Considering that I quit drinking more than three years ago, which was far too early for coping with the electoral disappointment that came last November, I think I’ve done a decent job of blotting out the pain or at least cramming it down so deep that I can’t find easy access to it. But, even so, I should have known that it is still accessible and that it would be a bad idea to revisit it by looking at Esquire’s recap.
Yes, I definitely triggered my PTSD by perusing that article. And it made me realize that as hard as we fight against it, the Trump presidency is slowly asserting itself as something normal. It wasn’t just that everyone was living in some kind of bubble of denial. Whatever predictive data existed, it overwhelmingly pointed in the direction of Clinton winning the election. The people who were willing to put hope over facts were the ones expecting Trump to win despite the evidence, and despite the election day exit polls that were so bad for Trump that his team had to call Matt Drudge for moral support.
I think the denial was in thinking that the American people would never elect a man like Donald Trump. To believe such a thing was tantamount to slander. We couldn’t really be that awful.
And that was the trauma for me. It wasn’t that I personally got the election wrong. It wasn’t that Obama’s legacy would be tarnished and his accomplishments undermined. It wasn’t all the policy setbacks that I could see coming. It was what Trump’s victory said about my fellow citizens that I found crushing.
And it wasn’t just one thing. There were so many aspects that were upsetting. The way Trump talked about people was appalling, whether they were immigrants or minorities or women or Muslims or his political opponents or the reporters covering the campaign. The way Trump acted towards women and minorities throughout his life was transparently immoral. His business dealings were clearly fraudulent, and so were his claims of charity. His personal behavior was lecherous and dishonorable. His disregard for the truth was stunning.
But it was also his complete lack of preparedness for the job. Making him president was like asking a toddler to defuse a bomb. No one in their right mind does something like that.
The real disservice is that we weren’t warned. If the polls had foretold a Trump victory, we would have had some time to adjust our opinions about our fellow citizens and lower our expectations accordingly, but all the indications were that people got it.
That’s why I found this so irritating. It comes from the day after the election, some time before noon:
Joshua Green: [Steve] Bannon called me. He said, “You recognize what happened?” I’m like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” He goes, “You guys,” meaning you on the left, “you fell into the same trap as conservatives in the ‘90s…you were so whipped up in your own self-righteousness about how Americans could never vote for Trump that you were blinded to what was happening.” He was right.
What bothers me is the idea that it was self-righteousness that blinded me. And the reason I don’t like that formulation is that my expectations didn’t have any thing to do with my opinion of myself. I had expectations for the American people. They might not be excited about another Clinton presidency, I thought, but surely they can’t seriously entertain a Trump presidency. Not enough of them, anyway, for him to actually win.
It’s almost like if you have a child who you decide has certain capabilities and certain limitations, and you try to dissuade them from having too much ambition lest they wind up a failure in life. I could be as cynical as H.L. Mencken about the intelligence of the average citizen, but would have considered it cruel to predict that they were incapable of understanding that Trump could not be our president. If they were going to fail, let them at least have the chance to follow their dreams, if you know what I mean.
Looking back a year later, it’s a struggle not to succumb to a well-earned cynicism. We don’t like to repeat our mistakes, which makes it tempting to over-correct for them.
There were a lot of times when President Obama stood up and told the American people that we’re better than this, that we can do better and be better. It’s not a good feeling to know that the response was, “No, we’re not, and no we can’t.”
But Obama was right. Maybe the answer isn’t that when they go low then we go high, as Michelle liked to say. But one giant mistake doesn’t condemn us in perpetuity.
I actually find comfort and a cause for optimism that so many people were unable to imagine a Trump victory. It means that I wasn’t alone in having some standards or in believing that we can be better than this.
It’s just going to be harder and take longer than I was willing to imagine.
Martin – you’re spoiled by the wonderful folks that visit and comment here. Go to the comments section of any prominent national website and it won’t take long to learn that: Yes, “we” are this bad.
Science, logic, truth and honesty is no match for the foulness that emanates from these people. They are deplorable and they are us.
It’s comments like these that make me wish I could use the Facebook “sad” reaction here.
