by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
In this age of The Resistance and Trumplandia, it begs the question: can these two sides ever come to some agreement? Is it even possible that The Resistance could woo over enough of Trumplandia to actually win in 2020? Because of a personal history quirk or two, I find myself knowing a few more residents of Trumplandia than perhaps you might expect.
The issue is — Trumplandia is not nearly as a united front as you may expect. Trumplandia contains different factions and ideologies that for various reasons are united by one thing: Donald Trump. The problem The Resistance faces is because of technology (at least in my opinion) the most partisan views are the only ones that thrive. It’s kind of like how because of people not taking their antibiotics properly, there are increasingly resistant strains of major diseases floating around.
Technology causes us to think anyone who doesn’t agree with us is trolling us, when, in fact, the ability to have a cogent conversation with someone who disagrees with you is actually the crux of civil discourse in a democratic Constitutional republic such as ours. This is a problem I’ve seen with both sides. Both sides are at fault on this one.
Each side seems so repulsed by the notion of talking to someone they disagree with that the United States has become almost impossible to govern. The question, of course, is how to fix that? How to bridge that gap? Is there anyway out?
I believe a two prong approach might be right. On one hand, The Resistance really needs to listen to the issues that face the individuals who make up Trumplandia. We can’t dismiss coal miners, or anyone else who serves as Trumplandia’s core. How exactly to go about that is something I find very difficult to understand. The Resistance rightly opposes the racism and bigotry and misogyny that Trump managed to fed upon. Yet we have to stop being so mad about it all that we don’t actually try to talk to the residents of Trumplandia. They aren’t going anywhere and only by trying to understand them can we ever hope to regain power.
Meanwhile, I am still intrigued by the concept of a startup to challenge Twitter. A “Twitter Killer,” if you will. Maybe if we change the question, then the answer will be so fundamentally different that the problem will be fixed a lot easier. This presupposes a lot — no startup is an assured success. And, besides, most VC people are interested in VR and AR now, not social media. So, in the end, we may be talking more about UBI forced upon us because of automation than we will any hypothetical startup.
But let me stress, if we allow our blind fury over the many horrible things that Trumplandia voters have accepted to blind us to them altogether, we’re doomed to failure. Something has to be done. Only after we solve the problem of getting Trumplandia voters to leave their country of the mind will anything happen to end this tragic era in American political life.
