Friends, I get it that everybody is bummed out. And I join you. I am shellshocked as well. I never, ever thought that I would see this day dawn or be writing from the angle that I now find myself positioned in. Many of you have written or called or I have written or called you and you’ve told me variations of, “I need to get away from politics for my sanity.” For a few days, fine. But we can’t all just walk away en masse from the fight. The fight for democracy and a government of the people by the people and for the people has never been an easy one. It is emphatically not easy now. But the forces of evil only truly win when good people give up and walk away.
I’m going to share with you excerpts from David Kurtz’s newsletter. Kurtz works for Talking Points Memo and he has some clear thinking on what has just happened. This is where we need to start, with clear thinking. Forget about the post mortems. Life is a chess game. You don’t go back and redo several moves, you make your next move from your position on the board right now. Here’s the reality of our situation — or at least this is the best articulation of our collective reality that I have found yet.
You might be taken aback by me finding silver linings in this result but I do think there are two of them. First, the dark path ahead was chosen clearly and unequivocally: With 51%, Trump is on track to win a majority of the popular vote. Second, Trump will win without undue reliance on the quirks of our 18th century anti-majoritarian constitutional structure.
There is clarity in that result. This is who we are. Not all of us, but a majority of us. It presents a stark picture of America in 2024, without sugarcoating or excuse. It makes it harder to fool yourself about the task at hand, which is an enormous cultural one more than a political one.
Donald Trump’s win isn’t the product of a constitutional quirk. It’s not the result of a poorly conceived or executed campaign by Kamala Harris. It’s not a messaging failure or a tactical error or a strategic blunder. Other broader dynamics at play – like a post-pandemic revulsion toward incumbents or an anti-inflation backlash – are too limited in their scope and specific in their focus to account for the choice that was made: Donald Trump. It would be a category error to ascribe our current predicament to a political failure.
If politics is merely a reflection of culture, then we get to see that reflection clearly and sharply as the sun comes up this morning. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.
Political change is slow; cultural change is glacial (an anachronistic metaphor in an age of rapidly retreating ice). But it’s doable. We’ve seen remarkable cultural changes in our own lifetimes. Cultural change starts small, with the brave, resolute, and individual choices we make in our own lives and communities. It’s reflected in how we live, where we live, and what we live for. These myriad choices we make over the course of conducting our private lives speak more clearly about who we are and what we’re about than the occasional casting of a ballot in an election.
I don’t feel inspired to rally you to action quite yet, and it feels hollow to try. If you need to decompress and recover, I get it. But in our heightened emotional state this morning, some of us are going to be tempted to cast blame all around us for this electoral outcome. It might make us feel good in the moment. But if you’re looking for a political fix to the cultural problem, I’m not sure you’re going to end up fixing much of anything. Politics alone will not save us.
For those of us who believe in the rule of law, a pluralistic society, and standing up to unkind people who engage in hurting others as public blood sport, we’re going to have to take a long view toward promoting those principles in all aspects of our culture so that they are ultimately reflected in our politics in a way they simply are not now. I recognize that many of us have already been doing this slow and steady work, which makes the overnight result even more discouraging. It remains an enormous, decades-long task, but it is something each of us can engage in without uprooting our lives or changing professions or moving abroad.
Not going to lie to you, because I never have. I’ve had conversations with friends in Canada, New Zealand and Ireland in the past eighteen hours or so about fleeing America. And I anticipate even more. It never hurts to talk and be informed of options. Nobody knows where to begin to pick up the pieces this November morning. But the clarity you just read does distill down to a few key points:
- Trump is not a fluke. 2016 was not a fluke.
- This is who we are. Trump does represent the soul of this nation right now and he is a downright moron, as H.L. Mencken predicted a hundred years ago. The handwriting was on the wall, predicting this day, that early on.
- We have lived through political tragedies in this country before. I well remember 1963 when JFK was assassinated.
- And I well remember 1968 when both Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated within a few months of each other. Bobby wasn’t alive to get the Democratic nomination in the fall. So we ended up with Hubert Horatio Humphrey, who was pleased as punch, and Richard Nixon was elected. Those were black days. And they led to Watergate and you know all the rest.
