The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

Our industry loves to bang on about the power of all this stuff and yet – sadly – the US election result shows most of them don’t work.

Or they don’t know how to actually use them. At least in terms of identifying the issues, the momentum, the considerations of the people they claim to know so much about.

Of course, it’s not just them who are lost in their own tunnel vision.

There are the opinion pollsters, political experts, podcasters and, let’s not forget, the Democrats … who sat on their hands for 8 years and then arrogantly thought they could turn it all around in a few months.

I wanted Kamala to win, but It was all so horribly inevitable that Trump would triumph.

Or it was inevitable if you opened your eyes rather than saw the world through your blinkers.

For me, nothing sums up the issue more than these images.

First this.

Then this.

And finally, this.

This last one is particularly telling because of the uncomfortable truth it reveals.

An uncomfortable truth that has been there to see for a long time if we stopped with our own prejudices against Trump supporters and looked at our own behaviours through others eyes.

You see I suspect Trumps voters know he is a hypocrite and a liar.

I also suspect they know he knows he is too.

But it’s much easier for them to trust a person who they see as openly and obviously lying than someone they believe is trying to hide their lies.

For them, Kamala can’t possibly be telling the truth when she is presenting herself – and the Democrats – as ‘goodie two shoes’.

Not just because they don’t like her, but because they believe no one can live up to that level of integrity.

They’re not wrong … especially where politics is concerned … which means they trust open liars more than who they perceive as secret liars.

That’s where society is right now.

That’s where politics is.

Which reminds me of how someone once described the difference between the Republicans and Democrats.

“Republicans want to win, Democrats want to be right”.

People like winners more than they like know-it-all’s.

If a 54-year-old, English man in New Zealand knows that … why don’t the Democrats?

Why don’t the experts?

Why don’t the systems?

Not because they’re stupid – far from it – but maybe because they chose to be deliberately blind.

Choosing to ignore the bits that make them question their own complicity.

Their own prejudices, hypocrisies, inconsistencies.

I hope the Democrats learn from this. To grow and evolve. To win in the future.

But then I hope my industry also learns from this.

I fear not though.

Preferring to carry on as before so as to not have to face the issues and behaviour they could or should do better.

Acting with the sort of arrogance we accuse Trump and his supporters of having.

They say it’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from failure … well, we failed.

Time to learn from our mistakes.

Time to open our eyes and ears rather than rely on the self-serving systems and processes we developed and rely on to make us feel better about who we are and what we know.