The Here and Now and the Future

              

THE HERE AND NOW

We've just had an election and departed with a near dictator (though he had the will, he did not have the skill). The foundations of our election were shaken.

The  few words there are in the constitution about elections came to a test. The founding fathers apparently did not trust us that much. There was an option in there of the lower house of Congress (very big of them to leave it to a group of politicians representing more of us, not the senate) deciding who will be president if the election was a mess. The Supreme Court really is not involved.

Following this lead giving the states great powers, Republicans in dozens of states are writing bills to stop the great masses from voting. Working class people these days, with weak unions, have to vote on a working day. It could be in their 12 hour work cycle or a 12 hour sleep cycle. Some lucky few will have a day off on Tue, but that person will be working Sat and Sun.

Other parts of the Georgia election bill put the (gerrymandered) ruling party in control of elections. No more county control, no more canvas boards with two Democrats and two Republicans to certify the election. the goal is to prevent the election from being certified when a Democrat wins.

Other than election tampering, Republicans will just refuse many measures at state level. We saw this with the pandemic. This will be the trend for the next 10-20 years if the Republican party survives. They really do not represent the country, but can rule as the minority party, or at least stop all progressive ideas.

THE FUTURE

The structure of America is such that there are many rural states. We grow a lot of the world's food, in some manner. We send soy bean animal feed to China. China has run out of land, and even more so, the successful industrial nations of South Korea and Japan. These countries and most of Europe have urban people running politics. It does not mean farmers are cut short, it just means they will get subsidies, but will have to follow liberal social ideas of city folks. City folks work as a collective for common good, whereas rural folk have a feel for community, but it is a county with a small population. They will know more of the families in the county than a city dweller of their neighbors. If the state is a red state, they have feelings of unity state wide.

The future will be somewhat more like South Korea, though never that populated. Our states will have cities of a million or more people, like Saint Louis, and the politics will slowly drift towards Democrats. The Democrats will make sure that states follow their lead in things like energy and transportation. The states will not get funding unless they approve some of these measures. Old principles on guns, abortion, religion will stay in those red states. The frustration the Trump voters had was largely to do with this trend. There was racism too, but most of them realized the trend is to go little by little to the left. So the red states will soon become centrist. We see this with places like Montana where there is one Democrat, Tester, in a red state.

I brought up South Korea, where I have visited. It has 52 million people and is about 100 000km2 in area. Both Nebraska and Kansas are just slightly smaller, in the 70-80 000 km2 range. But those states have 2 and 3 million people. You can see it will not be much different even if it were 10 million people, compared to South Korea. With mostly hilly areas, the farming is squeezed here and there along the bullet train rail lines and freeways. A city might be 600 000 people between rural areas, where the American city in the same setting would be about 200 000, with no high rise apartments. Here is a picture from a city a half hour train ride South of Seoul. I walked a mile South of the main belt line and rail line to take this photo. There are somewhere over 500 000 people there.