I have great doubts about the Democratic party making any great gains quickly, save for the above tragedies possibly caused by Trump which I listed.

Our society is really comfortable in some strange ways, with the current status quo. The recent election saw Hillary get a record number of votes and yes, she won by 2.5 million. But we should not overlook that Trump got a lot of votes too, more than his Republican predecessors.

Many Americans, especially older ones, are very easily scared, and of course demagogues know this well.

Note how easily Trump won Florida, a state where 16 years earlier in which Bush and Gore tied.

Trump played on the fears of older people quite well. Fear of strangers in particular, the other.

I don’t want to be a total debbie-downer, but I think we really have to know what we are fighting.

There are a lot of easy marks out there… I wonder what percentage of Joel Osteen’s followers voted for Trump?

Part of our post-industrialism society is that workers are not seeing a need to unionize, and in the 20th century it was the organization of labor that helped plow through the more progressive agendas.

Without that organized political force, now the Democratic party finds itself with varied “base”, widely scattered, that I label “We’re-not-Republicans” as the key characteristic.

Culturally, those of us in urban areas will continue to vote more progressively than the populace in rural areas. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Given the structure of the American state, with geography over-weighted and humans under-weighted, we’re pretty much ensured that not much will get done.

Until something breaks. Bad.

Then something will be done, but perhaps in haste and not well thought out.

My best guess is that the biggest risk is of a regional conflict somewhere in the world which we try to ignore until it is too late (an old theme.) Until there is another WWII scale event, we’ll probably just bumble forward with minimal change.