As Winston Churchill once remarked: "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
The problem we have is that people have differing views, beliefs, needs and wishes. Some people love things that other people hate. As such, there's no single perfect political system that could possibly keep everyone happy all the time, unless we fractured into millions of tiny little states, each one supporting only the tiny number people who have the exact same views (imagine, then, what that would do to your family if your kids turn out to support something you rally against - as they invariably do!). As a matter of fact, this is exactly how the world used to be, and you know what it resulted in? Tribal warfare. Small, disparate groups fighting 'those' people who differ from 'us'. Sadly, that's a part of human nature: to act aggressively towards those who are different. Democracy has taken the edge off of that, but it doesn't take much to re-awaken those instincts. I'm sure most of us here have experienced that kind of othering and aggression in our every day lives as trans people.
Democracy at least gives you the illusion of free choice in that your vote only counts if the majority of people in your voting constituency want the same thing you do. If you live in a constituency where you want X and most of your neighbours want Y, your vote is effectively worthless and it is completely ignored if the other side wins. But hey, at least you had your democratic right to make your voice heard, right? So yeah, with democracy you can get whatever you want... as long as everyone else wants it too. And whichever side wins you have to hope they're not a bunch of idiots, because the train is heading more or less in their chosen direction and you're tagging along for the ride whether you like it or not.
It is in all of our best interests to remind ourselves that 'the other side' (whatever that might mean) is also entitled to have their voice heard and to be represented. Everyone believes that they're right and their opponents are wrong. Proportional representation works better, but in a bipartisan state like the UK or the USA, where the main parties represent people who are diametrically opposed to each other, the losing side's voters will always feel disenfranchised, ignored and unrepresented. If the winning side introduces enough policies that are hated by the losing side, then the losing side's voters will come out in droves at the next election to vote in protest, and politics will swing the other way again. That's what happened here: people who felt disenfranchised (for whatever reason) during the Obama years staged a protest vote. If Trump introduces a lot of unpopular policies, then people who feel disenfranchised by those policies will come out in droves at the next election to vote in protest, and the country will probably swing in the opposite direction again, in an endless game of tit-for-tat. So instead of stability, everyone keeps see-sawing from one extreme to another... and nobody is happy all the time.
That's politics, that's democracy, and that's life.