I told a colleague of mine the day after the election that “I had no idea so many of my fellow Americans were such ignorant, hateful people.” He agreed with me. Then again, he’s African-American. He knew it already.
Sitting on pins and needles here in Va.
We have to win something just to keep going
Virginia Goverrnor and Assembly would be a refreshing change indeed.
I was on the phone and talking and texting with my brother, sister and son on election night. It was surreal. We could not believe it. It was terrible agony to see it happen. We talked about Michael Moore’s prediction and cussed him for it.
And last evening I watched Richard Engle talk about the Paradise Papers and the extensive corruption in this administration. They seem one and all are serving to enrich themselves and use their power over us. And then they showed an old clip of Trump talking about Ross and the crowd cheered, another tough business man doing business with Putin’s son in law. They have sold our government to the highest bidder and there is nothing we can do about it.
We let a really good man go to get this POS.
Yes, exactly.
Since his first forays into politics, I’ve found it hard to get too angry about Trump being Trump.
A friend, who had grown up with a parent who was diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, walked me through the DSM description, and said “this guy (Trump) is a textbook case.” Years of therapy had given my friend the tools to analyze the situation. He predicted that, just as someone with this malady can destroy a family, so Trump would destroy the tattered remnants of civil society in the U.S. Naively, we assumed that enough of our fellow citizens would recognize his sickness.
It’s hard for me to get overly angry with a sick person. Trump is a sick person who has managed to elude all consequences for his actions. On the other hand, I am constantly battling to maintain my emotional bearings with regard to my fellow citizens, especially those who enabled Trump’s rise to power, and those who helped him to elude the consequences of his actions. I feel rage for what they have inflicted on my country.
I realize that rage is unproductive, so I fight constantly to contain it. Before I post comments on any site, I ask myself, if my students could read this, would I be ashamed? Regrettably, sometimes the answer is “yes.” But that thought does serve as a deterrent.
You express so many of the same emotions which I feel when it comes to fellow citizens, mostly the ones I know personally. I find myself consciously avoiding social media, because I don’t want to end up hating people who I do love or for whom I have genuine affection. I am just unable, still, to find a way to come to terms with the fact that these same people helped elect, and still enthusiastically support, an abominable human being such as Donald Trump. I still cannot accept that friends and family found it within themselves to look right past so much of the glaring evil and hate that Trump was ginning up during the campaign, and continues to this day to loudly and proudly proclaim.
My rage at these people is always barely below the surface of my emotional being. And I have found that it takes very little to trigger a disgust in me that borders on riotous anger. I don’t want to be that kind of person. But at what point does it become a moral imperative to require these people to give an accounting for this unconscionable support they continue to give this man? I cannot ignore forever the fact they are a party to this evil.
I can understand all of what you say.
Trump and friends has caused a good deal of friction in my family and among our friends in the neighborhood. Politics has become a no go topic to avoid awkward encounters. We have in laws who live about 45 miles away. My son will no longer go there having had a distasteful encounter one too many times.
In my life I had never found it this way. Where I worked I was always among the minority but it was more of a friendly rivalry. These days it is best to simply ignore it all.
It must have been like this in the run-up to the Civil War.
What I hate most is the relentless destruction of our country. Every day we lose another freedom or protection. Trump is the figurehead, the catalyst, the face of the ugliness of racism and bigotry and misogyny. But the Republican party is guilty as sin, killing everything decent and fair in our democracy for corporate gain. They have used Trump to make slashes in government agencies and policies like no one before him. They have capitalized on his ignorance and bully tactics to ruin the country.
I despise George W and Cheney and Rove.They did damage, too, and probably paved the way for a Trump presidency. But this blatant embrace of nazism and outright racism coupled with the cruelty of crashing healthcare and brutality of new taxes goes beyond the pale.
I’ve never felt such despair on a constant level. It seems we lose more of our humanity every day.
Many of the people we disparage have been in politics dating back at least to Reagan. Their goal is to destroy the New Deal, the environmental legislation passed during the Nixon administration and all of Johnson’s domestic achievements.
Is Trump winning because he’s normalized insane rhetoric, race baiting, and bashing women? Because he can “get away with it?” I.e. meaning that the rump of the GOP in Congress won’t dare impeach him?
