Something that drives certain members of my family crazy is that I no longer vote. I don’t feel represented by any of the candidates who get run out every couple of years, and I also live in a state where my particular vote carries very little weight.
In the current election cycle, though, something else that irks those same relatives is that I am not utterly appalled every time that the name “Trump” is brought up. Don’t misconstrue what I’m saying – he most definitely is not the candidate who will bring me out of my voting doldrums. But, at the same time, I appreciate that he signifies something more than politics as usual, a proverbial shift away from the establishment.
All of this brings me to a recent conversation that I had with a friend on the topic of this election. And how my view is that Trump is not the right candidate, but he symbolizes a change in this country that likely will be realized in future elections.
Apropos of that anecdote, I was reading an article by George Friedman on the website Geopolitical Futures and saw the following:
“Whatever happens to Trump, he has in my mind laid out – in one speech and leaving much out – a foreign policy that is likely to be implemented by some future president, if not himself. The ideas of free trade as an absolute principle, of oversight by international organizations and of open-ended military alliances, are now over 60 years old. It is a set of doctrines created when the world was a very different place. It is unlikely to be sustainable as a doctrine for much longer. This is not isolationism. It is a more flexible involvement with the world.”
That sounds about right.
