A bad time to stop drinking!

Boy, did I ever pick a bad time to stop drinking!

America, America über alles!

I’m four years sober now, and if booze wasn’t so expensive, there would never be a more appropriate time to start drowning out the terror that lies ahead of the American public.

As a keen observer of American politics and having lived in the country for over 17 years, I’ve always been assured that ‘the system’ will prevent the country from veering too far right or left.

But this election, the American public voted to take a flamethrower to that system and now  the walls are starting to melt, it’s unleashed the radical elements.

Already, we’ve had Nazi flags being paraded openly in the streets. We’ve had thousands of ‘Alpha Bros’ taunting women online and in person with chants such as “Your body my choice” and we’re literally only one week after the election. I genuinely fear we are throwing away all the great DE&I progress we’ve made over the last 20 years and that the #MeToo movement is under its greatest threat of extinction in the US and wider global community.

It will only get worse because there are now no guardrails to deter that type of behavior.

People tell me that it’s only 4 years and then it will swing the other way.

 I’m not so sure.

Trump’s agenda is to rip up the constitution and rewrite it to fit the strategy of the very obvious ‘Project 2025’ plan.

A plan, that let’s face it is reminiscent of a similar plan put together by Adolph Hitler in 1932. As a European by birth and whose Grandparents grew up in the shadow of the threat of Fascism, I was taught to recognize the signs, and never has that blinking red light been so obvious as it is now.

In America, FFS; the Land of the Free.

This is one fight we must all engage in.

Moving on…

On a slightly lighter and more anecdotal note that seems trivial by comparison, there is also a lesson to learned in terms of political marketing.

Events from the UK’s and the US election cycle are part of a pattern that has been so well recorded in Sam Delaney’s ‘Mad Men and Bad Men’ book.

Despite the US economy being the best it’s been for a long time, the cost of living has not subsided, so working people don’t feel the effects.

The basics are still too expensive (thank you big food and big retail) so people feel left behind.

Sam Delaney details the teachings of Bob Worcester – the MORI research guy – who said back in the 1970s that in any election, it is only a tiny percentage of people that tend to swing the vote one way or the other. 80% of the population is always going to vote either red or blue, so they cancel each other out. It’s the small percentage of the remaining 20% of the voters in the key areas (in America, they are the ‘swing states’) that make the difference and they go to the polls with the earworms ringing in their head.

In 2016 in the UK it was Boris Johnson’s big London bus with the £350m per week NHS lie on it, in the US this time around, it was simply the price of eggs. And it took about 2% of the voting population of America in every state to swing the vote - 3,146,563 people, out of a total voting turnout of 148,891,227.

The moral to the story is that if you are the party left holding the bag when people feel poor at the time of the election, and the opposition can effectively play on that message, you’ve lost.

I remember a friend of mine living in Argentina a few years ago, when I tried to launch an environmental charity. She told me that people didn’t care about recycling plastic when they were struggling to feed their family at the end of the week.

Priorities matter and despite our best intentions, we all (well most of us) prioritise the cash we have on hand.

Trump took advantage of a cost-of-living crisis that Biden should have grappled with at the very start of his Presidency. Infrastructure, green projects, jobs and lower drugs costs all took centre stage, and they are all laudable initiatives. But if you can’t make people feel they can afford the nicer things in life, then you’ve lost the game.

Short term, immediate feelgood factors will outshine any long-term good intentions any leader has.

That’s why we as employers offer Christmas bonuses, commissions and pay rises. If you short the workers, your long-term growth vision will never be achieved.

Trump used this simple mechanism and flaw in the Democrat’s campaign as a Trojan Horse for his wider, social engineering agenda.

Who can tell where America is heading right now. Party politics used to be a veneer on a big vision of real democracy, where voices were heard and the vulnerable were protected.

I bought into that. That’s America to me – a land of friendly people who get along despite their differences and who all work together to create a free and just world. A land built by and for immigrants of every religion.

Now, I worry that America’s ‘brand’ has been forever trashed. We will see next year if a six times bankrupt, convicted narcissistic, draft-dodging, sexist, felon, rapist, insurrectionist fraudster can undo what 46 previously upstanding moral leaders worked so hard to build.

Let me leave you with a quote from German pastor Martin Niemöller about his own early complicity in Nazism and his eventual change of heart:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller