Self Reliant to the End, He Drove Himself to the Autopsy

In many of the postmortems I'm detecting what I'll call the fallacy of intellectual optimism, the notion, understandably popular among thinking people, that understanding things solves all problems. I don't doubt that Clinton and her supporters could have been done things better—when is that ever not true?—but I don't discount the possibility that some sort of disaster was inevitable. Small differences in the votes in a few states might easily have resulted in an electoral as well as a popular majority for Clinton, but nearly half the country would still have been rabidly against her. I'd certainly prefer to undergo the Purgatory of a bitterly contested Clinton administration than the Hell of a Trump regime, but there are deep reasons why a happy outcome may have been impossible. We underestimate how profoundly the transition of America from a white Christian country to a genuinely multicultural and multiethnic nation affects the would-be Herrenvolk. They actually are losing out, at least relatively; and a better analysis of the situation isn't going to change that anymore than a definite diagnosis of end stage lung cancer means you aren't going to die. The rise of women in business and politics is perhaps even more difficult for men, white, black, Asian, or Hispanic, to stomach. If you're a man and doing well, the equality of the sexes may be unproblematic or profoundly welcome. For a great many men, however, that is not the case. On top of all this, modestly skilled and educated people are simply less valuable in a high tech world. That is also a fact. Trump is offering this huge group imaginary solutions to their declining fortunes, but over the medium term, there aren’t anything but imaginary solutions apart from the usual weak tea. How is understanding the plight of the Trump voters in the face of this pile of social and economic revolutions supposed to help politically?  We all have an obligation to try to find answers, but that doesn't mean there are any, at least in the short run.