I do agree that the Electoral College - which I regard as an artifact of the need to get slave states to sign on to the Constitution - bears some of the blame.
And I agree that appointing misogynists like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose to interview Ms. Clinton also played a role.
And I agree that the Russian involvement - to the extent it was effective, something we still have not clarified - played a role.
I've spent most of the free time in my life, when not involved with family, in academic libraries. Most often I am reading hard science, but I have spent considerable time on reading in history and politics. While I'm not in anyway a professional historian, I feel I can hold my own in a discussion of the role of ignorance in human history; it rises and it falls, falling usually in response to dire realities.
This is an ignorant country, and as much as I hate to say it, being on the left myself, the scale of ignorance on the left - notably expressed as contempt for science masked by citing superficial pop culture readings and wishful thinking on dire subjects like climate change - is in some ways as bad as ignorance on the right.
I live in New Jersey, a state that went solidly for Clinton. It's not like I didn't see Trump lawn signs and bumper stickers all over the place even in New Jersey. They shocked me on one level but left me less than surprised on another.
I think the rote explanations you offer are, in fact, superficial. It's not a few bad guys; it's a nation that has been distracted and lazy and frankly myopic.
Are the artifacts of slavery, including those still operative such as the electoral college, in our constitution odious? Yes they are. But is there really a band of men and women in this country such as those who wrote this constitution present today in this culture? No, there are not. Now this constitution, written by men who cared about the future and about posterity, has survived for more than two centuries, and mostly functioned admirably, better than its authors might have hoped. This said, it is clearly inadequate for this age. But can a new one be written that might do as well? You think a nation with a Senate run by Mitch McConnell, a House lead by Paul Ryan, and a Presidency occupied by a very, very, very stupid sybarite is up to the task?
The last President to so severely divided this country as Trump has done was James Buchanan. Can we really expect another Lincoln to arise out of the ashes of his incompetence? I don't think so. I note that early in his Presidency, Lincoln experienced many major failures. In the tweet age, would he have survived in the office?
I mean, how is it that during this election we focused on crap like, um, emails?
Now I know a great many people who are not ignorant; and I recognize that Ms. Clinton - a superbly qualified individual who was relentlessly attacked on specious grounds - got the most votes in the nation as a whole, but the fact is that ignoring ignorance and minimizing its power has had a baleful influence throughout human history, scarcely limited to the history of the United States, in fact, is ignorance itself.
Our culture, unlike the culture of previous Americans, is a culture of fools.
Ignorance can be cured by something called "learning." But one cannot be forced to learn; one must want to do so. There are, as much as I abhor sexism and sexual harassment, deeper things that we need to address than "who grabbed whose ass."
I refuse to back down from saying that this is an ignorant country, because culturally, and intellectually, taken as a whole, it is.
Enjoy the rest of this Sunday.
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