’m also old enough–and had a teacher ancient enough—to have been forced to memorize that old chestnut “In Flanders Fields” in fifth grade—although without being given any historical context for it, I think at the time I assumed it was about World War II, since as far as I knew that was the only real war.

You can find the story of the poem here . It was written by a Canadian doctor who served in the European theater (there is no separate URL for the discussion of the poem, but you should click on the “John McCrae´s Poppies in Flander’s Fields” link on the left sidebar). It’s not great poetry by any means, but it was great propaganda to encourage America’s entry into what was known at the time as the Great War.

The poem’s first line “In Flanders fields the poppies blow” introduces that famous flower that later became the symbol of Armistice—and later, Veterans—Day. Why the poppy?

Wild poppies flower when other plants in their direct neighbourhood are dead. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, but only when there are no more competing flowers or shrubs in the vicinity (for instance when someone firmly roots up the ground), these seeds will sprout.

There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him bloodred poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

But in this poem the poppy plays one more role. The poppy is known as a symbol of sleep. The last line We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields might point to this fact. Some kinds of poppies are used to derive opium from, from which morphine is made. Morphine is one of the strongest painkillers and was often used to put a wounded soldier to sleep. Sometimes medical doctors used it in a higher dose to put the incurable wounded out of their misery.

Now a day to honor those who have served in our wars, Veterans Day has an interesting history in its original Armistice Day incarnation. It was actually established as a day dedicated to world peace, back in the early post-WWI year of 1926, when it was still possible to believe that WWI had been the war fought to end all wars.

The original proclamation establishing Armistice Day as a holiday read as follows:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

After the carnage of World War II, of course, the earlier hope that peaceful relations among nations would not be severed had long been extinguished. By the time I was a young child, a weary nation sought to honor those who had fought in all of its wars in order to secure the peace that followed—even if each peace was only a temporary one.

And isn’t an armistice a strange (although understandable) sort of hybrid, after all; a decision to lay down arms without anything really having been resolved? Think about the recent wars that have ended through armistice: WWI, which segued almost inexorably into WWII; the 1948 war following the partition of Palestine; the Korean War; and the Gulf War. All of these conflicts exploded again into violence—or have continually threatened to—ever since.

So this Veterans/Armistice Day, let’s join in saluting and honoring those who have fought for our country. The hope that some day war will not be necessary is a laudable one—and those who fight wars hold it, too. But that day has clearly not yet arrived—and, realistically but sadly, most likely it never will.

Settling down

The New Neo Posted on by

There may be riots in the streets, but some of the people I know are settling down at least a little, post-election. One of the big reasons, in my opinion, is demeanor.

I’m not just talking about Donald Trump’s demeanor. I mean the demeanor of most of the people involved. It began with Trump’s victory speech, which had a calm and unifying tone. Whatever happens in the next few months and years—and I don’t fool myself that it’s not likely to be loaded with conflict—Donald Trump had a choice as to how he would behave in victory. He made the right choice. The guy who showed up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning had a more soothing presence that most people had ever expected.

One of the advantages of the type of juvenile, insulting, provocative behavior Trump often exhibited during the campaign was that he had almost nowhere to go but up. And go up he did. President Obama and Hillary Clinton went up, too, which was also very reassuring. I commend them all for it—and the stock market commends them, as well.

A year and a half ago, when the campaign season began, I had hopes and dreams of a Republican president and Congress. Somewhere along the line quite early on I pretty much gave up on that hope. It seemed that Trump would be nominated and that he was likely to lose, although not certain to lose. And it even seemed as though the Senate would change hands.

So it took a while for it to really settle in early Wednesday morning that no, that’s not what had happened at all. Forget Donald Trump for a moment, and my reservations about him. The unlikely thing had actually occurred, and the hope I had way back in the spring of 2016 had come true—GOP sweep—albeit with a slightly (!) different cast of characters.

So now I get to muse on one of the things I hadn’t let myself indulge in much before: who might be in the new Cabinet. Which things from the Obama years might be undone and which things that have been proposed for the next years done.