So take what time you need to decompress but the simple truth is that the important work is still here. It will not do itself. We need to preserve democracy and that means going forward with clear eyes, clear thinking, and sound resolve. This too shall pass. And we shall overcome.
Yes, well stated Ursula. We have to change the prevailing narrative that led us to this point.
And perhaps change the way that the narrative that so many people have bought into – and how that narrative is disseminated.
Ironically, the greatest help to our cause will be the ideological over-reach of the other side.
People have elected the ‘Leopard Eating Faces Party’, they’re about to find out how hard it is to function without a face, and how painful the loss of face will be.
“And perhaps change the way that the narrative that so many people have bought into – and how that narrative is disseminated.”
Unfortunately, that narrative was pushed onto those people by folks who care NOTHING about “those people.” I mean, look at Twitter. Musk bought it because “free speech” and he turned it into a total cesspool, filled with the absolute worst of speech. The Constitution only says that the GOVERNMENT can’t regulate speech or ideas. Twitter, before Musk, was doing what ALL “information delivery services” had done and REGULATED what could and could not be put forward through THEIR service. You can’t write a letter to a newspaper editor and spew nothing but obscene language and expect it to be published, no matter your “First Amendment rights.” Hell, I use AOL and when I comment on news articles, I frequently get a “warning” that some language might “offend” some people (I recall using the word “crap” in a comment and got the warning, so I changed that one word to “garbage” and it went through; absolutely NO other change to content or context was made but the “moderators” felt that “crap” would somehow offend more people than “garbage”) and I’ve had to flag a lot of comments that *I* found offensive (using some pretty disparaging language and posting utter “misinformation”) but, for some reason, those right-wing comments somehow managed to escape getting any warnings. Twitter rightly decided to rid itself of users who were deliberately violating the service’s own “terms of service”–that every single one of those users had agreed to follow–but it enraged Musk enough that he bought it. Now, not so ironically, Musk has been banning people who criticize his thin (pasty immigrant) skin and reposting vile garbage–apparently, as long as you don’t criticize Musk, you can post all the homophobic, transphobic, racist, misogynist, xenophobic garbage you want (and there’s a very good chance that Musk will “like” your tweet and even repost it).
And it’s not just Musk. It’s ALL the owners of ALL the media in this country. They control the narrative; they control how it’s disseminated. And with Trump’s recent threats to the media, do you think we’re going to see MSNBC continue as it currently exists or will it start morphing into another CNN, presenting a conservative view of what liberal and progressive mean?
“Ironically, the greatest help to our cause will be the ideological over-reach of the other side.
People have elected the ‘Leopard Eating Faces Party’, they’re about to find out how hard it is to function without a face, and how painful the loss of face will be.”
And that will do us good, how? We still have a horrifying two years of the Trumpian dystopia to deal with and then we get to find out if Trump makes good on his promise/threat about elections. The “ideological over-reach” won’t be of any help if we have no way to actually stop it. And that “leopard eating faces” bit might salve your soul but leopards aren’t particularly choosy in whose faces they eat. The people who voted for them won’t care about their own faces being eaten as long as the leopards eat other faces first. Alabama has one of the worst ever state constitutions. It was passed in 1903 and is constantly being amended (way too many of those amendments are literally single-issue items affecting just a single county or even a single city because the legislators refused to trust locals to handle their own issues) but a major selling point for the folks who passed the original version of the document was the basic premise of “If you can make the lowest white man feel superior to every Black man, you can steal from him all you want and he’ll keep voting for you.” And that’s what the current GOP is doing. Oh, they elect their tokens and put them up as needed but you won’t see Trump fill an important cabinet post, much less a close advisory position, with a Black man or a Latino (and the bulk of his white voters won’t have a problem while the minority Trump voters will just be ignored–until Trump *needs* them again and he sends out the tokens to get them back in line).
Yes Joseph, we need to get rid of billionaires and their corrupting wealth. And we can rely on people, who voted for R because they were fed some bullshit about ‘the economy’ and ‘the border’ , to discover that they WERE lied to.
