Election Disconnection

Call it a four-year try-out we’ve just been through of strong-man, one-man politics.  The election put it to a vote, and the country said: enough for now, but not quite No. The USA didn’t so much split down the middle as declare itself two states, of mind and geography, red and blue, or maybe three: Atlantic, Pacific and Farmland, with the next round in doubt. We feel saved, in some sense, but not cured or redeemed.

So we do what you do: enlist the soundest of our friends and keep talking. With people like Citizen Ralph Nader; Masha Gessen with a Russian twist, Green New Dealer Saikat Chakrabarti; historian Rick Perlstein; letter-writer Heather Cox Richardson, the noisy Scotsman Mark Blyth; Chris Hedges, preaching doom; and the only pundit we truly love, the cranky Caribbean-American patriot Amber.

You thought a presidential election could be an exit ramp out of polluted stuck traffic and already you know we’re in the same old breakdown lane — with ingenious fresh touches of absurdity. President Trump lost the popular vote and the electoral college, prompting his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to assure us this week that we are in a peaceful transition to a second Trump administration. What can you do in the breakdown lane but call out for help or at least for company, or judgment with a jolt? And that’s what we’re doing this hour with the Open Source family of historians, preachers, politicians old and young, foreign and domestic.