Somewhere in the middle

Yes. that is the title of a song by Dishwalla. Yes. That just aged me. That's okay, though, as I was going to age myself in this piece.

The 2016 election season is now over - to the dismay of some and the joy of others - America has elected a President. While the man has done little to engender respect from the mass of the electorate, including the truth of his defeat in the popular vote while coasting to electoral college victory, we must look inside ourselves for the choice. Notwithstanding his four-year old rant against the concept of losing a popular vote while winning an electoral majority, his victory seems to cast a shadow of fear across the land of the free.

To that I say not so fast. Is Donald Trump the person a despicable human being? Absolutely. He told us so with his own words; he admitted to sexual assault. He attempted to pass it off as just guy talk. Hey, if he were 15 years old, maybe, maybe I could accept that. But those were the words of a 60-year old man, not a hormone riddled teenage boy. Which is to say, there is no good excuse for using such vile descriptions of encounters with women, regardless of whether he knew he was on tape. After all, character is the trait you show clearest when you think no one is watching.

Despite all of his flaws, his victory showed our nations flaws. No, the electoral college system itself is not a flaw; it is the heart of a representative democracy. But it showed a lot of strains in our nation. I have been energized to speak my mind through the written word for most of my life - and now find myself more energized than ever.

For those that do not know me, I am a part-time sports writer. That's how I got into the concept of writing and sharing it outside of my own thoughts on paper. I have expanded, but what has always been at the core of my writing is the subject of philosophy.

Today we are at a cross roads in American society. There is plenty of anger to go around, so I need not share my own anger; it would be pointless. In fact, I think we need those who are expressing their anger, but I also think we need those of us willing to challenge not those people who elected Donald Trump, but ourselves. For while there were nearly 60 million votes for Hillary Clinton, there were not enough and that is not the fault of those who voted for Trump, but the 46% of eligible voters who chose to stay home rather than vote.

I call this piece 'Somewhere in the middle' because it represents what happened last night, and it represents who exactly I am. I am not a millennial - I have millennial children. I am not a baby boomer. I am not a Gen-X man. Instead, I am somewhere in the middle. With that, I am also one of those people who is far more progressive than most people would expect, especially given my position as the middle (get a theme here?) child in a family of conservatives of varying degrees, I am the abhorrent; the black sheep.

Over the course of however long I decide to keep writing on this blog, I will share my thoughts on all kinds of topics. Many will be political in nature, some will be sports, some will be philosophy and some will be me hawking my books. Hey, gotta try to pay some extra bills somehow, right?

My first topic is going to be my own take on how the Democratic party found itself bent and broken. Just a month ago, Democrats secretly, and not so secretly, found themselves almost giddy with glee over the apparent disintegration of the Republican party. It should be no surprise today that the party has been treated with reciprocal joyful hostility. We did this to ourselves because we missed something.

This will be the topic I discuss first: we missed that a political party should represent ideology not identity.

We have spent the last twenty-plus years in recognition of a changing demographic. In our zeal to override the, so-called, moral majority, we willfully sought the changing demographics of the nation. The Democratic party actively sought to expand their base with the Latino population and the African-American population. I suppose it could be said that this is part of how the 'right went wrong' but it is also how the left lost.

The conservative movement refused to recognize changing demographic culture in America and found themselves lagging nationally. They simply tried to turn out the vote among their white base of voters - and that failed until yesterday. Yes, I know that Donald Trump received 20% of the Latino vote, but that is still the lowest of any Presidential candidate.

The Democratic Party, though, chased down the demographics only and forgot their own roots in the working class people. So while the party worked to turn out higher percentages of minority voters, they did so at the expense of ideology. The party looked to 'expand the map' at the expense of those in the map. Had the party spent time establishing a stronger ideology that identified to their core, disaffected workers, rather than chasing change, maybe this day would have been averted.

So, that is my thought today. We are at step one of a rebranding. No, not a rebuilding of the party, but a rebranding. Step one is simple, recognize where your core failure was, and that, in my opinion, was losing sight of core values and ideology. We exchanged ideology politics for identity politics. That must be changed moving forward.