# I completely understand the desire to make big changes.

If you want someone to tear the system down, you will probably want to elect
someone like Gary Johnson: he has a clear idea of which parts…

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I completely understand the desire to make big changes. I don’t find the
current system sufficient. (The term closest to describing my political
sentiments is “anarchist”.) That said, I can’t stand by the idea that a
“middle finger vote” is justified, particularly when it’s unlikely to result
in real change; breaking down a complex and resilient system like a government
requires a strategy.

If you want someone to tear the system down, you will probably want to elect
someone like Gary Johnson: he has a clear idea of which parts of the system he
would like to remove and how to remove them.

Trump is unlikely to tear it all down. He has no reason to want to perform
major restructuring; he doesn’t have enough understanding of the current
structure to know how to disassemble it; even if he did, he probably couldn’t
keep his attention focused on the task of tearing down government for long
enough for it to happen. A Trump presidency will be comparable to that of
Bush: more of the same, but with more mistakes.

To tear a system down requires more than bringing in an unpredictable
wildcard. While someone like that is unpredictable in the short term, the
distribution of their behavior is predictable at scale: a random walk seldom
goes very far and often returns to the center, not despite but because of its
randomness.

With regard to the negative sides of the status quo, I think even this favors
Clinton. She will avoid war and torture whenever possible — after all, they
have bad PR — and to the extent that she condones them at all she will do so
very carefully. Trump will not avoid war: he will act in accordance with
momentary displays of dominance, rather than in accordance with risk.

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [September 30,
2016](https://medium.com/p/9e16f86f6b4e).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/i-completely-understand-the-
desire-to-make-big-changes-9e16f86f6b4e)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.