And then do you think they might be upset about being betrayed?
And after that, do you think they might want to listen to our side,
The R side only has lies and falsehoods and fantasies, we have the truth.
But after what happened with this election it isn’t going to change minds overnight. The corruption of the body politic in America has taken place over forty years, it’s going to take a while to turn things around. These people have a LOT of money to spend to get their way and they’ve been spending it for a long time, but lies run out, the truth doesn’t. We are not going to stop them straight away. They’ve been playing a long game, we have to as well.
I am reminded of a quote by Margaret Mead, but I just can’t place it….
Right, cultural change is a long game but “This too shall pass” (Lincoln). Democrats have long game power they can harness. The party should start now with the ground game by mobilizing the Harris released energy. Contact them now and soothe them in their disappointment by showing a way forward, buiiding on their ability to act locally and prepare the way for state and national for 25 and 28. Release Hope. Yes, we can
The only way dorward is civil war. There will never be another election that orange menace will not rig. Maybe never another election. Not in this country
Unfortunately after Trump gets his money from the fossil fuel industry and the national parks are sold for drilling rights etc., the earth will decide the next election…except there may not be a way out once the tipping point is reached. Nothing like being trapped in a car speeding down a dark mountain road at night in the rain and then others choose a blind drunk to take the wheel. The earth plays a long game also, and despite our cultural/religious beliefs, we aren’t necessary to be a part of it. Thanks America. This is the last reality show called NO SURVIVORS.
What happened is deeply cultural. The reality is the US is a nation full of racist misogynists. Consider the races where orange man won handily but a male Dem also won handily. The imbedded belief that only a man can run our country, and a white man will do it better than a man of color, is what has to change before we will ever make any progress. All the accusations about what the Dems got wrong is BS. They ran a good campaign with a great candidate but until people believe that a woman of color can be every bit as, if not more, competent, we’re stuck here.
Oh, it’s politics, all right. It just isn’t the politics everyone thiks politics is.
Everyone thinks politics is left and right. Tha isonlt part of politics – the economic part. Left and right refer to economic theories. But politics also has an up and down dimention, where up representa autocracy and down represents democracy. This election ws all about up and down.
I did not think this out all by myself – sure, I had a vague feeling there was something too simple about left and right, but that was as far as I could get on my own. Instead, I had to have it spelled out for me by The Political Compass [https://www.politicalcompass.org] which has been around for 23 years now and still almost no one knows about it – and thpse wh do apparently don’t have a clue how to use it. Yes, I take some liberties with the vocabulary it uses – mostly because the term “libertarian” has been coopted and now has a meaning far removed from “democratic” or
“egalitarian,”
If you want to call authoritarianism a culture, and you certainly can – it certainly creates a n environment of a culture a repulsive culture with rigid hierarchies – then yeah, it’s a culture war. But it’ specifically a war between authoritarian culture and egalitarian culture, and I think that’s important not to overlook.
The editor of “The 19th” today put up an article “What will it take for America to elect a woman President?” My gut reaction was that the first thig we needis Democratic control of the curriculum of primary and secondary schools in all states and teritories for a peeriod of at least forty years (one generation). And by control. I mean enforeceable control. And although I conseder that a necessary condition, I don’t consider it a suffivient one. I’m pretty co=nfident it will take more than that.
Yes, the problem KS cultural. A lot of Americans are racists and misogynists . Toxic Religion pushes this, especially the prosperity gospel preachers.
And if you look at the Southern states
, a good chunk of Americans is still fighting the Civil War, and deny that they lost ( I had a fairly smart woman tell me exact that). Heather Cox Richardson summed it up well: the Union may have won the battles, but the South won the culture wars because of one couple in Texas who pushed school books devoid of facts. Because of them and the market for textbooks in Texas is so large publishers caoitulated. Real factual.history is no longer taught. Neither is civics or government, because this group didn’t want an informed electorate.
With Trump.in charge it can only get worse. The religious left needs to.be activated. There’s a group called Faithful America that I follow. We also need educators willing to stand up.