Trump as a vote against the system

Tl;Dr: Trump is a lazy person’s protest against a complicated system (the federal government)

A very smart and politically savvy friend of mine was just laughing about why Trump won; his example very enlightening. It was an organization (NGO but liberal) that had him filling out blatantly stupid paperwork. It reminded me of my recent interaction with the Social Security Administration. Even though I was on the phone with their technical support, we were unable to avoid having them send two-factor authentication credentials via the postal mail. So to sign in I had to wait 7 to 10 days for the mail to arrive.

It’s a dumb system. It’s annoying and inconvenient. Any idiot could design something better.

I think many idiots actually have this very thought, and rather than asking why this dumb system exists they just want to take action against it: I don’t care how you do it, just make it better. I mean: how much worse could you make it?

And it’s not just the Social Security Administration, it’s a lot of government. IRS forms so complicated you have to hire somebody to pay your taxes, many other examples.

Speaking of taxes, if you thought your hard earned dollars were going to pay for all this idiocy, you’d be even more frustrated. And you’d be willing to sign up for almost any change.

Enter Trump: he’s an alternative to normal government. And if you listen to him, he’s awesome at making things better (evidence to the contrary is easy to ignore).

So we vote him in and: oh yeah – your savings is now 40% gone because we don’t need rules to prevent insider trading. Oh yeah, you can’t get your pension because you’ve been fired from your government job.

The issue is that governing (and especially governing by consensus) is really hard and the systems created are very complex. It’s a spectators game to sit on the sidelines and take pop shots about how simple it would be to fix it.

So perhaps voting in an idiot is a useful method of change – it’s like chaos monkey for distributed systems: just turn off shit and see what happens. Cool beans if what you do is sell t-shirt. When you literally govern peoples lives and property, maybe not such a good plan.

I don’t have any solution, but maybe this is a start towards empathy for the folks who voted for this.