An American Tragedy
The
election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a
tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a
triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism,
authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his
ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the
United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid
farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity,
dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who
did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white
supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less
than revulsion and profound anxiety.
There
are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme
Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for
women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say
nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is
vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only
set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the
vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom
he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic
Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful
way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this
election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the
fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our
seriousness and resolve.
Early on
Election Day, the polls held out cause for concern, but they provided
sufficiently promising news for Democrats in states like Pennsylvania,
Michigan, North Carolina, and even Florida that there was every reason
to think about celebrating the fulfillment of Seneca Falls, the election
of the first woman to the White House. Potential victories in states
like Georgia disappeared, little more than a week ago, with the F.B.I.
director’s heedless and damaging letter to Congress about reopening his
investigation and the reappearance of damaging buzzwords like “e-mails,”
“Anthony Weiner,” and “fifteen-year-old girl.” But the odds were still
with Hillary Clinton.
All along, Trump
seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical
right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a
crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the
country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty
that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality,
decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth,
and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will
lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.
In
the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event.
They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about
the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They
will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel
decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who
has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil.
George Orwell, the most fearless of commentators, was right to point out
that public opinion is no more innately wise than humans are innately
kind. People can behave foolishly, recklessly, self-destructively in the
aggregate just as they can individually. Sometimes all they require is a
leader of cunning, a demagogue who reads the waves of resentment and
rides them to a popular victory. “The point is that the relative freedom
which we enjoy depends of public opinion,” Orwell wrote in his essay
“Freedom of the Park.” “The law is no protection. Governments make laws,
but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on
the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are
interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even
if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient
minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”
Trump ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession
and anxiety among millions of voters—white voters, in the main. And
many of those voters—not all, but many—followed Trump because they saw
that this slick performer,
once a relative cipher when it came to politics, a marginal
self-promoting buffoon in the jokescape of eighties and nineties New
York, was more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury,
their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests. That
he was a billionaire of low repute did not dissuade them any more than
pro-Brexit voters in Britain were dissuaded by the cynicism of Boris
Johnson and so many others.
The Democratic electorate might have taken
comfort in the fact that the nation had recovered substantially, if
unevenly, from the Great Recession in many ways—unemployment is down to
4.9 per cent—but it led them, it led us, to grossly underestimate
reality. The Democratic electorate also believed that, with the election
of an African-American President and the rise of marriage equality and
other such markers, the culture wars were coming to a close. Trump began
his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it
with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”;
his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s
bodies. And, when criticized for any of it, he batted it all away as
“political correctness.” Surely such a cruel and retrograde figure could
succeed among some voters, but how could he win? Surely, Breitbart
News, a site of vile conspiracies, could not become for millions a
source of news and mainstream opinion. And yet Trump, who may have set
out on his campaign merely as a branding exercise, sooner or later
recognized that he could embody and manipulate these dark forces. The
fact that “traditional” Republicans, from George H. W. Bush to Mitt
Romney, announced their distaste for Trump only seemed to deepen his
emotional support.
The
commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also
find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I.,
the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the
hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to
Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his
campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American
institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein
themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as
smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were
unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason
to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump and
his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence,
and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the
traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform
of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he
was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not
our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely
the way fascism can begin.
Hillary Clinton
was a flawed candidate but a resilient, intelligent, and competent
leader, who never overcame her image among millions of voters as
untrustworthy and entitled. Some of this was the result of her ingrown
instinct for suspicion, developed over the years after one bogus
“scandal” after another. And yet, somehow, no matter how long and
committed her earnest public service, she was less trusted than Trump, a
flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a
hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being
of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of
egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.
For eight years, the country has lived with
Barack Obama
as its President. Too often, we tried to diminish the racism and
resentment that bubbled under the cyber-surface. But the information
loop had been shattered. On Facebook, articles in the traditional,
fact-based press look the same as articles from the conspiratorial
alt-right media.
Spokesmen for the unspeakable now have access to huge audiences. This
was the cauldron, with so much misogynistic language, that helped to
demean and destroy Clinton.
The alt-right press was the purveyor of
constant lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that Trump used as
the oxygen of his campaign. Steve Bannon, a pivotal figure at Breitbart, was his propagandist and campaign manager.
It
is all a dismal picture. Late last night, as the results were coming in
from the last states, a friend called me full of sadness, full of
anxiety about conflict, about war. Why not leave the country? But
despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to
struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is
what is left to do. That is all there is to do.
BLOGGER'S NOTE:
I’m not crying, I’m angry. And I BLAME HILLARY. If I
was asked to run for President of the United States or even to accept a
nomination for a Presidential Appointment, the first thing that I would think
about is, what in my past, could potentially cause a problem. And when
folks are being vetted for these types of positions they are asked to disclose
those things.
I have no idea whether or not Hillary did that, but I do know
that she and her gang did not care one whit about what was best for
America. Instead they plotted against Bernie Sanders. They lied,
they played dirty tricks on him, they did everything humanly possible to win
the nomination – AT THE EXPENSE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. They
risked OUR future because Hillary and her entourage wanted so badly for
her to be President. Now that is a serious case of White entitlement.
And is there any doubt among any of you, that Bernie Sanders could have beaten Trump? Even the press is admitting
that Bernie was popular because he spoke to the disenfranchised, the people
worried about their social security, the chronically unemployed, the tide of
folks who did not rise with the efforts of the Obama administration - but who
hoped their day would come. The very
same people that Trump lured with promises of getting even. Trump gave credibility to their suspicions of, and hatred for, people and cultures different from
their own. Instead of educating them, he aligned himself
with the trappings of Jim Crow and the SS.
And Hillary like an immature 13 year old (or a self-entitled
rich White woman) who doesn’t want to face-up to her mistakes, who can’t
apologize – but thinks that the world turns on her hurt feelings, Hillary
didn’t even have the courage to publicly make a statement, after the election,
until they dragged her ass out there the day after. Great President she would have made – NOT.
White America, you have not one reason in Hell, to be shocked
by the violence and vitriol of Trump and his supporters. We have been telling you about this shit for years. And for the last 5 years you have seen
the videos, listened to the sounds, and watched us die. What exactly are you shocked about?
