Not sure who really won, but the American people sure were the real losers. I've had a distaste for Republicans and a begrudging alliance with Democrats for a long time, but this past year has shown that both are far worse than I ever imagined. Liberals throw hissy fits every time anyone says anything remotely controversial, and they are 100x easier to bait into going into a screaming, blinding rage than the President. And they're just as dumb. As recently as early 2016, Bernie Sanders was giving stump speeches to the effect that low wage, low skill immigration was killing America (and he was cheered and applauded for it--he always clained it was a policy that only the Kochs are pushing for). Now immigrants are so fetishized by the Left that if you say an immigrant (any immigrant) doesn't have a God given natural right to work and live in the US in perpetuity you're basically a slave master. Ann Coulter opens her dumb, irrelevant cunt mouth and the Times has to cover it for like three weeks so that all the Liberals can have a group cry. It's embarrassing. And you can't even call Ann Coulter a dumb, irrelevant. cunt anymore without being a misogynist.

I often feel like the last man on Earth who easily gets along with people regardless of their political stripes. As much as I care about certain policies, I'm under no impression that your preferred marginal tax rates are a character trait. Trump will probably screw over the GOP. That much has seemed obvious from day 1 (or at least from when he told all the Christians how much he loves "two Corinthians"). But that sure as shit doesn't mean anyone won. This is war. There are no winners; only degrees of loser.

And so long as we are stuck with a voting system that weighs geography over population, we're going to have to compromise. And part of compromising is to stop fucking demonizing everyone for everything that you don't agree with. The biggest problem we all face (from my white, male privileged POV) is the environment (climate change, clean and abundant water, etc.). There was a time in America when the environment wasn't such a big partisan question. We can get there again, but not if every time someone says something that someone else could possibly construe as mean we have a temper tantrum. Life is hard. Fuck me, I sound more and more like a Republican every day. 15 year old me might travel into the future to kill me soon. If you don't hear from me, that's probably what happened.

This is some Richard Simmons level optimism.