I am sticking with my theory of the election results.
The election was based on hate, bigotry, and fear from the razor thin majority of suburban and rural communities directed towards the urban razor thin minority. The problem is naming the fear. After re-reading Clifford Simak's short story, The Huddling Place, I decided the name of the fear is Agoraphobia.
Agoraphobia? Yes. Think about the term itself, fear of the marketplace. We normally assume this is fear of open places, like plazas, or landscapes, the fear of openess and emptiness.
But the agora was a marketplace, a plaza filled with people, wares, hawkers, prophets, thieves, different people from different places, different races. In short an urban zoo, a place filled to capacity, not empty, but full.
It's this latter meaning to agoraphobia, that I am thinking of. The fear of crowds, contending voices, competing vendors, which probably has no better representation than a traditional Arab or Middle Eastern bazaar, or the Chinese and Vietnamese markets, Mexican markets, African markets. Nothing is fixed, prices change with the mutual appraisal of the customer and vendor. Everything is a potential swindle or a deal and the trick is to struggle to find the fair price were wits, humor, and intensity win.
These kinds of places are living nightmares to the controlling reserve, the manipulative and behind the scenes nastiness that prevails in suburban and rural communities which are quite closed and protected---not at all unlike the closed, protected, and insulated elite circles of power in DC. Bush's reactions in the first debate were a great example of how insulated he is from even mild confrontations. Business managers and higher-ups act the same way when they are confronted. University administrators are the same way. The whole managerial caste is just as fragile. If the voices get too loud, call the police, call security, call the Army.
So, there is a certain poetic symmetry and irony to the idea that the US Empire is driven by its agoraphobia, a presumed ideal that has turned against itself.
CG