Yes, a lot of things could go wrong—a lot. But the longer Donald Trump manages to go without acting like a child, or a loose cannon, or a vindictive narcissist, the better it gets for everyone and for the country as a whole. Hey, the better it gets for the world.

I always said that’s what I would be hoping for if Trump is elected. We’ve had two and a half days of it. Time to celebrate. But now the shoe is on the other foot, the ball is in the GOP’s park, it’s put up or shut up time, and all those other cliches. The GOP must prove to the American people that it can do a better job than the Democrats did. As I noted yesterday, if you pass legislation that doesn’t work out in reality rather than rhetoric, the people will ultimately know, and they won’t thank you for it. The Republicans are running the show right now, and they’ll have to deliver a quality product.

If they manage to do that, though, it could have its own transformative effect on at least some of the people on the other side, who can’t help but notice that Republicans aren’t the demons they’ve been led to fear. And if the GOP doesn’t manage to deliver, the people are likely to reject them next time they get the chance.

[NOTE: Tomorrow I plan to write the post I promised on the fear and angst many liberals are experiencing at the moment, and the reaction of many people on the right to that fear.]

Here’s a brave man

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an epic anti-MSM rant by Will Rahn, a political correspondent and managing director for CBS News Digital.

Why brave? He’s at CBS, and his essay doesn’t pull any punches about the press. And I don’t think a lot of people on either side are going to give him many kudos. The left will hate him, and much of the right (at least in the comments to the article that I saw) seems to be hating on him, too.

Election 2016: not so deep as a well; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve

The New Neo Posted on by

This Republican victory was a very republican victory.

Not the small “r” in that last “republican.” On election night I noticed, long before Trump had been declared the victor, that although a lot of states were still undeclared, there was a pattern and the pattern was that Trump was ahead in nearly all of them. The pattern held, and that pattern (and the Electoral College itself) reflected the fact that Founders set up this country as a republic, in which states retained their identities as separate entities of some importance.

But not overwhelming importance. That’s why the House was set up. That’s why there is a popular vote, and it matters. But it doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the electoral vote, which is done through the states, mostly winner-take-all. Among other things, the Founders didn’t want huge population centers to dominate, and they wanted smaller states to have their say.

The names of the parties aren’t an accident, either. Republicans are called that because in general they believe in republican principles, and many Democrats would actually like this country to lean more towards democracy and the popular vote, and abolish what they consider an archaic and unfair Electoral College. I’m not going to get into that battle today, except to note it and to say I’m on the republican side of it.

If you look at the results of Tuesday’s election state by state, you’ll note that Trump’s victory was wide, and in some places it was deep but in quite a few states it was shallow. That is, almost all of those states that were projected to be neck-and-neck broke for Trump. It was as though a very shallow wave came ashore in those states, just enough to wet the sand. But it was enough to wet a lot of sand. In particular, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida (in Florida the victory margin was somewhat larger)—as well as Michigan, which is still undecided but where Trump is ahead—the margins were all very close. Those states are large and influential, and had they gone the other way, Clinton would be president. But they did not, and that turned out to be very very significant, because whatever forces led to the Trump win were acting over a wide variety of close states.

It looks like Clinton has won the popular vote, however, even though the absolutely final count isn’t in yet. What does that mean, in an Electoral College system? Not much, actually, except to provide fodder for those who won’t concede that Trump actually won and who don’t like the system anyway. But if you look at Clinton’s loss you’ll see that it included enormous and very deep support in many of our largest states, in particular California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, and this is mainly where her popular vote total came from.

That’s not to say that Trump didn’t win large states, too; he did. Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, (and Michigan, if he ends up winning it) are large, too. Trump won Texas and Ohio handily. But the others ranged from close (Florida) to extremely close. That’s where the shallow wave effect came in.

The title of this post quotes from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Now I’ll quote from John Donne, who wrote “no man is an island, entire of itself.” Well, except for tiny Rhode Island, no state is an island; each is “a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Some of the Clinton states may want to become islands, and may feel that they are already islands (islands of sanity, to their way of thinking). But they are not, and this election has reminded them of that.