US election: Chickens voted for KFC

American elections are finished. The defeated side is shocked and appalled by the realization of the kind of society they live in, the winners they took the whole thing quite calmly, as something that was taken for granted. The first ones did not understand at all and are only now slowly realizing what the topic of those elections really was, while the others knew it from the very beginning.

All the countless polls and focus groups organized in recent months showed that by far the most important topics for voters were the economy and women's rights to abortion. And they were all wrong. Not because the pollsters don't know their job, but because the pollsters, sorry, lied big time. People were simply ashamed to admit that they were only interested in the gender and race of the candidates in this election. Neither the economy, nor immigration, nor women's rights, nor security, nor foreign policy. None of that.

A black woman is unacceptable

Simply put, America could, if only barely, put up with a black president, but it is by no means ready for a president who is a woman. Be it white or black. And a woman who is also black, like Kamala Harris, had absolutely no chance. It is unacceptable on both grounds.

And as, a few days ago, we analyzed the campaign for the just-ended elections from the director's point of view, now it is time to look at their results in a similar way.

Photo: AP

So, we had a situation like when two large, repertory theaters in the city have premieres on the same evening. One offered a remake of their old play, a staging of a well-known classic piece with the same main actor, and the other a new drama with a contemporary theme and a completely new, as yet unconfirmed actor.

Approximately the same amount of funds were invested, in terms of production there was no major difference between these plays, and the marketing campaigns were of similar intensity and scope. However, one of the productions achieved an incomparably greater success with the audience.

What sells the show

And as the history of the theater teaches us, a famous title with an acting star in the lead role almost always, with precious few exceptions, sells more tickets. And it didn't matter at all that that old acting bard was visibly decrepit, that only massive make-up and prosthetic aids kept him together, nor that the play had faded, performed in front of an audience in Munich beer halls during the thirties, and today it is played around the world from Moscow to Pyongyang.

It didn't matter either that the main protagonist directly insulted and belittled his own audience from the stage, told them, quite openly and literally, that he needed them only and exclusively for the votes, let them wait for him at the beginning of the play for up to three hours, while he finished the interviews with some podcasters, left them without transportation in the middle of the night in some California wasteland. He even unequivocally and persistently repeated to them that he intended to do even worse things to them, if they supported him.

Theater of the Absurd

But the audience didn't mind. On the contrary. He offered them something incomparably more important to them - permission to express with impunity their basic impulse to dislike someone. In this case women and blacks or ideally both. He promised power or at least the projection of power to a large part of society, whose wishes had long been denounced and socially unacceptable. And they responded with blind support.

This is where we come to the often misused term - theater of the absurd. But really, many elements of this theatrical genre are not difficult to recognize in this situation. The results of the audience research show this unequivocally. Here they are, tabulated, as many theater managers like them:

White men: Harris 39% Trump 57%

White women: Harris 46%, Trump 51%

Black men: Harris 73% Trump 23%

Black women: Harris 88% Trump 9%

Latino men: Harris 51% Trump 45%

Latino women: Harris 60% Trump 36%

If we cross these numbers with voting data in rural areas, industrial cities and among other ethnic groups, we see how the ideas of Beckett, Ionesco and the immortal Jean Genet work in practice.

Thus, Latino immigrants voted for their own deportation, whites and a third of Latino women voted for the abolition of their rights to bodily autonomy, one in four black men voted for a racist, peasants voted for taxing themselves, the poor voted for tax breaks for the rich, and the Arab community voted for Netanyahu. As someone noted – the chickens voted for KFC.

The only groups that remained within the framework of classical theater and if we may say, of common sense, were black and part of the Latino women. They supported a more contemporary piece and above all, a main actress similar to them. And this is the fate of every theatrical avant-garde - it brings new ideas, new people, stirs spirits, but after the initial excitement it fails at the box office.

What next

And well, the management of the theater whose performance failed will say, what next? It would be essential for him to understand, in our opinion, that, first of all, he has a repertoire problem and then also a problem of actor division.

And let's leave this (para)theatrical language now, let's return to this ordinary one and state that, if we want a more successful fight against extremism of the fascist type, it would be necessary to start from basic things, let's say the way of communication.

The arrogance with which the left, including the American one embodied in the Democratic Party, addresses people is shocking. And even worse than that – unproductive. "If you want to change people, don't stand back," Branimir Štulić would tell them.

These elections, as well as many others in Europe, show that the issues that interest a huge part of the population are not economic and even less ideological, but cultural. Questions of identity and belonging. And the left persistently imposes some kind of class struggle on them, which they are absolutely not interested in.

The shift of Democrats to the center, evident in this election, especially when Republicans allowed a hostile takeover of their party from the ranks of the Cult of Mages and went right, all the way to the brink of fascism, is necessary and potentially salutary. Only the far left, the so-called progressive wing of the Democrats and their Woke movement would have to follow the example of the political evolution and maturation of one of their most visible leaders, the charismatic and as it seems now pragmatic, Alexandria Acasio-Cortes and accept the fact that dissenters cannot be won over by force , neither by arrogance, nor by refusing to, regardless of how wrong they are, still be heard and not, as they say now, canceled, however freaky that word may be.

Let the people themselves know the truth

Today, it is no longer about people having to be convinced and won over to different ideological or economic concepts, but about much deeper changes in behavior and character, about helping them get rid of systemically embedded fears of the new and, above all, different. This job requires a huge amount of skill, and even some cunning.

Socrates said that we need maieutics - the skill of midwifery, so that people themselves can be led to realize the truth that they hide within themselves. Or less poetically, in the words of the archinamazan Šojić, the great Lanet Gutović - that we roll fans along with their coffee. To offer them at least a part of the repertoire that is close to them and the main actor that they can accept at that moment. Let's first prepare them for modern theater and modern acting style, if you understand me...

Human nature will probably never change, because that is exactly what it is - our nature. Aggressive primate impulses will always try to prevail and the only question is whether we as individuals and as a society as a whole will manage to control them long enough and bring a sufficient number of people to the side of progress, in order to buy the time necessary for technological breakthroughs to bring us to the point where life becomes so high-quality that issues of race, gender, ideology and religion become completely irrelevant.

It will be a time when this political theater of today will not be so crucially important and when it will take the form of pure art and why not, entertainment.