The only thing that really bothers me is that the GOP may have dug themselves into such a tight spot that totalitarianism is their only way to hold onto power. But, will the 1% go along with that? Or will they look to the stability of society as a goal to be desired, in order to safeguard their investments, in which case they will turn on the GOP instead.
The problem for us is that the 1% are not very smart or self-aware. The hope is that there is just no need for extreme measures, just so that the most stupid and recalcitrant people in the country can have unfettered rule for their racism and insular prejudices.
In short, to the 1% the “Real Merkins” are simply useful idiots, so the question in the future will be “how useful are they?” It’s one thing to take advantage of the ignorant rural population to get tax cuts. It’s quite another when blood in the streets and martial law are making things bad for business investments.
There is simply no profitable way to run a fascist government that governs by unfettered police power, and at the same time have favorable economic growth.
Fascism is normally the result of much worse breakdown in society than this.
But, if we succeed in fighting off Trump and Trumpism, there really isn’t much future for the GOP in its current white nationalist incarnation. They have put all their chips in on suppressing the majority through threat and violence, and gerrymandering and packing the courts against them.
But, such tactics can only stall the very thing that the GOP fears most – that white power will soon not be enough to win elections. What happens then?
Then the tanks roll.
I realized while reading this thread that the “1%” are just useful idiots and cannon fodder, too.
Most of them (eg, the DeVos’s) are inherited wealth and demonstrate no real talent for anything. Any more than anyone else.
They have a massive amount of leverage that other manipulators can use, their money, their contacts, their ownership rights.
I anticipated better based on the polling, not on any notion regarding the morality of the American people. You don’t have to be as cynical as H.L. Mencken to have expected as much, maybe something closer to Sinclair Lewis.
Wasn’t it Churchill who said that “Americans can be depended upon to do the right thing, after trying every alternative”?
Churchill was an optimist and a tippler.
It feels like it’s been a year of avoiding the obvious answer to the question “what kind of country makes human garbage its president?” Maybe the election tomorrow will provide some hope.
This is a lovely, almost elegiac piece.
And right on the money too. You are not alone in having some standards and believing we can be better than this. Never forget two things:
People are very weird. So many can be awful, but even many of those aren’t consistently awful. We can indeed be better than this, and we will. It is just going to take longer than any of us were willing to imagine.
I hate to tell you this, but we ARE this bad and we have been this bad for quite a long time.
See, “the reaction to Obama’s presidency”.
Frankly, I’m ready for an amicable divorce. I’d gladly move back from Nashville if I knew we were cutting the old Confederacy loose.
I beg to differ. The old confederacy didn’t elect Trump as President all by themselves. There were a whole bunch of other states that enabled his Presidency, oh, like Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Michigan.
As a lifelong Southerner, I get as angry at my fellow white Southerners as many non-Southerners do, but I rebut any effort to paint all of us as unreconstructed racists who need to be shoved aside and cut off in the manner of a diseased and useless limb. That disease permeates the whole country.
You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.
then Mel Brooks blew an opportunity.
Obligatory “Blazing Saddles” clip:
. . . came immediately to mind (even though it’s been years, if not decades, since I watched it).
It’s going to take longer… is rather sobering when you were born in 1945, and Adolf Hitler was still alive. The hope I now hold on to relates to turning this mess around for my Niece and her kids.
I find a little solace with my fellow citizens providing Hillary a plurality of votes, just not the electoral kind.
Sorry, but the time to ask ‘are we better than this’ is long past.
The time to ask that was when, take your pick, during the 90s extreme poverty tripled, Operation Desert Fox/Desert Badger happened, we deported more people that decade than every previous year combined, and we ended up with a racialized incarceration rate that exceeded that of actual no-shit fascist states.
This is just bullshit liberal whining. Crocodile tears ladled atop of a cheese spread of bourgeois sentimentality. Spare me.
Sixty years ago the signs segregating the Duke Power diesel buses in the Carolinas were taken down by court order.
