Stunned.
A week later I still find myself waiting to wake up and find it was all
a bad dream. I hear on the news about Trump’s transition team, and I
think, wait a minute, where’s Hillary’s transition team?
I’ve
been processing. Not putting feelings into words, because I need to let
the knowledge settle enough so that my feelings aren’t the
flash-in-the-pan of incredulity and anger. Let those burn off, then take
a good long look around at what my America has become.
What we
lost by electing the bastard: Health care, environmental protections,
regulation and accountability for Wall Street, and any chance of
overturning Citizens United. And the Supreme Court.
But even if
he’d lost, the bastard would have done much of his damage just in
running. Defeated, he would still have made hate speech part of ordinary
political discourse. When his followers admire him for “telling it like
it is,” they mean he’s not pretending a respectable tolerance he
doesn’t feel and not asking them to either. His campaign brought the
white supremacists out from the corners and crevices where they’ve been
hiding.
We do not live in a more racist country than we did a week
ago; it’s just more visible now. And while all my educated white
liberal friends are in a state of shock and fear, to the black people we
know it’s just same old, same old.
So. There’s reasons why Clinton lost, and there’s reasons why the man won.
All
the Sanders supporters are shouting, “I told you so!” The Democratic
party had a vibrant, popular candidate who was pressing for change at a
time when Americans were demanding change and who was creating a
groundswell of grass roots support, and the powers that be did
everything they could to undercut him. Hillary was “inevitable.” This is
not the first time that the Democrats have taken for granted the
support of the left and flushed it. This is not the first “inevitable”
candidate who lost for failing to cultivate what was supposed to be her
strongest base of support.
Stu Spivack, 2006.And
then there’s the other half of America. The day after the election, I
heard Trump say something I actually agreed with. Our country’s thriving
economy has turned rural areas and small towns and rust belt cities
into a stagnant backwater. And I have to ask myself, what the fuck was
up with NAFTA anyway? All these free trade agreements that the Democrats
have put in place…I used to look at them and kind of shake my head in
puzzlement. They were an anomaly, a Republican-sounding, laissez-faire
initiative from an otherwise liberal administration. But free trade
agreements, while good for American businesses, seem very bad for
American workers. They put well-paid workers with strong unions in
direct competition with peasants making a few cents an hour, so no
wonder American workers can’t make a living wage any more. It also
allows American companies to sidestep environmental regulations by doing
their dirty work in an increasingly polluted third world.
Sanders had policy proposals that would have worked. Trump had nothing but empty promises, but they promised the same thing: make it possible once again for less educated and unskilled labor to raise themselves from poverty.
And
then Trump linked those promises to the natural xenophobia of the
American people. Trump’s victory is a victory for racism, yes, but
“white identity politics” is more besides racism. At least I think it
is. It’s also grounded in rural poverty and rusted out industries and
American contempt for the lower classes and the less educated.
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