I am still a bit stunned by the election. Did we really do that? Is this really the country I thought I had been living in? How do I make sense of this? What do I do now?
So, I have been listening and reading, talking to friends, family and colleagues, trying to take stock. It seems my thoughts fall into three categories: What I know, What I don’t know, and What I need to find out. (I am still working on “What do I do next?”)
What I know
1. This was complicated. There was no one thing that accounts for this election result. Trump had to be good at what he does. Clinton had to be sub-par. The media had to play its role in gracing Trump and treating Clinton with undeserved moral equivalence. Bernie’s folks (and I am one) had to feel disaffected and unmotivated. Trump voters had to show up. I would like to come to some quick understanding of what happened and why, but I suspect this will take some time to sort out.
2. Enthusiasm beats professionalism. Trump had a clear “enthusiasm gap” over Clinton. One of the commentators on PBS said that this was an election between Trump’s ability to generate enthusiasm and Clinton’s ability to manage an expensive, highly professional, data-based, modern political campaign. Ask any political professional which they would rather have, he said, a great “ground game” or terrific enthusiasm. Enthusiasm beats professionalism.
There was a clear enthusiasm for Trump. He pulled together the Republican coalition, getting almost as many votes as did Romney in 2012 and McCain in 2008, and that energy was missed by the pollsters and pundits. Oddly, he did his job.
Clinton suffered from less enthusiasm. She got 7,000,000 votes less than Obama did in 2012 and 10,000,000 votes less than Obama in 2008. Depending on where those votes were, that was probably the difference in this election. And 42 percent of women voters did not vote for the first serious female candidate for the presidency. And they voted for a serial practitioner of sexual assault! She underperformed, and it cost her (and us) the election.
3. Republicans came home. I think the winning coalition that Trump put together was the traditional Republican base (minus the surprisingly small number of people who usually vote Republican but couldn’t stomach voting for him), plus a whole lot of very enthusiastic, working class white people suffering economic and cultural distress and anxiety, plus a smaller but highly visible“basketload of deplorables,” assorted xenophobes, islamophobes, homophobes, racists, anti-Semites and just plain ignoramuses. Were there enough anxious white folks and racists to win? I don’t think so. The fact that the Republican party “normalized” Trump (with help from the unbelievable combination of Putin’s trolls and hackers and Comey and his FBI colleagues) allowed Republicans to “come home,” and vote for “our candidate.”
4. We are all living in bubbles. I am. You are. All those Trump voters are. Look at the map of who won which counties around the country. Rural people voted overwhelmingly for Trump. In every state, not just in the “red states.” Most “blue states” are largely red, when looked at county by county. These people don’t know many minorities or Jews. They disproportionately listen to Fox News, if they listen to the news at all. They are more likely to doubt that global warming really exists. They are much more likely to be mourning the loss of a lifestyle that centered around a good job at the factory and a Christian church. They are less likely to be college educated.
Or at least I think that is who they are, because I am inside my bubble – college educated urbanites, heavily Jewish, lots of minority friends and colleagues, worried about climate change, listening to NPR and MSNBC, wondering whether to eat Thai or Vietnamese tonight. We live in the tiny, but heavily populated blue islands in the sea of red on that map. I don’t know anybody who voted for Trump, but half the people in the country did. All of them live outside my bubble.
The people in those red counties have absolutely no idea what my life is like and what my concerns are. Nor do I understand their life and troubles. Mutually exclusive bubbles.
5. We are all desperate for leadership. People who stand for something. Who know their own values and share them well. Who are willing to make tough choices and withstand the consequences. We are kind of done with triangulation and nuance.
While I continue to doubt whether Trump actually believes much of what he said, he sounded like he was sure of his positions. And he didn’t seem uncomfortable that they might draw criticism; in fact, I think he fed off the criticism.
Clinton was careful. Lawyer-like. Guarded. Precise. She came across to me as insincere, not frank. She talked a good game about taxing the rich, but she wouldn’t let us hear what she said to the rich in those highly paid speeches. How hard is it to say “Boy, I really screwed up when I decided to put those emails on a private server. I wanted to protect myself and my communications, but look at the mess I created. My bad.” I think distaste for her lack of sincerity was magnified in the rural bubbles.
I have said in earlier blogs how important leadership is to change public policy when you are up against the rich and powerful. See my original argument in favor of Sanders, here:
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-heart-says-sanders-but-so-does-my.html
And here is my critique of Clinton and Jeb Bush on their lack of real leadership and my admiration for Sanders’ and Trump’s skills:
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/08/what-do-trump-and-sanders-have-in-common.html
Real leaders take strong positions on tough choices. This is what we want, and Trump offered it. Half of us were unmoved by his brand of leadership; the other half elected him.
