Here are two more things for us to think about for the next four years. And by “think about” I mean “learn more a lot more about.”
The first thing is to learn how narratives are formed and sustained. The night of the election, Nancy and I went to a production of Annie (that one of the grandkids was an orphan in), and if you are familiar with the play, you know that FDR is a sympathetic character in it (balanced, politically speaking, by Daddy Warbucks, a Republican). Now anybody who knows economic history knows that FDR was to the decade-long Depression what Typhoid Mary was to her legacy. And yet, here we are, coming up on a century later, with Hoover still saddled with the whole thing. What Obama successfully pulled off (blaming his predecessor) is a trick that has been done before, and it can be done repeatedly. Wits have observered that Obama inherited a bad mess the first time, but wait until you see what he inherits this next time. Surely, we think, he can’t keep harkening back to Bush? Sure, he can. The people running the country are economic illiterates, but they know how to shape a narrative. Complaining about it is not a counter-narrative — plenty of people complained about FDR.
The second thing is coming to understand that human action encompasses far more than just political action. Human action is economics far more than politics. If you find political choices that people make inexplicable, you need to look at the areas where they behave in a far more rational fashion.
On these two points, if you want to pursue them, I would suggest, respectively, this book and this study course. The latter would be a really good thing to incorporate into your home school curriculum.