It was a real squeaker, all right, but it squeaked the wrong way: in the Electoral College, determined by a different number of votes allocated to each state, Donald Trump won by a significant 312 to Kamala Harris’ 226; in the popular election (each person counted) she actually did better than he. It was a “normal” election in the sense of being free, fair and secure from either internal or external interference, but it was far from an ordinary political party vs. political party contest in that one candidate was running on a platform dedicated to changing American governance from a democracy to a dictatorship.
As a social democrat, a feminist, and a life-long advocate for racial and gender justice, you can imagine my horror when Donald Trump won with a coalition including white women, young white and black men, and Latinos, largely comprised of the working and sinking-from-the-middle classes. Although it has taken a while for me to come out of shock and set pen to paper, our newspaper and television pundits were up the very next morning, hard at allocating blame.
Here are some of their theories.
Shame on us
White, liberal and college-educated people like me lost to voters who felt that they had been systematically prevented from getting ahead ever since the 1990s, consumed in desperate attempts to get food on the table and pay the bills in an economy that has been keeping their wages too low and their expenses too high to achieve “The American Dream.”
On the morning after the election, in an article titled “Voters to the Elites: Do You See Me Now?” New York Times columnist David Brooks called our dismayed attention to the “Diploma Divide” which left those without higher education furious at their loss of status, recognition, and economic opportunity. “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible.”
The results for voters were concrete and devastating: “Before long, the diploma divide became the most important chasm in American life. High school graduates die nine years sooner than college-educated people. They die of opioid overdoses at six times the rate. They marry less and divorce more and are more likely to have a child out of wedlock. They are more likely to be obese.”
Trump voters felt sneered at and disregarded by a liberal elite “woke” about the oppression of people from other races and ethnic groups and gender identities but uninterested in their economic needs. For but one small example of what offended them so much, in the chattersphere after the election Latinos said they had swung to Trump the minute that college-educated elites began using the term “Latinex” (a gender-inclusive term to include both Latino and Latina).
Well and truly “pissed off” by being left behind economically and culturally belittled, they responded enthusiastically every time Trump ruptured liberal norms with racist, sexist, and ethnically prejudiced “dog whistles.” The more outrageously he behaved and the more we liberals cringed, the more votes he garnered.
Or, as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote in a post on Facebook, “[i]t should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them….While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” Or, shame on us.
Shame on Them
News Analyst Robert Hubbell insists that assessing the election as a class division “normalizes” Donald Trump’s campaign, which was historically abnormal and abhorrent to normal American values. We should not attribute our Democratic loss to a political divide between more and less educated voters but to the latter’s concurrence with his xenophobia: “Just as the media normalized Trump before the election, there is a wholesale effort to ‘normalize’ the election results. Pundits are claiming the election was decided by voters’ concerns over inflation, immigration, or crime. Those issues are post-facto rationalizations offered by voters to conceal their real reasons for voting for a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser over an eminently qualified candidate… Kamala Harris lost because Trump’s supporters were motivated by racism, misogyny, and white supremacy.”
I see this argument between David Brooks and Robert Hubbell as a matter of “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” It is a question of whether Trump’s racist, misogynistic and immigrant-hating dog whistles constitute ends in themselves or the means to garner votes in order to achieve other ends?
Hubbell’s insistence that Trump’s underlying goal of xenophobia is to put an end to non-white advancement gains credence from the fact that, when shown Harris’s and Trump’s economic platforms without being told whose was which, focus groups chose Harris’s pragmatic kitchen table policies over Trump’s tariffs and taxes. But when they realized which were hers, many men (and women too) switched their vote because she was a woman, and/or a woman of color, making distrust of women and people of color rather than their own economic wellbeing their deciding factor
Is it possible that, although Trump insisted throughout his campaign that his goal was 1) to make America great (white, male-dominated) again and 2) to make the rich richer and business less regulated, his real motivation was neither economic nor xenophobic but something far more sinister? Was he seeking dictatorial control for the sake of power itself, or did he want power in order in order to achieve something else?
By the second week after the election it became clear that he had two basic motives: anarchy (“dismantling the deep state”) and humiliating his enemies (“owning the libs”). These two goals — to break everything up by destroying governmental institutions and to revel in retribution — became shockingly manifest in his choices for cabinet positions:
- Matt Gaetz, a congressman accused of drug and sex trafficking crimes, for Attorney General.
- Robert Kennedy Jr, accused of groping his children’s nanny, an anti-vaxer who seeks to abolish childhood vaccination and who has been blamed for children dying during a measles outbreak in Samoa, who insists we should take fluoride out of the water supply, and that everyone should drink raw milk, to head Health and Human Services.
