The eBay America?

There is no question that this election is like no other. Perhaps the reason is not just people being fed up with spineless Republicans and crony Democrats. There may be something more at work here. People may be reaching the conclusion that democratic institutions no longer work. If so, what is next? If Hillary wins, she will govern at a time when Obamacare collapses, the outside world continues to blaze, and the government pushes every crazy culturally rotten idea – like transgender bathrooms being a real issue – into the American home. At least 40% of America will consider Hillary a criminal president.

What will the 40% of America who support Trump or oppose this kind of governance do? Will they compromise? Perhaps no longer. Perhaps the Trump phenomenon is more of a signal that compromise is over. We may well be in a different place from what we know, because nobody alive has been here before. We may be in a place like where Americans were in 1770s, and again in the 1850s, where it becomes obvious that political institutions are not adequate to solve our collective problems. We are too far apart. We share incompatible worldviews. To compromise further is to embrace our own degeneration. It is just not worth it. We reach this point when we have issues that cannot be compromised because they are at their core who we are as a people. How do you compromise with the government forcing people to abandon religious beliefs to support a gay marriage? How do you compromise on totally unfettered abortions? How do you compromise on opening our borders to people who want to kill Americans? How do you compromise on a government that will take away all guns if it has the chance to do so? We may be at a time when political solutions are no longer an option. So what is next? Probably not armed revolt. Probably not pitchfork-waving masses in Washington. This is the cauldron of civil disobedience to the point of shutting down the government. Americans understand they can self-govern complex arrangements like eBay, buying and selling, dealing with Facebook communities, raising money on a moment’s notice for some needy cause. In each case, with no government involvement or rules, Americans built communities that perform ongoing, complicated commerce, with the crowd making up the rules as everyone just goes along. Maybe our parents from the 1930s and 1940s could never imagine people organizing on the web for a common cause, but a majority of Americans take it for granted now. Something is brewing, and it is not more of the same. There is a new governance structure being born. We cannot make out even the outline yet, but it is not command and control. It is the eBay model – people dealing with commerce issues through self-governance. People leaving each other alone on private issues. It will not be born this year, but it will be born over the next few years. The Trump-Hillary dogfight is something quite different from what we have seen before, and it heralds something we have not seen in our lifetimes. When the governance structures cannot handle issues, people will come up with ones that can. Here we go.