Donald Trump (cnn.com)
As of November 9th, 2016 the age of President Donald Trump is upon us. And the Millennials wept. As did my mother who is a Baby Boomer. Go figure. I suppose some good came of this, though. If you are conservative, not like a mainstream conservative, but like an it’s-about-damn-time-we-got-our-country-back kinda conservative then you are in a good mood. Good for you.
As for the rest of you, before you go burning Donald Trump in effigy, please realize that some good can come out of it for us left-leaning folk as well. For instance I restarted this blog. You’re welcome. What began as a hobby back when I started grad school has been revitalized. What happened to the old one you ask? It was back in 2012 –you know the good old days— when in the process of pursuing an advanced degree I felt like my voice mattered more than it ever possibly could. Inspired I was. *Yoda voice* I would write two or three articles a week, but subsequently stopped writing them in 2013 because, well, grad school. Oh, the irony.
Now look! I finally have something to talk about again and don’t have a two-books-a-week reading list to compete with. So here I am.
So yeah, Donald Trump. How exactly did someone with a well-documented history of inflammatory speech, and heinous actions get elected? “Bro, it’s the electoral college” my friends declared. Eloquently I might add. Sure, the Electoral College is easy to blame.
Ahem. I mean, WHAT?! The Electoral College! Burn it down! In all seriousness the Electoral College is hardly the reason why Trump won. “But, Chris if it was only the popular vote he wouldn’t have won.” That’s true. However the system is the system, and easy as it is to criticize it’s not without virtue. Part of the reason why we have an electoral college is so that large states like California and Texas don’t dictate national policy. Hillary won the popular vote, sure, but only because there are so many liberals on the west coast. The Electoral College is actually a better representation of how the country as a whole felt about the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. They didn’t like it, and that is what we should be examining.
I blame the general apathy of the American public and their tunnel vision single-issue approach to elections…
There is more at play here than just racism, Secretary Clinton’s unfavorable numbers, or Donald Trump’s countless verbal miscues and outright insults. The Electoral College can’t tell is why a subset of White rural voters went for President Obama, but not for Hillary Clinton. The Electoral College can’t tell us why President Obama won a larger percentage of African American and Latino votes than Hillary Clinton did in an election year filled with racial tension in the forms of police shootings, national anthem protest, and echoing chants of “build a wall!” The Electoral College can’t help us figure out why so many factors that should have pushed the election in the favor of Democrats didn’t.
So what is to blame? It’s a complicated issue, and I think the answer is equally complicated. It’s too easy to scream, “America is racist!” when the finger is pointing at some people, not all, who indeed voted for America’s first black president and Donald Trump. Now, I’m not saying that there is no racism in play here, far from. It’s actually all over the place. What I am saying is that we have to delve deeper to see what happened. I blame the general apathy of the American public and their tunnel vision single-issue approach to elections…and yes, racism.
The apathy of the single-issue voter is an unfortunate consequence of living in a free, diverse society. Give me my job back, I don’t care about anything else! Stop the illegals from coming in, I don’t care about anything else! Get the lobbyist out of Washington (drain the swamp, I guess?), I don’t care about anything else! Defund Planned Parenthood and overturn Roe v. Wade, I don’t care about anything else! And the list goes on forever. Apathy. The NIMBY effect–Not in My Back Yard. If it doesn’t affect me, then I couldn’t care less. Many people have this approach to life in general.
The racist element is different, not always connected, and deep rooted in white supremacy, and white privilege. Are all of these people White Supremacists? No. However the white supremacist mindset prevails in American society. It’s the idea that the country belonged to you in the first place, or that it is somehow stopped being great. That logic has always escaped me. Who exactly took your country away from you, and what does taking it back entail? I’ll never know.
What I do know is this: You have to appreciate the irony of this dynamic. Disgruntled white, many of them working-class, voters turned out to vote for Donald Trump to get their country back. This same group essentially elected him all by themselves. No other demographic voted majority-Trump. Hmmmm, sounds like a powerful group of people to me. You didn’t need Blacks, Latinos, Asians, or most Millennials to “get your country back.” All you needed was White People. White Men in general, and White Women without degrees specifically. No other group in America could have elected the candidate of their choice with this small of a coalition. No pluralism. No diversity.
So scream all you like about this reclamation, but It appears the country is, as it ever was, yours. Anyway. I wish Mr. Trump and his supporters the very best in making this country great again. I don’t even know what that means, but I suspect I’ll find out.