What we found in twenty years, that is, in 1976, that we were better than this and we replaced Nixon and interim Ford with Jimmy Carter. In 1978, I conducted “Town Meetings” for the American Revolution Bicentennial. Most ever county school in south Georgia except for about ten counties was completely desegregated. Most in north Georgia were still bragging about being sundown towns in the 1920s. There were enough sheriff-run counties in north Georgia to have good drug sales. It seemed then that we might be better soon–and then we saw folks we knew for years flip to Reagan after flipping to Jesse Helms in 1972.
We really don’t know when we will get better than this.
And in this part of the world what will make it better is fininshing what we started in the 1960s. And pretty much only that. Justice and prosperity.
I am Canadian so it is not perhaps my place to respond, but I will anyway. Like Martin I was shocked that so many Americans could make such a ridiculous choice. The worst part is that the very things that make me recoil from Trump in horror is exactly what binds his supporters to him.
The fact is that Americans are no better or worse than any other group of people. Your history – and the failure to come to terms with it – taints every issue and election with race, so there is always conflict to be exploited boiling below the surface.
Like everybody else, Americans are attracted to the siren call of populism. Like everybody else, Americans will fall for almost any ridiculous story if it fits with their worldview. We can all be conned. Propaganda works. Germans were led step by step into history’s greatest catastrophe. Neither Americans or Canadians are any better than the Germans.
I am not being hyperbolic when I say that I fear for the American democracy. And I fear for global stability without leadership from the largest economic and military power on the planet.
Well, the good news, such as it is, is that we have met the enemy and we have their full measure. We no longer have any illusions about them. The phrase, “they wouldn’t do that” has been expunged from our vocabulary.
What comes to mind for me is the constant refrain from Al Giordano during the election cycle: (paraphrasing) Most of the world is run by people just like DT. We have been enormously fortunate not to have had a series of people like DT these past 200+ years. Human instinct and tribalism tends toward authoritarianism. Throughout history authoritarians have had power over this planet for thousands of years. Being in a Democracy in a Republic is messy and makes us just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as any other country attempting to learn self-governance.
The big lesson for me is that none of our rights are guaranteed or sacrosanct. We must guard them every day, watching our backs for threats like what we are witnessing currently.
I cling to the reports of people having buyer’s remorse; DT’s very low approval ratings as evidence that we can be better. Our worst impulses don’t have to control us. We can control them.
Presently we are on a learning curve. I’ve never been in this place in my lifetime. It is new to me. I’m still finding my way. What I won’t do is give in to fear or despair. The one thing that prepares me to cope is: One. Day. At. A. Time.
This is a media story, no more, no less; full stop.
It’s not an existential crisis for America (or, it needn’t be unless we make it one) any more than when the tables were turned the other direction in ’68 or ’36 and the other side thought America was over. It’s not a “civil war” — not even close — despite Bannon-style propagandists and basement-dwelling YouTube “warriors” with their junk food and guns and Twitter feeds.
The one silver lining I’ve clung to throughout this awful year, is exactly this: as with industrialization or slavery or any of the other species-wide developments that must be confronted, we’re finally having to face what happens when unscrupulous commercial/corporate media manipulation is allowed to run unfettered and wild: a perfectly mundane, doctrinaire, middle-of-the-road presidential candidate is turned into a terrifying, criminal monster, while her opponent, a disgusting, unqualified moron, is elevated to savior status by his trivial ability to thrive in that same asinine television/advertising environment (his only skill).
Marx and Adorno were right — this is the Capitalist swill we’re drowning in, just as predicted — but they’re not right about the necessary fate of our régime. America is as robust and healthy as ever, but it’s got a crippling virus: this awful media/television (and, now, Facebook/social media) landscape that turns ordinary, thinking/caring people into obese, drunk, addicted, infantile, racist/sexist fodder for corporate interests.
It’s all reversible, as it was in the robber-baron era — already the more level-headed conservative forces (the ones who had no problem with the Bush era) are so appalled that they’re starting to question how we got here and how we can get back.
This excellent Slate article covers a great deal of this (focusing on the Russian Facebook ads).
Of course the groundwork was laid over the decades by, mostly, talk radio (the most recent incarnations of which are covered in this DailyKos account, “Learning How to Hate in Trump Country.”
