Election 2016

I am renaming Orozco's print, "Election 2016."

Like all right-thinking people, I conclude, when an election goes my way, that a good system is working as it should. When it doesn’t go my way, I bemoan a deranged system where the δημος, the mob, can be unduly influenced by a δημηγορος, a demagogue. In the case of the election of 2016, it was hardly any skill of a demagogue that did the trick. Anybody can see through that guy—unless you’re in love. Proust says more than once in In Search of Lost Time that the beloved is never a real person but always the imaginary creation of the lover. The electorate fell in love with a figure of their own imagining, a combination of wealth, celebrity, and take-me-back nostalgia, who was going to restore a past that meant different things to everyone who imagined that the promiser could bring it back. For one guy it meant a time when you didn’t have to have a college degree to get a good job. For another guy it was a time when everyone “knew his place.” For one woman it was a time when the faces all looked like hers.