The more reasonable half of the country is still scrambling to come to grips with one unnerving fact: Donald Trump, the business mogul, reality TV star, and arguable orangutan, has a better-than-unlikely chance of becoming President of the United States. I’m not sure anyone truly saw this coming… in fact it was half jokingly quipped nigh-on one year ago, as he headed down the escalator in Trump Tower, that he had been tapped on the shoulder for a Democratic hit job on the GOP.
Well, if that’s the case, Donald seems to be having a hard time finding an exit strategy.
Despite wasting no time suggesting incestuous feelings for his daughter, calling Latinos rapists, and ensuring the public that, like evolution, hand/penis symmetry is only a theory, Trump continued to rise in the polls. Establishment conservatives looked on, horror-struck, as huge numbers of Americans clambered onto the bandwagon at the expense of Koch-endorsed favorites such as Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush.
Liberals, on the other hand, observed smugly as the Republican party went into full meltdown. Trump was seen as the offspring of the GOP’s deal with the devil, an artifact of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, a Faustian bargain with the uneducated, the disenfranchised, and the bigoted lower-class whites of America. His rise to prominence was interpreted as living proof of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of right-wing America, with his main appeal consisting of xenophobia, jingoism, and an ironic claim of “authenticity”.
However, Trump’s appeal extends beyond the downtrodden masses, as his continued relevance in the election suggests. In fact, many of the more educated and informed of his supporters look at Trump as a symbol of creative destruction, a wildfire that will sweep across the American political landscape, leaving behind an unshapen mass that would, hopefully, be recreated in an improved form. This image casts a romantic light on what Trump might do to our country, an image of the US as a phoenix fated to die, only to be reborn into a more pure state.
Herein lies my problem with this image of Trump the reformer – the second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (a system where no matter or energy is permitted to exit or leave), entropy will always tend to increase over time. Entropy is a measure of a system’s level of molecular disorder, and approximates how close it is to thermodynamic equilibrium. For example, one imaginative way to think of this principle is to think of a disordered room. If this room were an isolated system, and was then reordered by an enterprising tenant, the disorder in the room’s furniture would decrease, but this decrease would be less than the disorder that the tenant had created in the room via the work he had done, in the form of his body’s energy loss, the heat he had generated in the room, and so on.
This theory has massive presence in scientific thought, but it also finds its way into the minds of nihilistic writers on occasion.
The heat death of the universe, a hypothesized end-times scenario, postulates that the universe will end, perhaps as T.S. Eliot referenced, with a whimper rather than a bang. Modern thought suggests that our universe, ever-accelerating, will eventually stretch itself so thin that all matter and all energy becomes dilute to such an extent that only the most basic bits of matter will continue to exist. This scenario predicts that the universe ends with a waning away, a bit like “butter scraped across too much bread”. The poetic attraction of this scenario for pessimists is clear.
However, despite the romantic nihilism of this story, the second law can be condensed to a simple logical observation – there are infinite ways for things to be in disorder, and a very finite amount of ways for things to be in order. Given enough rolls of the dice, probability alone would dicate that systems would, given time, tend towards chaos or disorder.
This does, ladies and gentlemen, finally bring us to the thesis of this essay – it is very likely that a dramatic reconstruction of the American political system, especially by a huckster along the lines of Trump, is by odds alone much more likely to lead to fracture than fruition. The idea that this reformation of our government, by a clinical narcissist with no experience making governmental or military decisions, and dubious experience in business, would be able to combat the very serious threats we face both nationally and internationally is a pretty shaky concept.
The next generation of Americans faces dangers that we have not had to confront before – international terrorism, climate change, the need to revolutionize world energy policies, the widening gap between the mega-rich and the middle class, the crippling issue of student debt that continues to worsen as tuition rates rise, the accelerating national deficit, these are all issues that a Trump presidency has no business handling, especially if we are to believe that he will wash away the existing infrasctructures we have in place and replace them with his own.
The dangers previously mentioned require a leader with a proven track record, and verifiable experience dealing with these problems. While Hillary Clinton is by no means a perfect candidate, and in many ways exemplifies some of the problems we currently face in our politics, she is far and away a more responsible choice for president. At the very least, Hillary is a woman who would defer to the insights of experts on any of these serious issues, rather than stubbornly attempt to be the smartest person in the room.
Let’s try to keep in mind that even a flawed system is better than no system, and work to make incremental, well thought-out, and democratic changes to the way we govern. Let us also try to keep in mind the idea that systems always tend towards disorder over time, and resist the urge to hand over control to an autocrat, instead choosing to right our course periodically with the help of a strong and experienced leader. The success of people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is proof that the American people desire the kind of change that we need and, given time, I believe we will have the right kind of revolution – a measured one.