All of this is just by way of reiterating the point I made directly above: Goebbels-style propaganda is extremely dangerous because it works — it makes people stupid and dangerous; it’s as effective in making people hate liberals as at making them love Coca-Cola. Right-wing types use these foul techniques because they’re easy and effective…hopefully they’re waking up to the very real consequences of surrounding Americans with this kind of wall-to-wall propaganda landscape. It’s not just the overt political elements; it’s the entire package; the cheeseburgers and bikinis and The Apprentice and all of it, that put Trump in the White House. It’s the toxic culture of reducing the entire world to glitzy, shallow, bullshit.
I’m assuming you’ve read Neil Postman’s seminal book “Amusing Ourselves To Death”? If not, I strongly recommend you pick up his depressingly prescient work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
I haven’t read that book, but your comment constitutes “critical mass” in terms of it being recommended to me. I certainly will, and thanks.
Jean Baudrillard is a bit harsher but on the same point, from Wikipedia:
Photo credit Ken Jarecke, who said, “If I don’t photograph this, people like my mom will think war is what they see on TV”.
It has happened before.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, biracial democratic governments were established throughout the South. These governments were in many cases better for the people in general than the slaveocrat governments they replaced, in particular in their support for social services. But they involved denial of the central idea of white supremacy — a concept which, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued, has been one of the most consistent elements of American life. So they had to be destroyed — and they eventually were, by a combination of Southern terrorism and Northern exhaustion and indifference to the fate of African-Americans. There were certainly noble souls who struggled against this outcome; the story of some of their efforts is well told in Stephen Budiansky’s “The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox.” But they ultimately failed; and Southern segregationists, assisted by Northern historians sympathetic to the “Lost Cause” falsehood, reinstated social and legal regimes as close to slavery as they could manage.
Similarly, the civil rights era offered a chance to overcome this legacy of three and half centuries of wrong. It led to some real progress; but it also led to the rise of a Republican Party heavily infected by residual racism, whose efforts have led (among other things) to the substantial gutting of the Voting Rights Act, one of the major achievements of civil-rights activists.
It is less surprising in that context that the election of an African-American President was never truly accepted by a racialized Republican Party, and that we got in reaction what Coates has called “America’s first white President.”
Yes, we are better than this.
It’s just that sometimes we let our worst impulses overwhelm our better side.
Obama was the trend, it’s Trump that is the aberration.
.
Illiberalism comes in many flavors. We may have dodged a bullet of sorts by getting a grossly incompetent would-be autocrat, but that is not exactly cause for celebration or even a sigh of relief. Let’s take that as a reminder that our nation is likely vulnerable to illiberalism in whatever form it comes. The next time, the would-be dictator might actually know what he or she is doing, and we’ll be in some deep fecal matter if that occurs.
I could make a case that the post title amounts to “are we better than we are?”
Too tired and/or unmotivated to do so, so just throwing it out here. Do with it what you will . . . or won’t.
The only people that ever provided me persuasive warnings about America’s dark trajectory that I could both receive and internalise were Hunter S Thompson and Malcolm X. They were both right.
When people hear Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas they think about the drugs and craziness but it was ‘based’ on the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs that he attended in 1971 along with Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta. Thompson met Acosta when sourcing a story on journalist Rubén Salazar, whom LA Sheriff’s Department shot and killed with a tear-gas grenade fired at close range during a Vietnam War protest march. The book is about how closely America was tilting toward fascism and a ‘law and order’ state.
I hitched all over the United States in the early Seventies; Appalachia, the South, the Rust-belt, the Texas panhandle and the South-west. There was enough cultural and racial violence in evidence and on offer to be thoroughly alarming. Easy Rider. Kent State. We had all the warnings we were ever going to get.
“The grotesque Police chiefs at their drug conference…” This seems to have aged very well indeed.
The short answer is no, we’re not better than this. Random anecdote – a few years ago, I did an externship with a DA’s office through my law firm. I saw ADAs trying plenty of cases (as did I) where the evidence of guilt was more than sufficient for a conviction. We (I) assumed that any objective juror would come to the same conclusion that we did, and presented the evidence in a straightforward manner, based on that optimistic assumption. By contrast, the defense attorneys came up with the craziest theories and generally tried to bamboozle and confuse the jurors about what the evidence showed. It shocked me that, time after time, the juries decided to acquit (including in one of my own cases). We (I) thought that we didn’t need to work the jurors as hard because we had the truth on our side and the defense attorneys’ arguments were objectively ridiculous. But the jurors got bamboozled anyway.
