We have witnessed over the course of this past year just how difficult the democratic experiment of governance really is, as the fundamental reason for this inherent difficulty has finally been laid shockingly bare: human beings can have very strong differences with each other.
We now live in an openly acknowledged "post-truth" world, where the very facts of life themselves are no longer universally agreed upon. Some would argue that this situation is hardly new: it's always been the case that opposing values, worldviews, and belief systems tend to produce contrasting understandings of particular events or circumstances which impact the common human family. What 2016 has demonstrated, however, is that objectively observed or reported facts are so superseded by the subjective interpretations that establish their context for any particular individual in question, that even the most irrefutable factual contradictions of one's preferred narrative can become so irrelevant as to be practically no better than blatant falsehoods.
In this toxic environment of self-polarization and self-isolation into echo chambers or "safe spaces", it's easy to see why one side is winning and the other is losing - badly. The global right-wing populist insurgency is toppling the international liberal establishment because it enjoys a massive asymmetry of intimate knowledge and understanding: it knows the ways and goals of the Establishment far more than the Establishment reciprocally knows and understands the ways and goals of the surging rebellion against it - even at this relatively mature stage of the gathering coup.
Both ends of the political spectrum live in massive bubbles, but it's now obvious whose bubble has been bigger and more artificially inflated for a longer time - because its bursting has been so dramatically and traumatically disconcerting for those who've sheltered in it so habitually that they didn't even recognize it.
As the year ticks down, the revolt of 2016 can now be seen as having been an uprising not so much against "the elites" as a socioeconomic class, but as one of rejection and repudiation of elitism as a philosophical lens for understanding societal reality.
The respective euphoria and angst over Donald Trump's election among his supporters and opponents says it all: while the latter are appalled that an individual with no conventional or "mainstream" qualifications for the post he ran for somehow managed to win it, the former are cheering precisely this overthrow of a perceived rigid caste of merit.
Those that have since decried Trump's betrayal of his common-man campaign through his appointment of a veritable clique of plutocrats to run his incoming administration miss the point: Trump loyalists never really had much beef with the wealthy and well-connected for being wealthy and well-connected; their hostility was always reserved instead for the perceived alien values and interests that have come to be associated with those privileges - whether real or imagined.
As a whole, both progressives and the cosmopolitan "mainstream" still haven't fully grasped the deep socio-cultural character of Trumpism, with the economic factor mostly a secondary and subsidiary element: the "elites" that this movement purports to throw out aren't measured by the size of their pocketbooks, but by the size of their intellectual and ideological egos. Billionaire Exxon-Mobil oilman Rex Tillerson is thus a "man of the people" as a provider of well-paying blue-collar jobs to ordinary working folk; yet (probable) millionaire bleeding-heart pundit David Remnick of The New Yorker is a haughty, condescending snob who's completely out of touch with "real Americans", who actually still exert their bodies for a living.
That's not to say that socioeconomic redistributionism of some sort isn't the core of Trump's mission - providing measurable criteria that he'll be judged by over his coming four-year term. But the way that this crazy 2016 has turned out to be - with conservative and liberal "experts" alike having their proverbial ivory tower windows smashed and eggs tossed in their faces - the only survivable way forward for anyone still taking their cues from a badly discredited, bi-coastal globalist, socio-cultural elite is to start looking for the forest beyond the trees.
Elites aren't the problem - elitism is. Rather than fixate on individual figures and their statements or actions, one must look to the ideas and ideologies driving them - and quite possibly find that precisely because they're actually quite open and even a tad progressive, after all, the means to achieve such ends could look anything but conventionally enlightened.
In this toxic environment of self-polarization and self-isolation into echo chambers or "safe spaces", it's easy to see why one side is winning and the other is losing - badly. The global right-wing populist insurgency is toppling the international liberal establishment because it enjoys a massive asymmetry of intimate knowledge and understanding: it knows the ways and goals of the Establishment far more than the Establishment reciprocally knows and understands the ways and goals of the surging rebellion against it - even at this relatively mature stage of the gathering coup.
Both ends of the political spectrum live in massive bubbles, but it's now obvious whose bubble has been bigger and more artificially inflated for a longer time - because its bursting has been so dramatically and traumatically disconcerting for those who've sheltered in it so habitually that they didn't even recognize it.
As the year ticks down, the revolt of 2016 can now be seen as having been an uprising not so much against "the elites" as a socioeconomic class, but as one of rejection and repudiation of elitism as a philosophical lens for understanding societal reality.
The respective euphoria and angst over Donald Trump's election among his supporters and opponents says it all: while the latter are appalled that an individual with no conventional or "mainstream" qualifications for the post he ran for somehow managed to win it, the former are cheering precisely this overthrow of a perceived rigid caste of merit.
Those that have since decried Trump's betrayal of his common-man campaign through his appointment of a veritable clique of plutocrats to run his incoming administration miss the point: Trump loyalists never really had much beef with the wealthy and well-connected for being wealthy and well-connected; their hostility was always reserved instead for the perceived alien values and interests that have come to be associated with those privileges - whether real or imagined.
As a whole, both progressives and the cosmopolitan "mainstream" still haven't fully grasped the deep socio-cultural character of Trumpism, with the economic factor mostly a secondary and subsidiary element: the "elites" that this movement purports to throw out aren't measured by the size of their pocketbooks, but by the size of their intellectual and ideological egos. Billionaire Exxon-Mobil oilman Rex Tillerson is thus a "man of the people" as a provider of well-paying blue-collar jobs to ordinary working folk; yet (probable) millionaire bleeding-heart pundit David Remnick of The New Yorker is a haughty, condescending snob who's completely out of touch with "real Americans", who actually still exert their bodies for a living.
That's not to say that socioeconomic redistributionism of some sort isn't the core of Trump's mission - providing measurable criteria that he'll be judged by over his coming four-year term. But the way that this crazy 2016 has turned out to be - with conservative and liberal "experts" alike having their proverbial ivory tower windows smashed and eggs tossed in their faces - the only survivable way forward for anyone still taking their cues from a badly discredited, bi-coastal globalist, socio-cultural elite is to start looking for the forest beyond the trees.
Elites aren't the problem - elitism is. Rather than fixate on individual figures and their statements or actions, one must look to the ideas and ideologies driving them - and quite possibly find that precisely because they're actually quite open and even a tad progressive, after all, the means to achieve such ends could look anything but conventionally enlightened.
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