Wow, what a conflicted 
community Oped has become - along with the whole country.
I have not submitted anything recently as I have been concentrating on Canadian politics and have not concerned myself with Oped other than to follow the trends. But with the recent election campaign it would be fair to say there is no trend - there are many conflicted thoughts and a baffled progressive community.
Some are worried about a rigged election. Perhaps, sure, but that is nothing new in U.S. politics. For that matter, no matter how patriotic you are, it needs to be recognized that the whole system is rigged and was set up that way purposely. Having read a number of the Federalist Papers from those trying to decide what kind of electoral system to have, the fathers of the system were mainly trying to avoid having "factions" - those nasty populist factions - from having any influence on mainstream political activities.
More recently, advent of electronic voting has several concerns. Among those is the obvious one of the ease and ability with which hackers can interfere with almost any computer programming. It also leaves open the consideration of bribery or pure and simple insider manipulation in order to change a voting scenario, although at that scale it probably would not have a large effect. Paramount in all this is the lack of a paper trail, where votes can be recounted and fought and argued over by the lawyers of each side. Without paper, with a rigged two party system, with a rather strange electoral college, there can be no democracy.
Consider also the idea that the winner did not have a majority of the popular vote - another problem with the winner take all system of each state. Yet for some reason this time, even though it has happened in the past, there is a much larger hue and cry because one of those "factions" won the election on a mainly anti-establishment rant. But as indicated by other writers only time will tell if Trump is truly anti-establishment or if his 'advisor' James Woolsey represents the same old - same old neocon influence. How deep is the deep state?
Another writer calls out a warning reminiscent of the old commie hating, red-baiting, the 'Soviets are attacking era - renewed recently vis a vis Ukraine and Syria and the Dems push to power. The shortsightedness of that line of thinking is amazing as Russia went through a rather thorough shock doctrine under the drunkard Yeltsin and his U.S. economic advisors, leaving Russia greatly weakened, now much revived - and then reviled - under Putin.
Given a choice between a lying manipulative chicken hawk wall street sycophant (the latter includes the industrial-military-financial complex) and a xenophobic, misogynist, racist narcissist, the conflicting ideas are probably a natural outcome. Given only bad choices with unknown consequences for either candidate, and having a mainstream media that overwhelmingly reported a sure thing for the mainstream candidate, only to have the other evil chosen is a sure way to lead to cognitive dissonance.
Unfortunately for the U.S., the electoral system and the government is a bed of their own making, and as always, they have to lie in it, lumps, bumps, broken springs, bedbugs, roaches and all.
The good part of this is that it appears that so far, Oped is allowing all voices to be heard. But in an age of instant messaging and sound bites, people tend to only read that which supports their preconceived ideas and remain immutable from new or contrary information. Oped will remain conflicted for some time; as will the U.S. in general; and so will the rest of the world attempting to make sense of this, wondering what will occur next.
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