Once again, the concept called America has left me behind. On November 8th,
America elected Donald Trump to be the next President. He won by one million fewer popular votes that Hillary Clinton but won the electoral college count.
As I write this on
November 17th, only a week has passed, and still I find it impossible to
believe these words. It is not a version of reality that anyone I know thought
could play itself out. Even when terrorists flew planes into buildings on
September 11, 2001, somewhere in my rational mind, I could accept the
motivations that led to these actions. As shocked and depressed and saddened as
I was, the world order that created the conditions for the kind of rage that
motivates young men to kill innocent victims and themselves was familiar to me.
The struggle between the imperial West and the oppressed, developing world has often
played itself out in acts of desperation that cause great destruction and
anguish in the most unexpected circumstances in the supposedly secure parts of
the world. I can understand the motivation for terrorism, though I oppose it
wholeheartedly.
But this is
something new. Half of the American animal has risen up and bitten the other
half in an attempt to mortally wound the whole body. I don't have a frame of
reference for this kind of blind self-destruction.
For about five
days, I was in numb, terrified shock, alternating with bouts of all-consuming
rage. In the past day or two, that has given way to indifference, and I have
begun to be able to listen to the news radio again, just a little. By
indifference, i mean the attitude that says "OK Americans, you wanted
this, now you can eat your own shit, I give up." This attitude is actually
making it easier to wake up in the morning, though I know it's not productive in the long term.
So I am now
trying to piece together a framework by which to understand how a sizable
portion of a developed, educated country is able to invite a figure with every
trait of a fascist authoritarian into its top position of power. I have heard
all of the explanations and tried to absorb them: The left has abandoned the
working class. The left has preoccupied itself with social movements and
identity politics and a large portion of the population no longer trusts the
American political system. The personality and character of a candidate are not
as important as his or her ability to completely undermine the status quo. The
liberal economic agenda has sent manufacturing overseas. The liberal agenda is
too soft on terrorism and radical Islam abroad. I hear and understand all of
these arguments, yet they do nothing to defeat the utter cognitive shut-down
that occurs when I think of one single human being actually casting a vote for
the person of Trump. I "understand" the reasons but my emotions and
intellect do not register them as real.
I think this is
the same part of my personality that can't enjoy horror movies. I don't believe
that a person without a flashlight or a weapon would willingly walk into a
cabin in the middle of the woods where a serial killer lives. I don't believe
it and I can't relate to it, so the movie makes no sense and is not
entertaining. In the same way, voting for Trump doesn't line up with my understanding
of what it means to be a human being. Anyone mindful of putting himself and his
loved ones in danger doesn't hear the rhetoric coming out of that guy's mouth
for a year and then willingly vote for him.
I have had a few
conversations with conservatives over the past few months, and not a single one
has expressed any fondness for Trump or admitted to voting for him. This is one
of the most confounding aspects of this election. If this was a strategy for
victory, then it was genius: Fool your opponents into thinking that no one
likes the your candidate, openly deride your own candidate, and then when the
other side is lulled into complacency, vote for him in secret in massive
numbers.
The left and
right are so utterly divided that even a desire for dialogue seems to be met
with silence or extreme reticence. I have tried to engage people I am very
close to in discussions of policy, and to understand the sources of their
discontent. More specifically, I have asked many people to send me factual,
reliable sources to document their positions, and I have gotten nothing in
return. There doesn't seem to be much desire for scientific questioning on the
part of the right, or for a consensus on reliable sources of information.
Liberals read the New York Times and the New Yorker and even the Wall Street
Journal and listen to NPR, and these outlets reinforce all of their world
views. The journalists who work at those institutions, as I understand it, are
at risk of losing their highly sought-after jobs if they embellish or distort
the truth. In my mind, this makes it reasonable to believe that what I read or
hear from them is "the truth." I believe that the truth exists, at
least a widely accepted version of perceived reality that forms the basis of
how human beings walk through life. Gravity is an absolute, for instance, and
not many people refute it. Where is the New York Times of the right wing? Can I read it?
This election
has made me question the very idea of reality. It seems to be a concept that
holds little value for a large part of the population. When a candidate goes on
TV day after day, week after week, and with a straight face, says things that
are easily refuted, immediately verifiable as lies, and self-contradicting,
reality ceases to exist on a certain level. Any assertion that is made by a
public figure can be easily fact-checked on an almost instantaneous basis these days. The
lies and fabrications and contradictions coming out of Trump during the
campaign were so constant and so unchecked by his constituency, it eroded all
respect for their credibility.
This is the part where
I could go into all of the well-documented ways in which Trump has disrespected women and people of all races and religions, incited violence,
undermined the democratic process, cheated on his taxes, admitted to sexual
assault, and on and on. But we all know what a worthless piece of trash he is,
it’s all on public record. That’s not the point of this. The point of this is
for me to try to figure out what happened. How? Huh?? The people who voted for
him did it despite who he is, not because of it.
