The election lost, Trump pivots to making country ungovernable

It's obvious that Donald Trump has lost the election. Even his diehard supporters know it - in fact, his diehard supporters in particular should be aware of what's truly happening. They've consciously essentially given up winning the race, because their goal is radically shifting to something far more negative but carrying potentially far greater long-term impact: making the country ungovernable from status-quo Washington.

If the political establishment still manages to hang on with Hillary becoming president, so they reason, it's time to punish the whole rotten lot of them by permanently burning the bridges of trust between the heartland and the ruling apparatus, thus rendering the latter so paralyzed and impotent that it will eventually crumble of its own atrophy into uselessness.

Trump's role now is to personify in one body the pent-up rage felt by anywhere from one to two-fifths of the American populace: the predominantly lower middle-class and working class whites of the geographically vast but largely socioeconomically stagnant interior of the lower forty-eight. In fact, as a number of surveys have demonstrated, this hostility isn't primarily economic but cultural, even borderline racial: poverty and income levels may indeed improve in the coming years to mitigate the deepening polarization, but the overwhelming structural character of a permanent shift to a diverse and multicultural coastal elite as against a still largely homogeneous middle America (literally) could well defy any quick or resounding healing of an alarmingly ossified national division.

The silver lining of this descent into partisan, even sectarian darkness in American politics is that it leaves a victorious Hillary Clinton little room to maneuver on wedge issues that she is known for lightning-rod views on, like immigration, gun control, or religious restrictions or prerogatives. Once in office, she will be confronted with a Republican electorate seething from the prospect of a third Obama term; even with a narrowly regained Democratic majority in the Senate, she will still almost certainly face a residual if reduced GOP majority in the House - to mention nothing of the Republican advantage in state governorships. That potentially forces her into key concessions lest her presidency be hobbled by even worse gridlock than Washington has already grown semi-accustomed to. If she wants to actually govern, she may well have to slow down at least somewhat the left flank of her party from carrying on its ambitious social engineering agenda.

But neither will it be easy to run the country in the old manner of the political elite and its wealthy patrons, who one way or another are widely perceived - on both ends of the electoral spectrum - as having looked out too exclusively for their own interests by shafting everyone else. Now that the microscope will be turned on her and her family's every move, Hillary can no longer sell favors and access as she so blithely did at State, and this could have a ripple effect across the entire establishment. And if nothing else, the fact that she's been so cozy with the big bankers on Wall Street could severely constrain the financial industry lobby in Washington merely by association with the White House.

Thus, even assuming a Hillary win, the country probably isn't governable anymore in the way it's been for a while, anyway. That at least is probably something Americans of all backgrounds and persuasions shouldn't be too disappointed by.