November is a bleak month
at the best of times. I'd been buoyed
this year by optimism about the future, with every aspect of my life reconstructing
in a promising way. But that has all
come crashing down since the election.
My stubborn belief that I would overcome financial, physical, familial,
and other assorted problems has been threatening to give way to the panic and
depression I have kept at bay by sheer force of will.
The post-marathon cold
morphed into bronchitis which had me confined to the sofa and the bleak company
of post-election lamentations on the Web and the obscene gloating of Trumpsters
on social media for the three weeks since the election. I'm rarely ill and the interminable
disappointment and frustration of waking up every day thinking it would finally
turn a corner and it didn't would have made this the month from hell on its
own.
City Boy owes me
money, which he is now forcing me to go to court to collect. It's a fucking nightmare but I can't let it
go as it's more than a month's rent. A
trivial sum to him, but it could keep me from ending up homeless. If you had to ask me who was worse, Trump or
City Boy, it would be a toss-up.
City Girl is leaving
NYC because she can't afford to live there anymore. I spent one final night with her as a way of
breaking up the long drive to see my little pumpkin; I don't know how I'll see
him going forward. City Girl asked me to
store her things until she is settled so I stare at the enormous piles of boxes
in my dining room in denial that my friend is leaving the area, quite likely
permanently.
The only one who is
happy is the cat, who doesn't seem to care that a megalomaniac is now the
Moron-Elect, and who spends her days sleeping contentedly on the topmost box of
the pile. What's sadly symbolic to me is
simply a new high perch to her royal furriness.
But my little problems
pale in comparison to the damage November has done to the country and, thanks
to our global economic and military hegemony, potentially the entire world.
I've started this post
a dozen times, with as many different approaches to analyzing and commenting on
the election, but it's been such a depressing horror show, and I've been so
sick, that I let each draft fizzle. But
it's now been three weeks. Dust has
settled and as we all emerge from the horror and disappointment, we need to
assess the destruction and cut through the bullshit explanations to understand
what really happened and what atrocities are in store.
There's been no
shortage of articles analyzing the election, and some of them have been excellent. But four of the main takeaways that keep
getting repeated are inaccurate.
1) Hillary
was a flawed candidate
No, she was perceived as flawed. The Republicans, media outlets addicted to
false equivalencies, not to mention rampaging social media, Democrats with an
anti-Clinton axe to grind, and a brutal anti-establishment-themed primary
created the belief that she was flawed.
In reality, she was one of the least-flawed candidates ever to run, with
the skills, experience, temperament, and genuine concern for people to be a
great president. If you had to find any
flaw it would be that she is not skilled at selling herself in a campaign
environment. She knows that policy
change is incremental and she refuses to make sweeping, melodramatic promises
she knows will be impossible to fulfill.
But the latter is what fires up the electorate and gets them to the polls. And her main obstacle was sexism. Virtually none of the criticisms leveled at
her would have stuck with a male candidate.
America is not ready for a women president, I am sorry to say. This election unambiguously demonstrated
that. There has always been figurative
dick measuring in debates but she lost to a candidate who literally talked
about his dick size.
2) Bernie
would have won
No, he would not have beaten Trump.
He never appealed to minority voters, and he was a one-note
candidate. Now, that note was the
economy, stupid, and Trump would not have been able to show up his lack of
interest in other policy areas like a normal opponent would have, but Bernie
was still singing in the wrong key. Trump
notwithstanding, a candidate has to be a policy polymath. The president oversees every policy area,
domestic and foreign, and Bernie came across as increasingly myopic. He had one song he played at every concert,
he couldn't seem to add repertoire or improvise, and the audiences would be
larger and more diverse in the general campaign. Also, it's rare for a two-term president of
one party to be followed by a president of the same party. Obama took the blame for voter woes that were
actually the result of an obstructionist Republican Congress and Republican-controlled
states, so Democrats were facing an uphill battle. Republicans always have an easier time
getting out the vote, and the Democrats needed an inspiring choice, an Obama on
steroids, to win this one. Bernie simply
had too many strikes against him – his age, his unkempt appearance with flyaway
hair and ill-fitting suits, his gruff demeanor, his angry harping on about big
banks to the exclusion of all else, his history as a "socialist", his
long tenure in government in an anti-establishment-themed election, his lack of
accomplishments in said tenure, his lack of foreign policy knowledge and
experience, his hailing from a tiny New England state, and his Jewishness.
When Bernie first entered the primary, I thought it was a great
lark. I had campaigned for him in
college, and I figured he'd shift debate a bit to the left but I never
seriously thought he was a contender for the nomination. I mean never, not for a millisecond, even
when many pundits were saying he had a serious chance of winning. Just for fun, I bought an organic green
Bernie 2016 t-shirt from the Vermont Clothing Company and wore it to one of his
rallies, my first political rally. It
was exciting to see the enthusiastic support he drew from (mostly young) people. But that enthusiasm and support did not
transfer to Clinton. Bernie's call for
revolution was as impotent as Occupy Wall Street. He would have pulled in more younger voters
than Clinton but fewer minority and older voters. It would not have been a winning coalition.
3) Trump
is going to be an authoritarian ruler with a compliant Congress
The exact opposite is true. Berlustrumpi
has only four motivations: feeding his ego, power, revenge, and increasing his
wealth/brand. He never expected to win
the presidency and has no interest in governing. Yes, he wants power, but the presidency is
too much like work. He lacks curiosity,
intellectual or otherwise, and has no ideological commitment to particular
policies. His appeal was based on
populist demagoguery but he has neither affinity with nor concern for
people. Nor does he have any loyalty to
his own class. Pence and the Republican
Congress, on the other hand, have a clear policy agenda and free rein to
implement it. They know Trump's four
motivations and they can easily manipulate him to get him to sign any piece of
legislation they want and nominate any judicial candidates and political
appointees they desire. This
piece explains my point in more detail.
4) This
election was an anti-elite blue-collar flyover state revolution
This is admittedly the most compelling and prima facie appealing
explanation for Trump's victory. Based
on social media, it certainly appears to be the obvious conclusion. Of the four takeaways I have debunked here,
this is the only one I personally ever gave any credence to. The problem with it is that the numbers that
have come out on voter demographics don't bear it out. We're not seeing an increase in voter
turn-out amongst white men without a college education, Trump's supposed
base. He picked up more minority votes
than expected, and many
more votes from college-educated women, but he is, at last count, losing
the popular vote by over 2.3 million.
Republicans, as noted above, tend to vote more reliably than Democrats,
and in the end they fell into line, as they always do, and voted for their
party's candidate. Democrats were not as
motivated to get out and vote for Hillary, due to her manufactured flaws and
her sex. The pendulum usually swings
after a two-term president. The election
was always going to be tight and turnout was only 56%. Trump voters who are most vocal on social
media make it appear that this election was a backlash against a socially
progressive and economically regressive world that had moved increasingly
beyond their ken, but the plural of anecdote is not data.
It is tempting to say
this election is an indictment of democracy.
Democracy only works when voters make decisions in a fact-based
universe. It doesn't work when people
are ignorant, uneducated, gullible. Except that Trump did not win democratically,
but that's another post.
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