I have to admit that on my side,
there is a constant echo chamber of opinion reinforcing the self-righteous
assertion that we are correct. There’s not a lot of listening going on. But
there’s a reason for that. The right has been telling liberals that they are
assholes for decades now. The right wing has claimed moral superiority for
decades. The right wing owns patriotism, it owns support of our troops, it owns
the church, it owns the police, the flag, the country. Obama and Clinton (Bill
and Hillary) are liars and commies and un-American, blah blah blah. So why
would I listen to right wingers, when all they want to do is tell me what a
piece of shit I am? I’d rather listen to my smart friends, and journalists and politicians who
are trying to fix the world.
Which leads me to the part of this
that makes me the most sad and angry. The reason why none of this makes any
sense is that everyone I know has spent their entire adult lives supporting the
working class, supporting the underdog, supporting the under-represented, the
ones left behind, the people with no voice. I vote for the candidates who want
to raise my taxes, not lower them, so that working people can have a higher
minimum wage. This is personally against my self-interest, but I believe in the
American experiment. I vote for candidates who want to help poor people get
health care. I vote for candidates who want to take the corporate interests out
of politics. I support candidates who want to keep people out of jail for minor
infractions or drug charges. I vote for people who want to pump money into
education and medicine and sustainable energy. I support regulation of the
banks, and a limited military budget.
This brings up a very important
point about the military and big government. The military comprises 16% of
government expenditure. All of the
people who work in the military work for the government, they are all paid from
taxpayer money. Only some of them are soldiers, the rest of them provide
support in some other way. So if you support our troops, you support big
government.
BUT… The working class doesn’t want
me to stand up for it. They don’t want me to speak for them. They don’t relate
to me, and they don’t relate to my candidate. They hate rich people, but they
want to be rich. Culturally, they relate to the middle and lower class, which
they identify with the worker’s struggle, hence the designation “working
class.” They are against those who control industry, who own businesses, who
own real estate. But in a subtle contradiction, they envy and venerate the
rich. They want to be rich. They want to retain their cultural working class
touchstones (music, food, entertainment, religion) but be wealthy. So for them,
Donald Trump is a perfect avatar. He has amassed enormous sums of wealth, yet
has retained a veneer of working class brashness and lack of polish. It is all a giant con, but it has worked.
The other pieces of the puzzle are the race and gender issues. If you assume that
culture is stronger than economics, then it’s possible that it can be stronger
than race and gender as well. Trump’s racist
comments and his pandering to racist elements of America, and his attacks on women, can seem secondary in
this light. They are a giant nuclear bomb waiting to be detonated, a scary
weapon to use, but apparently the people who voted Trump are not as concerned
with race, and as misogynist as we think. They can shrug off his wacky statements because they share his overall desire to subvert the smug edit. This is apparently a stronger motivator than racism and sexism. This remains to be seen.
So we seems to be in a class
upheaval, not a political one. There is a strong tide that makes membership in
the Trump camp not just attractive but inevitable. To identify with Hillary
would be a betrayal of everything you’ve known as a person for twenty years, so
anything the candidate, who happens to be Trump, can say or do, is irrelevant. It
blinds intelligence and overrides gender loyalty.
The final piece is the idea of
“middle class” versus “ poor.” To the new right, the middle class is not the
poor. To lump them together is to insult them. To the left, they are similarly
categorized, since policies to help them are similar. To be poor is no more or
less shameful than to be middle class in terms of national policy, it is a
matter of degree of need. It carries no value judgment. Poverty is not
necessarily a fault of laziness or lack of drive, but a symptom of systemic failure. To the right, this is flabby reasoning and it
lets freeloaders off the hook. There are two opposing ideologies at work in the
same brain (this is the era of cognitive dissonance, don’t forget): If you’re
poor and black, it’s because you’re lazy, AND, if you’re poor and white, it’s
because the government has turned its back on you.
This issue of classes overlaps with
race but is not necessarily the same. To lump the poor with the middle class is
politically disastrous. No one wants to be compared with a neighbor who has
achieved less, that is human nature. And if more and more of the poor are white
and more and more blacks are middle class, racial resentment is inevitable.
This does not excuse racism (and certainly does not excuse Trump’s ham-fisted exploitation
of racial friction), but sheds some light on what’s going on.
So here I am, stuck in this place
we call America, raising two beautiful kids. I have love for this place,
considering I’ve spent most of my life here. I’ve also spent all of my politically
active existence with the party that tries to help people, and the other party
has responded with a resounding “F*** you.”
For now, I can only respond by
saying “F*** you” right back while I gather my thoughts and try to figure out
the next step. My friends and I were exhausted on November 7th,
ready for a chance to stop fighting, and start implementing the policies that
we believe will heal America. These are the policies that Obama spent eight
years fighting for and getting shot down at every turn by a useless,
obstructionist Congress. Obama and the Democrats have been blamed for not
changing the system by the very people who prevent them from changing the
system. So yeah, I say “F*** you” loud and clear, Republicans.
But that is no solution. We need a
new candidate to build a real, strong progressive party. I would vote for Russell
Brand but he’s not eligible. I wonder if Jon Stewart would go for it… Good
luck, America.
