The danger in winning is real. Winning produces euphoria – perfectly understandable, and inevitable. On the darker side, winning can also create the impression that what you did to win was correct, and, therefore, doesn’t need to be changed. Losing is much healthier, since it makes you question everything you did, and look for ways of improving your performance.
At the time of writing, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party haven’t quite won the current U.S. Presidential Election – although solid trends indicate that they will. When they win, the pent-up euphoria will explode. A short explosion is positive, but if it continues, and a stops longer-term analysis of the strategies that produced that result, it’s very dangerous.
In my opinion, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both in enormous disarray. Both have lost their way, and both need to rethink what they represent, and how well they represent whatever that is. Both Parties, as Parties rather than just candidates, are moribund. The Republican Party has relinquished its position to “The Donald Trump Party” and the Democratic Party hasn’t had a cohesive direction, other than being the “anti-Trump Party”, since Hilary Clinton lost the election four years ago. Donald Trump has actually done a far better job of creating a cohesive base than has Biden, or the Democratic Party – Trump’s followers are fanatically loyal to him despite his ludicrous antics, his lies and his vitriolic rhetorical.
The fact that Biden will win by close margins, when the voter turnout is the largest in U.S. history, and Biden received more votes than any president in U.S. history, is indicative of something wrong. Incidentally, the fact that Trump received the second largest presidential vote in U.S. history, deserves close and detailed analysis as well.
Biden has won – it was announced while I was writing this – but there are huge lessons for both parties in the results.
The Founding Fathers of the U.S. intended, as far as we know, that liberals and conservatives create a sensible balance for the country’s development. They certainly did not intend that the division of philosophies between the two parties should be a yawning canyon that is almost unbridgeable.
As I have written before, the Republican Party has been hijacked by the Evangelical and Redneck “Right” and the Democratic Party has dissolved into a far left, medium left, amoeba that tries to be all things to all people, and ends up with no coherent message at all.
If you haven’t got the picture……….both parties are in a very dangerous mess that threatens the future of the country. However, the danger in winning weighs heavier on the Democrats than it does the Republicans.
In my not-so-humble opinion, the Democratic Party has to get rid of Pelosi and the old hypocritical party mafia (I do not include Biden in this mafia, by the way) and the Republican Party has to take back command of the conservative side of political philosophy, which means getting rid of Trump and the evangelical mafia. Only then can the country start the long process of healing internally, and re-establishing itself as a credible world leader.
