There's been a lot of blather about Party hegemony this election season, and while I don't entirely discount it, I also know that it's a lot harder to be elitist on the local level. Every newly registered voter in our county is invited to join the local committee. What we haven't been good at is educating people about what that means. And of course, it's hard to get past the fact that upper-class, educated elites are society's joiners, which perpetuates that kind of hegemony. I carried baby Olivia in a car seat to committee meetings, but not every parent can do that.
I just took the opportunity to do some of that initial, critical educating in my first column for
Tompkins Weekly. They reached out to me post-election, probably feeling sorry for us, but offering me 800 words monthly, which I happily accepted. It gives me a chance to do the kind of outreach and education (what's a caucus? how do I run for office? when do I need to re-register to vote?) that we as a committee have not been able to do because local media have been generally loath to help us do it. (When I've advertised for potential candidates, the response of the
Ithaca Journal has typically been: "That's your job, not ours.")
We'll make the effort, but again, it comes down to how many people take the time to read 800 words on civics in a local paper with modest readership. Many other steps will be necessary to reach the people who should be included but currently are not.
Most people have no clue how the electoral process works; that was evidenced by how many otherwise educated people were flummoxed by the primary system in NYS (which is stupid and exclusive but really very simple). Paul thinks it's because we no longer teach civics (
we do, but not terribly well). I think it's because people don't much care how the sausage is made until it makes someone sick.
Yes, the OED just listed post-truth as its word of the year, beating out alt-right and woke. I don't have the strength to list the many ways journalism failed us in 2016, but Christiane Amanpour gave a pretty good speech the other day on how threatened our media should feel in Trump Nation. 
The Trump transition just looks like chaos. There is clearly an underlying theme: privatization. You have a Secretary of Education who wants to privatize education. You have a VA Secretary who wants to privatize VA hospitals. You have potential choices for Secretary of the Interior who are all for developing public lands and a Health and Human Services Secretary who wrote the bill to overturn ACA. You have a guy in the running for Transportation whose specialty is private-public partnerships.
There's been a lot of blather about Party hegemony this election season, and while I don't entirely discount it, I also know that it's a lot harder to be elitist on the local level. Every newly registered voter in our county is invited to join the local committee. What we haven't been good at is educating people about what that means. And of course, it's hard to get past the fact that upper-class, educated elites are society's joiners, which perpetuates that kind of hegemony. I carried baby Olivia in a car seat to committee meetings, but not every parent can do that.
I heard from two people today about the joys of explaining Trump Nation to foreigners. One mentioned the difficulty of predicting what will happen next to people who are genuinely afraid of the possible effects on their U.S.-allied nations. One said that in the countries he deals with, people recognize that governments are f*cked up and don't represent the populace, and only idiot Americans would imagine that the system should work.
