How to "Get Over It"

Note: This piece was written about a week prior to President Donald Trump's inauguration as president. At the time "The Polaris Revolution" was not live yet. While not timely we believe this piece still has value, and is presented now.

                Donald Trump has told us all to get over it. He doesn’t want to answer questions about whether the Russians have hacked the election. He wants to get on with his presidency. He does not want you to dwell on anything that will ruin his already razor thin victory and deeply murky mandate. Instead he wants us all to just get over it. The thing is, we should, we need to.

                The way we “get over it” is we must begin to understand that we are at the opening of a new administration that is bringing to us a world view that is vastly different than that of the typical American. That this world view could threaten our democratic values and getting ourselves stuck on the injustices that have brought us to this moment will only weaken us. This world view, Trump’s world view, is one that must be prepared for so we can catch its abuses.

                To be clear, Donald Trump may not actual realize that he has a coherent “world view,” as best as anyone can tell his twitter account is a stream of consciousness look in to all of his thoughts. Instead we must glean from those tweets, and his actions that surround them, an underlying theory and methodology. To this I attribute a sense that the president-elect believes that the United States of America is a business that he has been appointed CEO of rather than a government that he has been democratically elected to. He believes that the main actors in his world are corporations. Those will be the entities he is most concerned with interacting with. He views states as secondary actors in the realm of international relations. Often times states are even more impediments than actors.

                His clear views on all relations in his life revolve around an “us” versus “them” mentality. One that his supporters will tell you will serve the American people because he will be fighting for “us.” He also sees the world as a world of deals, by his own statements many times; those deals have winners and losers. He wants to always be the winner, and when he hasn’t won by enough he changes the rules. This can work in the “low-context” world of business, but international relations are oftentimes considered a “high-context” type of interaction. This is borrowing terms of art from international relations focusing on the individual interaction versus seeing each interaction as a part of a series which constitutes the entire relationship. Those are low and high, respectively.

                To make sure that we are winners he will destroy any relationship or norm that the US has participated in, no matter its worthy history. He will focus on business and businesses bottom lines. Again his advocates say that this will be a boon for the country, until one realizes that focusing on bottom lines is the leading cause of worker mistreatment. His selection for Secretary of State suggests that the focus will be on business, and making deals that benefit those business interests.

                A major side effect of this world view may be that he will view conflict through the lens of business. Economic activity tends to pick up around the time of war. When a leader decides not to take in to account the significant implications for the real human impact of war, they are much more ready to jump in to conflict. The added benefit to the economic view is that all things destroyed during war must be rebuilt, a principle that will excite the business man, but should give pause to the public servant. We may only have the former, not the latter deciding.