0
0
How the South won the Civil War, by Heather Cox Richardson (Oxford University Press)
American politics can be baffling to an outsider, what with filibusters, gerrymandering, plenums, PACs and pork barrel politics. It’s not just the language, it’s the people who speak that language, many of them as hard to understand as their national political jargon.
In 2016, almost 63 million of them voted in the US presidential election for Donald Trump, an Olympic-class narcissist, a misogynist who is also disrespectful of national heroes and an unashamed cheat – on his taxes and his wives. Even more difficult to figure out is how he won when his opponent, Hillary Clinton, got 2 million votes more. It was the fault of the electoral college, another oddity which is meant to be a safeguard against electing a buffoon as US president. It didn’t work