6. We all share some anger. I am angry that millions of people lost their homes, and tens of millions of people were “under water” because of the economic disaster of 2008, while the people whose greed and arrogance caused it were bailed out and given bonuses and not one of them served time in jail.
I am angry that the Obama administration missed the opportunity to argue for universal health care back in 2009, which might have made the Affordable Care Act something that lots of people could love. I am angry that his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, yelled at people like me who didn’t get on board with the compromise they were making with the health insurers, the pharmaceuticals, the hospitals and the doctors, calling us “fucking retards.” That compromise was the much unloved ACA.
I am angry with the Republicans who decided to obstruct everything that Obama tried to do, and then had the chutzpah to criticize him because he couldn’t get anything done.
Out in the rural bubble, they are angry and fearful, too. White men, in their middle years, are the only demographic in the US whose rate of death is increasing. Everyone else’s death rate (the poor and minorities included) is going down. And the cause of these extra deaths are suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholism. Something is very, very wrong with that population. And Trump gave voice to their anger and their fear, and promised to make things right, to make things great again.
We are an angry population, angry about different things, all inside our bubbles.
What I don’t know
1. Who ARE these people? I mean the 59,000,000 Americans who voted for Trump. Are they uneducated, ignorant red-necks with guns? Are they hurting and anxious? White men, stewed in the subtle or not so subtle racism and sexism of the last 100 years?
President Johnson, after he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 famously told his press secretary, Bill Moyers, "I think we just handed the south to the Republicans for the rest of my life and yours." So true. In the next presidential election, Nixon’s Southern Strategy began the change from the Democrats’ “Solid South” to the red-tinged map we see today. In the early part of the 20th Century, it was racist Democrats who ran things in the South, while the Republicans were the “party of Lincoln.” After 1968 and into the new century, the bigots found a home in the Republican party.
Some amount of support for Trump was based upon bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism. How dare a black man be President of the United States and tell us what to do? And now you want us to vote for a woman? How much of his support was based upon this? If a lot, then it is easier to discount his constituents. If not as much, then we need to find out why else they thought to support such a man.
2. Was this what Wallace and Perot were trying to tell us? George Wallace was the last third party candidate to capture electors when he won five states in 1968. His message was heavily clothed in racism, but it was also a screed against the “pointy headed bureaucrats in Washington” who didn’t listen, who didn’t know much, who had too much control over our lives. Ross Perot, in 1992, captured 19% of the popular vote with a message that the Republicans and the Democrats were equally incompetent and unwilling to address the real problems the country was facing, such as the deficit and the movement of jobs to other countries. He warned of the “giant sucking sound” of jobs being pulled into Mexico.
Don’t those sound like familiar themes? I’d like to understand the history of these ideas, some of which were faintly echoed by Sanders.
3. Where were the Millennials? The Millenials are now the largest generation, passing by us Post-War Baby Boomers this last year. Yet only a fraction of them came out to vote in this critical election. (We won’t know the percentage for a while.) This is their future we were fighting over; among adults, they will spend more years in this future than anyone else. I can not imagine an adequate excuse for their not taking the time to vote, when the choice was so stark.
Maybe some will say “We couldn’t see voting for Hillary.” Well, how did that work out for you?
I didn’t care for Bill Clinton in ‘92 (his “Third Way” was responsible for accelerating the rightward, neoliberal drift of the Democrats), but I voted for him. John Kerry was a terrible idea (wooden, out of touch with ordinary people, a centrist at a time we needed a leftist critique of W), but I voted for him. Clinton was not my first choice this year. And I can think of a lot of reasons to not want to vote for her, but there is one good reason to have done so, and he is now the President-Elect.
Millenials, your parents have been doing everything they could to guard your future, to try to assure your safety and prosperity. One way they did those things is by voting. But you are the largest group of adults now. It is your turn. Where the hell were you?
What I need to find out
1. How is it that facts don’t matter? Yes, we are in different bubbles, but why is it that facts don’t matter over in their bubbles? I am a religious person, but evolution is science. I am skeptical of technical expertise with a financial interest, but climate change is really happening. (If you are 31 years old or younger, you have never lived in a month that was below average in global temperature.) The economy is, at the national level, doing very well, with steady if slow growth and almost “full employment.” Yes, there are pockets of anxiety and despair over lost manufacturing jobs, and there are still many, many poor people, but Trump’s assessment of the state of the economy was completely counter-factual. How does that not matter?