The point is, you should not set artificial expectations about the behavior of others, and the only way to ensure a win (or at least increase your chances) is to out-hustle the other side. I was also convinced that Clinton would win, both because of the points above but also, more significantly, based on the polling data that seemed to point to a win. In doing my own mental autopsy of the campaign, I think about little things that could have been done differently that may have made a difference and shown fence-sitters that Clinton cared about them and would work hard for them – for example, I think that essentially disappearing for the entire month of August was a very poor idea; obviously saying stupid things at a closed door meeting with fatcat donors blew up in Romney’s face and they should have known not to repeat that (the “deplorables” comment); having no coherent economic message probably hurt; the ad campaign that focused on how horrible Trump was without a corresponding positive message about what Clinton would do was also a mistake in my opinion. Rightly or wrongly, Trump looked like he was trying hard to win people’s votes; Clinton looked like she was on autopilot. For people who only have superficial views about politics, I’m sure that those impressions mattered.
Your first paragraph describes exactly the quandary the Democratic Party is in (and progressives in general), with regard to calling people to our side. George Lakoff has described how human perception works, as primarily a perceiver of metaphor and story, rather than of rational thought. More and more, his ideas strike me as undeniable, because they explain it all: how people can vote against their own self interest, can maintain their self-identity as “decent” people while voting for monsters, can get swept up attempting to justify their catastrophic vote against decency by cheap shots at Hillary, and so on. It’s no longer possible for me to look at the Nazis and say “thank God we’re better than that,” because we’re not. There’s no innate goodness in people that can’t be corrupted by the right kind of evil story, told over and over again (Fox News and the like) until it becomes part of someone’s identity. The good news as far as Lakoff is concerned (and I admit to only a superficial understanding of his actual science) is that you overcome an evil story/metaphor with a more compelling story/metaphor of your own. (The bad news is we progressives as a group suck at crafting good story/metaphor, preferring to deal in rational argument, which DOES…NOT…WORK, and the last 2 sentences of your first paragraph capture that perfectly.)
In that magic time to come when we regain control of the congress, the White House, and state houses, it might be time to undertake the harnessing of big media–breaking them up, instituting standards of “decency” (and oh what a fight that’d be, just to come up with such a standard that everyone could agree on), finding a way to treat massive propaganda disinformation as a public health hazard, for instance (here’s a page I just ran across, delving into it now & thinking `hmm, wonder if we could do that here’).
https://www.ofcom.org.uk
But that requires breaking the back of the oligarchy, getting a grip on the public-mental-health implications of robot social media disinformation, and somehow avoiding cataclysm brought about by feckless, self-enriching incompetents…maybe too heavy a lift for these times.
Muller is a bright spot, and hopefully after today there’ll be more bright spots to move forward with, and maybe, just maybe, we can finally craft a better metaphor for humans to live by than Fox News can. We’ll see.
The craving for story is human nature. The use of ‘Othering’ is the same. Our brains dont function on logic, they function on shortcuts. The europeans are no better at fighting it than we are. So its not our unique failure except that our illiberal fascist is stupid.
Magical thinking is a very old tradition in America and we dont really face failures in our past. We are very poor at looking back.
We COULD be better than this, but we’re not, and many of us don’t want to be. Its not an intelligence issue, thats self deception or even condescending.
If “self-righteousness” means believing the American People were observant enough, reflective enough, and intelligent enough to recognize that the bill of goods that sold HRC down the river on was pure propaganda, then “self-righteousness” it is. “I” thought we were better than that, to accept the “right-wing Wurlitzer” for what it was, sound and fury but not much else.
But seriously, who the hell bandies around terms like “self-righteousness” to describe people’s motivations? The same people who accuse those who charge them as racists, of being racist.
Projection isn’t just a way to show films…
Maybe the architects of the Electoral College were on to something.