The Hitchhiker's Guide to Twenty-First Century America

With the absurdity level of the 2016 election continuing to increase, I think it is best to look back for some perspective.  Here are some of Douglas Adams' thoughts about president and ruler from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
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Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was the ideal presidency fodder.

The President in particular is very much a figurehead { he wields no real power whatsoever.He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria. Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had {he has already spent two of his ten Presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these very few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn't be more wrong.

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. . . Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job. . .The fact that he had become President of the Galaxy was frankly astonishing, as was the manner of his leaving the post. Was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomably into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

It is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

The Ruler of the Universe is a man living in a small shack on a world that can only be reached with a key to an unprobability field or use of an Infinite Improbability Drive. He does not want to rule the universe and tries not to whenever possible, and therefore is by far the ideal candidate for the job.
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This foresight by Adams only highlights his intelligence and awareness of devolution in the process of government. In the postmodern world of superficiality and spectacle, the real projections of power become the inverse of the apparent nodes, existing at the invisible bottom of the superstructure, not at the top.  The president here is all surface, an attraction of spectacle, while the ruler lives in hidden isolation behind the scenes.  Those who do not want power are those that are most deserving of it and can yield it most judiciously and effectively, while those that want it are the most corruptible and least likely to be "objectively" good at it.

In application, this can quite clearly be applicable to Trump and his postmodern, reality-TV spectacle approach, which overrides serious, thoughtful, calculated, and determined practice of governance. For those that think a rejection of the establishment is the crucial factor in contemporary politics, I contend that that approach is, at best, just more superficial spectacle, becoming farther removed from the real serious business of governing.  At worst (and this is becoming actualized with the elimination of Sanders), it is just a more extreme form of the Tea Party movement.  It is just an evolution of the 2010 election which sought to block President Obama at every turn.  Now it is looking to completely bypass the democratic process of compromise and agreement and replace it with the singular perspective of an extreme political movement.  Before a democrat became president, when was the establishment bad? Reagan was establishment, and the Bushes were just continuations of that line.  But, if a black liberal (through accusation anyway) becomes the leader of the free world (twice), then the establishment becomes the problem.  This election was been one continual highlighting of what a circus the anti-establishment is.  If we could throw out this distorted notion, maybe we can get back the serious issues.

For those that think government is the problem, I invite you take a time machine back to the 90s.  There were still serious issues that needed to be solved, but we were on the right road and had a good start.  American life looked ever more promising until being derailed in 2000.  Those that continue to perpetuate this myth fall into two groups - first, conservatives who have deluded themselves into forgetting the Clinton era America (by propagating a Bush-hero myth and transferring the problems of the 2000s back to an "origin" in the 90s, thereby erasing the massive failure that was the Bush administration and projecting all of his failings on to Clinton.  The second group are the millennials, many of whom were too young to understand the Clinton years, and are now being fed Fox history to rewrite and degrade that era.  Their criticisms reveal a great misunderstanding of recent history.

On a deeper level, we must separate the President from the American System.  There is a course that America sets through history, and this will not be changed by an alternate presidential choice.   Does anyone really think that drone strikes will be different depending on H Clinton, or Trump? Or that Sanders would have been any different?  Or Johnson? At this level, the precedent has been set, and will continue autonomously, or decided by people whose job it is to keep it going.  Presidents may change history on a larger level, by invading sovereign nations under false pretenses which destroy 200 years of American policy [1].  But, generally, that which they have an effect on is much smaller, and more domestic.  Tax rates for those who depend on every dollar, and the general tone of what is acceptable in society are the real things at risk.  Economic policy which favors the dominant oligarchy is self contained and will continue on.  And geopolitically, the America-as-singular-super-power will continue on unabated.  No one within the system is going to risk implementing something which might impede this course.  Who we choose for president should be based on who has the best temperament to embody what we want America to persist and present itself as. That person should be presidential as an individual.  And, they should be chosen on what tone we want to domestic policy to reflect, in ways that shape American value over time, making slight corrections to the course.  But, we should not vote thinking that the President makes decisions that decide every minute policy.  That would in actuality be bad. Very bad.  That would lead straight in totalitarianism.  But, that is the picture that Trump is presenting - that he will be able to change every little thing that makes America not great.  By immersing himself in this distortion, he is either a scam artist, or actually ignorant and incompetent.

Michael Weiss has written a very interesting analysis of Trump in  "Donald Trump’s Anti-Semitic Mob Came for Me." He also evaluates the placement of trump in the postmodern age:

"Trump is everything and anything to this camp because he is the first postmodern authoritarian in American history, a man for whom truth is a relative concept defined exclusively in relation one’s perception of the central, overriding object: the authoritarian himself . . . Trump’s positions are wildly inconsistent and galvanizing at the same time . . . He thinks America under Obama has become a weakling superpower that doesn’t stand up to its manifold adversaries, but he wants to destroy NATO."

Furthermore, he makes a enlightened connection between the relativistic nature of postmodernism and the essentialist conservative position:

"Postmodernism got its fullest articulation on the European left, but it’s always been at home on the international right: its forerunner theorist was Martin Heidegger, who infamously embraced National Socialism, which of course didn't stop him from becoming an icon to French radicals once Hitler was defeated. The internet has only given these fiefdoms of infinite “interpretation”—climate change denialists, the anti-vaxxers, chemtrails obsessives—more stridency and organization."

The postmodern rejection of Truth and its replacement with unending layers of interpretation can indeed serve the right just as well as the left.  Weiss insight-fully identifies the Trump as the first candidate to fully embrace this disconnect and use the contradictory nature of its structure as an advantage. One thing is certain, politics will not be the same as we shift toward a new epoch that overturns modern structures.  The nation state has become increasingly more irrelevant as groups like ISIL exert influence, and now the very nature of the politician and the political movement is evolving in to new types of entities.


[1] It is very conceivable that The (American) System would have found a way to create a great Middle Eastern Intervention without Bush and his personal and enthusiastic interest in Iraq, but it would have been very different under Gore, who would have been reluctant and would have appeared through his hesitation as weak and indecisive, just as Obama has been presented. However, if the US is going to make giant international moves without regard for actuality, I would prefer they are done less arrogantly and with more forethought.  A much better chess-board story could have been fabricated to prompt US action.