The close of the 2016 campaign for the Presidency of the United States of America is a comedy whose second act would plunge into an all-out tragedy.

Predictably, suspicion and shade would become the tools of choice for both sides for most of the last 18 months, that closer resembled a feud than a campaign.

Suspicion of the other candidate and a fickle concern with the oppositions’ political beliefs (a crime continuously committed on one side more than the other) would take side stage in comparison to the focus on the other’s skeletons. Where the melodrama would ultimately unravel would be the accepted redefinition of ‘the other’ to encompass any deviance of ethnicity, of sexuality, of motives, of family background, or of minority status. It would be supplemented by vile, passive comments on the menstruation cycle, the mockery of disabled people, and a proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the country. The President elect would open his position on abortion by taking a relatively pro-choice stance that he would later abandon in favour of “punishment” for those who seek them.

He would also propose the killing of families of those known to be involved in terrorist organisations before topping it all off by floating a conspiracy theory that Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s father was a close friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and that the two had distributed pro-Castro literature. Photographic evidence the soon-to-be 45^th President of the United States claimed to have seen, doesn’t actually exist. Opposition to President Trump would be dismissed as nothing more than a lack of intelligence or as a means to advance a hidden motive not visible to the eye and hence understandably worthy of suspicion.

In Trump’s own hometown a subculture that began in the late 70s in Chicago would catch fire in the gay friendly vaults of Uptown NYC. It would go on to shape almost every aspect of popular music almost 40 years later. Despite having fueled popular culture, the black community would still remain the financial underclass in the US. Notorious stories of raids on The Stonewall and countless other clubs would leave the gay, Latino and other minority communities frustrated at political and social constraints they would find themselves in. America (or the world) didn’t understand it then – But they would come to.

House music would become a force capable of uniting people in an arena that could foster learning and acceptance. In return it would become the influence that would allow those on the outside the ability to imagine what life was like for those involved. House was rough and ready, dirty and unclean. The sound would resonate across the Post-Disco scene of New York and Chicago as an audible representation of the dirty social, civil and political realities of the country’s minority communities, no different to what Hip Hop would portray a decade later.

Underground club culture would continue to challenge our ears, our intuitions and our humanity. Today it allows us to fall in love with people or moments and recognise others as fellow human beings, that if nothing else must be half decent seeing as they’re at a pretty sweet party. Disagreements, while being able to recognise the other’s humanity is a key ingredient of intellectual debate; It’s your right to disagree; It’s your right to be confused; You’re allowed to be wrong; It’s also within your right to change your mind if you have an urge to do it. The crowd you find yourself in shouldn’t be defined only as House or Techno heads. There’s far more to people than the music they like. While it brings us together it should never assimilate us into being one of the same thing. House stands for multiculturalism, acceptance, tolerance, and equality. Maybe we should celebrate and try to explore these differences, airing them out, actually debating them, changing them and reviving them later on.

Empathy might not have been any kind of founding principle of the initial House sub-scene but it was one of, if not its greatest, exports. People got to meet and flirt with new ideas, with new perceptions of themselves and reimagined ideas of others. House would allow culture to crash into itself and where bigotry infiltrated, the scene would self-regulate and discard (something it’s still capable of doing today). When the early theorists of High Art sketched empathy for the first time in the 19^th Century it wasn’t something soft or fluffy. Even less important was its relationship with sympathy. Empathy would be an attempt to understand an object from that object’s point of view in order to come to some form of working understanding. It was a deliberate intellectual attempt to understand someone else’s opinions whatever they might have been. It represented a fusion of object and subject and the knowledge that would result. Nothing more or less.

New York’s first gay pride march in 1970

Diversity is strength, disagreement is productive and a healthy degree of skepticism is invaluable. There are habitual reactionary forces within the ranks of the American Alt Right but they have only exploited a preexisting illness within all walks of society: The lack of willingness to understand people we know too little about. Of course there is a historical narrative at play here. The painfully drawn out winding down of industry in the U.S. have left many feeling abandoned by their political representatives and increasingly out of pocket. Prospects for a lot of people have been growing increasingly narrow and a cap on illegal or cheap(er) labour is seen as a genuine opportunity to get into one of the toughest job markets of the past 100 years. The Establishment Left has been as guilty as any group for categorising it all as redneck parochial politics. We can’t be so naïve as to think we can make progress by preaching inclusivity but ignoring real concerns like those above.

Perhaps the issue is our claiming ownership of the same thing that’s not ours to claim. Throughout the election cycle in the U.S. there has been a total vacuum of empathy. Generalised anger, even if you doubt the motive, is a real issue that stretches far beyond the borders of the U.S. Maybe more pungent than anything else is the vanity of politics in 2016: Everyone is correct and as a result, everyone else is wrong – painfully, inconceivably and moronically wrong. A victim of their own stupidity, arrogance or lack of education. Browse the level of analysis regularly at play in discussions focused on the Irish Techno Scene as alternative. There’s a wealth of detailed and skilfully applied understanding that more often than not results in people learning something. Listen into TalkSport and catch phone-in analysis on José Mourinho’s run of form on Manchester Utd, or the scrutiny of the cost/benefit equation of Leicester’s Champions League run against the club’s performances in England (the list is endless). When people disagree, they debate and they listen to each other. We need to talk to each other. We need to debate each other. We need to dance together and we need to let go of nostalgia. We need to listen to scientists and spiritual leaders. Climate change is real and black lives matter. We need to get sweaty together, to bleed together and to get angry together. Opinions matter – not because they’re right or wrong but because they have consequences.

Once again it’s morning in America. It’s not President Reagan’s morning, nor is it the morning of President Trump or the Kennedy dynasty: It’s everyone’s. It’s the morning of those we don’t agree with and those we admire. This isn’t some romantic argument about how the ‘power of House’ can fix everything. Sadly the summer of love has ended. But next time you find yourself under a disco ball dancing to a kick drum loop bank, remember that what you’re engaging in is a fundamental part of Latino-Gay culture so infectious that it penetrated the world. The same world that 30 years prior wanted nothing more than to eradicate it until it listened.