- Pete Hegseth, who is opposed to women in the military and paid off a woman whom he is alleged to have sexually assaulted, to head up the Department of Defense.
- Tulsi Gabbard, who has questionable ties to Putin and Assad, and would thus be an ineligible security risk in any job in the organization she is being chosen to oversee, for Director of National Intelligence.
These are huge, complex organizations with thousands of employees and enormous budgets, but Trump’s nominees have little management experience. Antagonistic to the goals of their new departments and incapable of running them, these choices fulfill both his first goal, to rupture the governance of Federal Departments, as well as his second, which is to punish his enemies (he plans to fire thousands of civil servants along with a number of military generals).
The sexual predation celebrated in these appointments makes every liberal and democrat in the country cringe down to our bones (which is, of course, the intention). It seems clear that Trump, who has claimed the right to assault women and who has been judged a rapist in a court of law, is wreaking revenge upon his victim/accusers while thumbing his nose at the whole “Me Too” movement, which has brought many prominent sexual offenders to justice.
Or, as United States Attorney and legal analyst Joyce Vance puts it, “Trump is normalizing the unthinkable in front of our eyes.”
As for me, as it became clear how much Trump wants us to despair and to let his venom poison and paralyze our wills, my resistance strengthened. Fortunately, I have the kind of temperamental resilience that helps me bounce back from political disasters (so far, Hitlerism, McCarthyism, Sexual Discrimination, the Vietnam and Iraq wars, Reagan, George W. Bush, Trump, not to mention the entire patriarchy) and keep on fighting.
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Resilience and Resistance
Kamala Harris created a strong, diverse, and wide-reaching campaign organization, building a nation-wide grassroots base that is alive and well and will provide plenty of local volunteers for Democratic party groundwork in the difficult years ahead. In her gracious concession speech, Kamala Harris said: “On the campaign, I would often say when we fight, we win. But here’s the thing, sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up.”
My first thought after the election was how we could prevent harm to Trump’s intended victims, “Illegal aliens” whom he plans to sweep up in the thousands and force into detention camps. One of my friends told his neighbor that he would protect him, but that didn’t seem adequate to me: the police would just sweep through his apartment too. So I have a personal project of finding out 1) whether Michigan will forbid the sweeps altogether and 2) if churches can legally provide sanctuary if worst comes to worst. I am also researching organizations that will help women in Red (Republican) States where abortion is illegal to get to Blue (Democratic) states where women’s reproductive health services are still provided.
Enough Republican Senators managed to keep Matt Gaetz’s appointment from being confirmed, and there is hope that they may at last summon the moxie to resist the most horrendous of Trump’s moves. One note of hope is the Republican election of a not-very-Trumpist Senate leader, John Thune, who has succeeded in keeping the Senate in session to vet Trump’s nefarious nominees in spite of Trump’s desire to cancel it. In that way, he has (so far) preserved the Senate’s “Advise and Consent” function that is basic to the constitutional separation of powers between the Legislature, the Supreme Court, and the Executive branches of government.
At the state level, Democratic governors have started a coalition called “Governors Safeguarding Democracy” to champion democratic principles in the face of authoritarianism.”
After Trump’s 2017 win, a locally-focused interest group (see this Impakter article) came together to build resistance against his policies in every township, county and state. Now, facing the staggeringly harmful agenda he is unleashing on the country, they are reorganizing to fight back once again.
Lawyers are organizing to pitch in: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLI), which successfully fought hundreds of battles against “the big lie” that Biden lost the 2020 election, has summoned “legal, legislative, and advocacy experts (who) have identified the challenges and opportunities that President-elect Trump’s administration will present and have made concrete plans for the ACLU’s response.” Lawyers Defending American Democracy will also bring their expertise to attempts to undermine the Constitution.
On Good, and Evil
I have run into a bit of evil in my time — political evil, patriarchal evil, family evil — so I know unadulterated malice when I see it coming. The opposite of evil is, of course, the good, to be found in ethical values, social norms and the virtue of compassion that is found in every world religion. I have run into a lot of good in my time too, enough to be convinced that, even in the face of overwhelming odds, our sense of responsibility for our fellow humans endures.
Let’s let Liz Cheney, that courageous Conservative Republican, most of whose platform I disagree with but whose heart and soul have been in the right place throughout the Trump ordeal, have the last word: posted the following:
“We now have a special responsibility, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth, to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years. Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy.”
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of Impakter.com — In the Cover Photo: Donald Trump speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, February 23, 2018. Cover Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
