It's been the perceived wisdom this season that Americans are outraged, and that solutions need to be drastic. But perceived wisdom, especially among self-interested media types, isn't always accurate, and doesn't always reflect what the populace expects. And change often comes when a dam bursts, not with steady trends - watching the water rise often does little to predict the outcome. (Plus my experience with earthquakes tells me that an aftershock can be worse than the original quake - effects do ripple).

We've been searching for the wisdom of the "common man" in Iowa for decades, even as Iowa no longer reflects much of what is common in a post-industrial globalized service/Web economy. For all the political chit-chat I read, I've yet to see anything on the agglomerating political and cultural viewpoints. I was just in Shanghai going through shopping malls and eating in a non-international pizza place that could have easily been in Europe or America - same energy with the kids, forgetting the language, magazines reflect same trends, etc. Skip to a smaller Chinese city, and it's more the way it was 20 years ago. Less extreme difference between less advanced Bangkok and outlying areas.

In America, we have the high culture and low culture spots. The white Miss Teen candidate from Houston using "my nigga" with friends parallels European teens using the same language when talking English. This is the cusp of the culture (perhaps "high" may strike you odd, so say "fastest moving") - it's trending and available to most who are well-connected, whether from Des Moines or Beverly Hills, though to varying degrees. It's in language, tech, fashion, philosophies. And it's universal. Sure the PC police are out on this one, but it doesn't change the overall climate - how people live and think and act is becoming quite different from even 10 years ago.

The gasping from the slower-moving regions is audible, but it's less a reaction against the trends then a desire to take part, to share the wealth and advantages. Paul Bowles wrote years ago (40's/50's) that the desire to maintain quaint tradition in Morocco was driven more by the foreign French than the locals, who had every inclination to become more European tout-de-suite. Everybody wants to take part in the new opportunities and trends, and avoid being the dredge and cultural backwater - we're largely united in that.

The cultural wars the GOP has fought has been largely successful tactically, but a complete failure strategically. Support for entrenched racism is tiny across the board, acceptance of LGB is near-universal with a small bit of quaking over T, jokes about New York lifestyle are old man anachronistic as most of our trends come out of LA & SF, new business has become as much about 20-somethings and startups as it has defending the rights of banks and steel mills. Women in power has a long way to go, but still, it's an accepted state of affairs to be improved on, not a barrier to break. And unlike 2004, there seems to be much less worry about the rising Mexican population or need to build a wall - we've assimilated the changing trends, and they're no longer terribly much news, aside from the most rabid dog-whistling types. And despite efforts to keep Obamacare front and center, it's also transitioning into the new normal. People are more outraged about emails, and that too will pass.

The right has largely driven itself into a corner. As multiple people noted (including our local guru Dick Day), it's become very difficult to distinguish rightist rhetoric from outright dementia, both in terms of content and format - lack of syntactical and semantic ability just shy of Tourette's Syndrome. Yet due to the nature of the media space, Rush Limbaugh, chief practitioner of divide-and-conquer rightism, is taking a pay cut, and Fox is falling apart (I think less because of sex scandals and more because abasing itself in front of The Donald - though women on the right will notice this one).

What Sanders did very well in this campaign is giving tangible goals to key issues. Not just "higher wages", but $15/hour minimum. Not just "extending health care", but all the way universal single-payer. Not just "improved trade conditions", but "kill all trade agreements". Not just improve the safety controls on fracking but do away with it completely. And of course the big one, break up the banks and make them pay for education, jobs, etc. on the way out.

If you're going to express a protest vote, that's the way you do it - no mealy-mouth platitudes, but truly "stick it to the man" (saw Captain Fantastic last night - perfectly segues into this year's elections).

But is that the way people want it, this list of items? Is that the final offer?

Despite clamor about Clinton being damaged, the Pew Report from June has her with 59% support over Trump among women, and that 90% of Sanders supporters were pretty easily shifting their support to her in July. Meanwhile, there seems to be a pretty high profile movement of Republican women (e.g. Meg Whitman of HP) and Republican men (Kagan, Hanna...) shifting their support to her.

In what looks to be a year of shifting sands, the biggest accretion to date looks to be towards the center. Which is overall pretty good for the left. Despite the my-way-or-highway proclamations, areas like corporate taxation, wage equality (& minimum wage), better monitoring of the police, et al. seem to be firmly on the table - even for a growing chunk of the right. Some of the biggest offenders of hodling profits offshore are Bay Area IT companies - and they're largely behind Clinton, who's been less equivocal on that case than TPP.

As for defense and security, the overall global trends are much much less full-scale war, and more control through police activity and small-scale dealings with insurgents. Ironically, this is the approach Al Gore promoted in 2000 when he was shot down as soft on terror. It's an approach that suffers from the loopholes of pragmatism - our quasi-alliance with Russia has helped somewhat limit Syria's excesses such as removing chemical weapons while having an iffy effect on ISIS - but the end result is a steadily rolled back of ISIS territory, and a shifting of the battle to more lone-wolf, ad hoc attacks - the kind of attacks we were worried about shortly post-9/11 when someone slashed a Greyhound driver's throat, others surveyed water reservoirs and nuclear plants for weaknesses, a pizza delivery boy plotted to shoot people in a military camp, etc. It's nothing new except the number of actually carried-out attacks, but even these are extremely tiny compared to Iraq on a typically bad day.

The fear tactics and overplay of Comey, Brennan, etc. in demanding more powers is only bolstered by these events. But the overall military-industrial (& congress) coalition is weakened by the lack of actual big wars and big conflicts. Nothing compares to the costs of a battleship and nuclear silos and of course a fully-deployed Star Wars system, even though we've squandered much of our peace dividend on manned deployments and contractors. But even that decade is ending - "no flight zones" is far from boots on the ground.

So what I see is a pretty huge shift towards the middle in terms of public expectations and attitudes. And while we stay focused on the presidential match, there's no way the growing moderate coalition doesn't have an effect on down-ticket matchups at federal and state level as GOP incumbents commit hara-kiri by supporting the doomed ship (better to be a rat than a corpse at sea).

The worry about "likability" has been hugely overstated this year in a nation with a partial motto of "nice guys finish last". People like winners, or at least put away their complaints. This year we're showing more and more inclination to win big, in a way that can reshuffle party allegiance and the accepted wisdom of our pundit class - maybe even provide some face-saving redemption from our hysterical Madness of Crowds that's gripped us since at least 9/11. In this case, "don't get mad, get even" is tantamount to a slow methodical kicking ass - "revenge is a dish best served cold". Women keep lists, and this year it looks like we can finally take some names. The pendulum like the executioner's blade doesn't have to swing quickly - it just has to swing enough.