2. Could we find enough things that we are all angry about to forge new coalitions? The only way that the average person (which we mostly are) can win against the rich and powerful is through social movements. And social movements usually require coalitions. Since the people in my bubble are angry and the people in those other bubbles are angry, might there be sufficient overlap to support some joint efforts?
3. How do we bridge the gap between the rural and the urban? Joint efforts would require us to burst our bubbles and find common ground. How would we do that? Is that even possible?
4. Did Putin and the FBI have pro-Trump agendas? Russians were in contact with the Trump campaign. They hacked Democratic emails and released the results with a mind towards affecting the election. Russian hackers and trolls issued fake news and fake comments on online forums. Before we do this again, we need to figure out a way to identify similar efforts and either stop them or call full attention to them.
The FBI has to be investigated to see if what appears on the surface to be true, that they had a secret desire to tip the scale for Trump, is actually the case. If so, people have to be fired, and better rules have to be put in place and enforced. (I know – what are the chances either of these are going to be examined during a Trump Presidency, but we still need to know. Hey, mainstream media, these might be good subjects for the kind of hard-hitting investigative reporting that only a paltry few of you did during the campaign.)
5. Is it time to do away with the Electoral College? Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were both supported by a majority of voters (actually a plurality if you include votes for other parties). Yet they lost. This is because of the Electoral College. This is in the US Constitution, put in by the elites of the time to guard against their loss of power to the hoi polloi to whom they were giving voting privileges. It was also a way to keep support for the new Constitution among the less populated states in the south by giving them a disproportionate share of the vote.
Quick primer – Each state is given “electoral votes” equal to the number of members of Congress they have, plus two for their two Senators. So, since the least number of members of Congress a state can have is one (like Wyoming, Alaska, Delaware), then the least number of electoral votes that a state can have is three. (The District of Columbia also gets three electoral votes.) When the citizens of a state vote for President, they are actually voting for a slate of “electors” who are more or less committed to vote for the winner of the popular vote in that state. These electors meet (figuratively referred to as the “Electoral College”) in December, where the 538 votes for President are cast, and the President is actually elected.
Of course, this is patently against “one person, one vote.” California has 38,000,000 residents, and 55 electoral votes (53 members of the House of Representatives and 2 Senators). That means each elector represents 691,000 people. In Wyoming, there are only 583,000 people, and they have three electors. Each of those electors represents only 194,000 people. That isn’t fair, but that is what the Constitution calls for. Without it, the smaller of the original thirteen states wouldn’t have ratified the Constitution, and we wouldn’t have a Constitution.
Trump lost the popular vote, but since more of his vote came from smaller states with disproportionately higher numbers of electors, he won the presidency. That is why this is coming up again. (It wasn’t a big part of the conversation back in 2000, because we were all expressing our outrage over the Supreme Court’s coup in favor of Bush.)
Most of the time this doesn’t matter. The winner of the Electoral College vote is almost always the winner of the popular vote. Only 4 times has it been otherwise. Trump, Bush 43, Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and Rutherford Hayes in 1876.
But this might start happening more often, particularly given the realities of the red/blue division in our country. Should we change this?
It is an easy question to pose, and a quick response might very well be “Well, of course! It is fundamentally undemocratic.” But a slower analysis yields different insights. There are many parts of our democracy that don’t operate on a “one person, one vote” rule, and for good reasons. Like the Senate, where every state, regardless of size, gets two Senators. And the Senate filibuster, where 41 Senators can stop the majority in advancing legislation. (We are going to be very happy for that undemocratic procedure in the next four years.)
The Supreme Court isn’t representative in any way, and yet it has enormous power over us and our government. I remember being made to write an essay back in 11th grade about “majority rule and minority rights.” That is a critical balance within our democracy. We let such things go only after very, very careful thought.
And a popular vote would change, drastically, how we elect Presidents. Small states would be largely ignored, and the big population centers would get all of the attention. Sounds good to me, in my “big population center bubble,” but it would cut out lots of people in those red counties from the process. Are they likely to agree to this?
The cost of elections would go up, way up, because every large population center would be in play, as opposed to now, where places like New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago are not targeted because they are in states that are going to vote reliably for Democrats. Without an Electoral College, candidates would have to advertise in every single large media market. And since the entire country would be “in play,” candidates would have to advertise all over the country. The importance of money in politics would increase, when most of us are wishing it would decrease.
