Euclid and That Other Guy

Okay, I think I know why Uncle Ken's liberal agenda took it in the ass in the 2016 election.  In order for any logical discussion to continue, all parties concerned must agree on one or more axiomatic statements or "givens".  If they don't start out in the same place, they are not likely to end up in the same place, no matter how logical their arguments are.  For instance, everybody knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line but, in truth, that is only valid in Euclidian geometry.  There are other geometries in existence.  I am certainly not an expert, but I do remember from Mrs. Hradek's class that one of them was invented by a Slavic guy, Russian or Polish or something like that, whose name I remember, but will not even attempt to spell.  While Euclid constructed his geometry on a plane, this other guy constructed his geometry on a sphere, where the shortest distance between two points is a great circle.  If Euclid and this other guy were alive today and had an argument about geometry, neither of them would ever convince the other that he was right, unless one of them would agree to accept the other one's axioms and definitions for the purposes of the discussion.  Lots of luck getting that to happen in a political discussion!

The reason the liberal agenda failed in the 2016 election is that everybody in this country is not a liberal.  Those who aren't usually identify themselves as conservatives, and they have their own agenda which is as different from the liberal agenda as Euclid's geometry is from that other guy's geometry.  I would classify Trump as a reactionary rather than a conservative, but most of the people I have known in my life are not familiar with that term, and I gave up trying to explain it to them a long time ago.  Suffice it to say that most of the people who voted for Trump did so because he promised to advance their conservative agenda at the expense of Uncle Ken's liberal agenda.  I'm not so sure about the "lying sack o' shit" part.  Maybe they voted for him in spite of that, or maybe they voted for him because of that, or maybe, as I have long suspected, there are people who simply do not make a distinction between truth and falsehood, it's all the same to them.

As for all those Never Trumpers who have now been transformed into Forever Trumpers, I think it's simply because Trump won the election.  For some people, winning is not everything, it's the only thing.  While it's true that no politician can advance his agenda unless he gets elected, I think that some of them become so obsessed with getting elected that they have forgotten why they wanted the job in the first place, or maybe they never cared about any agenda in the first place.  Maybe they just want to get elected and are willing to assume any agenda that they believe will help them in that effort.

Be that as it may, I maintain that Uncle Ken's liberal agenda is not dead at all.  The Dems made some solid gains in 2018, and who knows what will happen in 2020.  When Obama was elected the first time, many conservatives considered it a wake up call.  I'm sure that many liberals felt the same way when Trump was elected.  Now that everybody is awake, let then party begin!