The 2016 presidential election results were supposed to be history-making. A week before voting day, NPR ran a story with headline "The Gender Gap In This Election Could Be The Biggest In At Least 60 Years," prognosticating that women could vote more liberally in 2016 than they had ever before. Like much of the pre-election coverage in left-leaning outlets, the article had a hopeful message: Hillary Clinton, our first female presidential candidate, would likely become our first female president, ushered into power with the vociferous support of women.

According to three national polls cited in the NPR article, it was clear that "women [preferred] Clinton...while men [preferred] Trump." Since 1980, a higher proportion of women have gone to the polls than men in every presidential election, and exit polls have consistently shown that women voted far more heavily Democratic in each one.

In this year's election, it was estimated that the "gender gap"—the difference in the percentage of women who vote for any given candidate when compared with men—could total a whopping 25 points. The article wasn't far off. According to Clinton super PAC pollster Geoff Garin, the 2016 gender gap was 24 points wide—a number that, read alone, conveys that women in general preferred Clinton. Overall, according to the National Election Pool, 54 percent of women voters filled in the bubble next to Clinton-Kaine. Forty-two percent picked Trump-Pence.

Read more: What You Need to Know to Call Your Representative About Trump

But that statistic does not show that 93 percent of black women who voted supported Clinton, that 67 percent of Hispanic women who voted supported Clinton, and that 78 percent of other non-white women who voted supported Clinton. It also doesn't show that just 43 percent of white women who voted supported Clinton, while the majority—53 percent—supported Donald Trump, a blatant misogynist, racist, and xenophobe.

Stephen Hawking recently remarked that, “The 21st century will be the century of complexity.” Indeed, the physics of classical geopolitics are being superseded by the physics of complexity. The combination of late-20th-century economic integration, the end of the Cold War, the entry of China, the former Soviet Union, and India into the global economy, increased labor and capital mobility, rapid population growth, the surging demand for African, Latin America, and Middle Eastern commodities, and technological explosion has propelled the world system towards unprecedented complexity. The ancient world of disjointed empires gave way to the disorderly medieval world, followed by the modern order of sovereign states, and now the transition to a global network civilization.

Geopolitical thinking, which is still governed by an antiquated, Newtonian logic, should be looked at through a quantum mechanics lens. Currently, it remains anchored in the writings of the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who saw the world as functioning according to fairly simple mechanical laws. The control over territory trumps all else. When forces collide, one must give way. This is hardly the way to understand our increasingly complex world. It is time for geopolitics to evolve toward a framework capable of grappling simultaneously with accumulating forces beyond 17th-century sovereignty, such as 18th-century enlightenment, 19th-century imperialism, 20th-century capitalism, and 21st-century technology.


Structural change happens every few decades; systems change only every few centuries. Structural change makes the world complicated; systems change makes it complex. International relations among states are complicated, while today’s network global civilization is complex. There is an order of magnitude difference in complexity between hierarchy shifting from one superpower to multiple powers (such as the Cold War) versus today’s system that is constantly reconstructing itself with diverse authorities and networks, with feedback loops across micro and macro scales.
Recent headlines, like Brexit and Trump, have been dominated by stories that require us to trace intangible butterfly effects to fully understand. For example, one of the triggers of the Arab Spring that exploded in early 2011 was the spike in food prices in Egypt and Tunisia. The countries’ main source of wheat imports was Russia, where a drought six months earlier forced Moscow to ban exports for the first time ever. (America’s ethanol-subsidies and global-commodities market speculation also played key roles, not to mention the countries themselves crossing the tipping point of intolerable political and social stagnation.)

As Arab states (especially Syria) collapsed, the refugee surge into Europe deepened a political crisis over migration that tipped the UK’s Brexit vote by just enough percentage points to bring about the most unexpected outcome. And the isolationist populism shared by British midlanders and America’s nativist Trump supporters traces back to the stagnation of incomes resulting from the globalization of industry and finance. And America’s past three decades of trade deficits with China pushed trillions of dollars of capital offshore that effectively subsidized China’s new mercantilism worldwide. The individual acts of outsourcing manufacturing to China and buying more goods from China were not intended to finance African infrastructure and remap its geopolitical loyalties—but they have.

After leaked audio showed Donald Trump bragging in 2005 that he can “grab [women] by the pussy” and kiss them without consent because he’s “a star,” Trump’s campaign seemed done for.

Many Republicans withdrew their endorsements in disgust, and those who didn’t faced intense pressure to follow suit. Trump’s poll numbers plummeted — and kept plummeting after women started coming forward to allege that Trump had sexually assaulted them.

But then, the free fall stopped. Media attention turned back to Hillary Clinton’s emails with a little over a week to go before the election. A new accusation against Trump from a former Miss Finland, and a newly surfaced video that showed Trump grabbing and kissing a former Miss Universe after humiliating her onstage in front of thousands, barely caused a ripple.

And then Americans elected an alleged sexual predator to be their president. They chose a man who has now been accused of sexual assault by 15 women — a man who has promised to sue all of those women in the first 100 days of his presidency — to be the next leader of the free world.

How did this happen?

No one factor can fully explain Trump’s victory. America’s out-of-control political polarization means that many people would vote for Trump no matter what he did, just because he had “Republican” next to his name on the ballot. Trump’s strong support among whites demonstrates how racial resentment played into his victory. His dominance in rural areas suggests a deep anxiety over not just economic security, but the loss of an entire way of life. And the role of voters who support authoritarianism can’t be ignored.