America could be due for some European madness : Trump (and Sanders) have shown that there's fertile ground for demagogery all over the spectrum. If anything, it's only gonna get worse when more savvy politicians will hop on that train. Voters motivated by more or less naked racism probably are not going away for a couple of generations still.
The internet and 24/7 news cycle has done a lot for non-typical outsider candidates. Or even lower totem pole elected candidates.
Ron Paul, Obama, Howard Dean, Trump, Sanders, Huckabee, Cruz, Herman Cain/Santorum/Gingrich (all led at times in 2012...and none had traditional campaigns in place much like Trump this year, they relied on free media) and now Gary Johnson have benefited from the "gatekeepers" falling in their ability to dictate the discourse. (I think he's been on more CNN/MSNBC shows in the past two months than he's been in the prior six years.)
Look at how long Trump's entire campaign seemed to consist of him bashing everyone at debates and then insulting them more on Twitter. The "traditional" candidates didn't even understand how to deal with this. Do we ignore it? Condemn it? Join in (like Rubio eventually did)? And that made Trump look even more in charge and everyone else floundering.
This is one reason all of Nate Silver's models collapsed, they were based nearly entirely on pre-internet/24-7 news campaigns. (IIRC, he goes back to 1972 or 1984 depending on which.) 2004 and 2008 barely scratched the service of the new way things would work, it was after 2008 when cable news took off and the internet became a basic part of life. "Blogs" getting attention in 2004 and 2008 was because it was novel, now it's expected that Buzzfeed or Twitter or Facebook can be the source of "mainstream" discourse for a period. Like when Sarah Palin said "death panels" in an extended op-ed on her Facebook account and it became a thing people talked about for two years. Campaigns prior to 2004 are entirely different, primary campaigns didn't actively start for a year prior to Iowa. John Edwards, a nominal frontrunner and the last party VP, announced his 2008 bid in
2006.
For me, the amusing thing was that an old dictate of campaigns past is what undercut Hillary. Had she refused to debate, period, Sanders would have never become a force. Bob Dole and George W. Bush used this tactic well in 1996 and 2000 until all the other "serious" candidates realized they should team-up on them for the entire debates which forced their hand and made them join in. This wouldn't have happened because Chaffee and Webb instantly bailed, O'Malley barely ever cracked 3% and Sanders was still in single digits until he stole the show.
I think it's helped the rise of certain parties in Yurop too, a lot of them do their organizing on the internet and take advantage of free media, etc. It's getting harder and harder for traditional parties to not even consider a coalition or at least supply from some of these once off-limits parties. And the otherwise dysfunction helps the conservative parties if only because they've mostly accepted the welfare states/etc. and become "don't rock the boat" parties.
And that's why this unprecedented Presidential election, and only the Presidential election nothing else matters, is the only thing standing between the current American Utopia and Nazi Germany, but worse, because of no German work ethic. The unprecedented scenes at the RNC had me triggered so hard, they looked just like Nazi rallies, there was a speaker on stage, and a crowd below cheering on what the speakers were saying no matter how dumb. It was monstrous and unprecedented.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
unprecedented