And what would happen if we had a really, really close election? What if less than a percentage point separated the candidates? The chances of error are very high when elections get that close. Would we need a nationwide recount? In 2000, the difference between Gore and Bush was less than a half of a percent. And this year, the difference was one fifth of one percent. We don’t have any idea how to do a nationwide recount, putting aside the cost and uncertainty of such a thing. Virtual ties are possible within the Electoral College, but it has never happened, and there are provisions for a swift and certain resolution. (If you don’t know what they are, you didn’t watch the last season of “VEEP” on HBO.)
Doing away with the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment. Good luck with that. But there are easier ideas to implement. The electors are not bound to vote for the candidate that wins their state. (That is how the elite in 1789 were going to be able to control the hoi polloi.) So, every state could pass a law saying that their electors were bound to vote for the winner of the popular vote. That might work.
I don’t know where I stand on this issue. Like the whole analysis of this election, it is complicated. But we ought to look at this and make a decision to change or not.
6. Is this moment in history we are beginning to face any worse than the Vietnam War era or Nixon and Watergate? I am old enough to remember the terrible conflict caused by the Vietnam War, a long-running civil war that we stepped into out of misguided “anti-Communism” and the cowardice of our government in not wanting to be “the people who lost Southeast Asia.” We marched on the freeways. We hanged our elected leaders in effigy. We talked seriously about revolution. (At least we did in my little bubble.) We lost faith in our government, who systematically lied to us for years and years. The four innocent students shot dead in Ohio at Kent State University by National Guardsmen in May of 1970 was a turning point in my own moral and political development.
Nixon continued that war, in fact escalated it with horrific bombings, and yet lied and lied. Re-electing him was a tragic mistake, but we did it in one of the great landslides of all time. (This was my first presidential election. Not an auspicious start.) But Nixon’s extraordinary shortcomings, his extreme and vocal bigotry, his paranoia in the face of what he thought were his “enemies,” his almost complete disinterest in domestic policy as he tried to play what he thought was his monumental role on the world’s stage, and his fundamental dishonesty in covering up the aftermath of the Watergate burglary all brought him down, the only President to resign from office.
We survived those times, although not without long-lingering doubts and aching scars. Will a President Trump be any worse? I fear yes, but maybe not. Those were truly awful times.
And now?
I don’t agree with those who say that we should hold out an olive branch to the Trump administration and give him a chance to show that he can do some good in his new office. Maybe he will grow into the job?
Poppycock. I know who this man is. Thanks to the ridiculous, ratings-fueled coverage of him by the media over the last 18 months, there is very little I don’t know about him. He is a narcissist with a short attention span. He is ignorant about the problems we face and about the workings of government. As some one said to me, he has taken command of a 30 ship aircraft carrier fleet and thinks he is going to be driving a motorboat. He is guilty of repeated sexual assaults, and of bragging about it. Damn, I even know what he thinks of the size of his penis.
I was wrong about the likely outcome of this election. Maybe I will be proved equally wrong about the Trump Administration. But I don’t need to give him a chance. He had plenty of opportunity to demonstrate good will during the campaign and never came close. The ball is in his court. Prove to me that you deserve my support. I’ll listen, but I won’t stop fighting you at every turn as a signal danger to our country and to what I believe in, until you convince me otherwise.
And now, for a time, I will continue to grieve. For the tens of thousands of people who will be denied the right to vote because of Republican efforts to suppress their votes. To the hundreds of thousand of immigrants who, like all of our parents and grandparents, want a chance to live and work in our terrific country. For the millions of women who may be denied their reproductive rights. For the many millions of middle class taxpayers who will continue to pay more than their share because the rich will get more tax cuts. For the many millions of small investors and holders of bank accounts and credit cards who will be, again, at the mercy of Wall Street after Dodd-Frank is repealed. For the 11 million undocumented aliens who will now live in desperate fear from every knock on the door. For the more than 20 million beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act who will, once again, be without health insurance.
For the many, many millions of people around the world who looked to America for leadership in the formation and the preservation of democracy, who looked to us as diplomats first, and as warriors only when necessary. And for the hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people, who will pile up in the northern countries of South America and Africa, fleeing starvation and pestilence because their homes are uninhabitable and their land is arid and their animals have died due to climate change, begging us to be let into the richer Northern Hemisphere.
And to all of us, who will now spend the next two generations subject to the rulings of a Supreme Court stacked with knee-jerk conservatives who will continue the behavior of the last 30 years, advancing a political agenda, covered brazenly, shamelessly with the good names of “justice” and the “rule of law.”
But grieving ends. And the fight continues. More on that soon.
