Trump: ‘What Was In It For Them?’ – Racist, Misogynous America: Nothing

I tossed and turned but eventually fell asleep. To say I was worried is an understatement. When I woke up I was okay for perhaps fifteen seconds as my mind started kicking into gear with the normal wake-up stuff. Then the fear kicked in. I feared opening up my phone sitting on the stand next to my bed where my CPAP sits. I feared turning on the TV. I’d been through this before back in 2016.  But I couldn’t put off learning the awful truth I feared facing. And my wildest fears were suddenly realized.  How? How could our country do this AGAIN? That, as in 2016 the polls were even close was gut wrenching so I tried to work through some anticipatory grief just in case. We’ll see in the days and weeks ahead if it did any good.

In the meantime, I’ll share what I thought might lead to this awful, tragic morning. I got stationed in Virginia while in the Marines back in the 1980s so I’m all too familiar with the “Wilder Effect.” Doug Wilder was by all accounts going to cruise to a solid victory in the Governor’s race. Although he did win it was a nail biter. Virginians lied their butts off to pollsters, not wanting to admit that while they agreed Wilder was the best choice there was simply no way in hell they were going to vote for a BLACK man. Over time this was teased out and confirmed.  If you’re old enough you recall the coining of the term Wilder Effect and we saw it in other places/elections involving a black candidate.  It was real.

Looking back what happened in Virginia was a breaking of a dam, a significant number of people willing to blatantly lie to pollsters. It became more common as time went on and the science of polling has become increasingly difficult. How are pollsters to deal with the fact that they KNOW a percentage of the respondents are lying? The KNOW their samples are tainted and instead of getting better at accounting for it the willingness to lie to pollsters has grown and frankly, the pollsters can’t keep up.

In 2016 we had a gender version of the Wilder Effect. Yes, Hillary Clinton wasn’t a charismatic candidate and the GOP had spent years demonizing her. But it’s also clear that some, even women voters simply weren’t willing to vote for a woman to be President. Add in an increasingly dumbed down (intentionally by Republicans gutting of public education for over four decades) electorate and that’s how you get a manifestly unqualified (in EVERY way) candidate beating a highly qualified one.

You can say what you want about people being upset about the economy and/or inflation or immigration. That’s because they WANTED to feel grievance and blame somebody. Well, they had in Donald Trump someone responsible for those messes but who pointed the finger everywhere but himself and a majority of Americans willfully allowed themselves to be deceived. Trump projected every failing he has (and they are many) onto others and in particular his political opponents. This year it was President Biden at first but then it became Kamala Harris.

In the case of Harris, the issue that was lurking underneath the surface all along is why Trump probably felt so confident. America is a RACIST and MISOGYNISTIC country. Being a woman of color Harris didn’t have to deal only with the Wilder Effect. She had to also deal with the Hillary Effect.  Someday someone might come up with a word/term for combining the two but I have neither the heart to try or the creativity to do so myself.

I’m an old white male. In my latter sixties now. For all the life threatening situations I’ve been through nothing scared me so much as a wee hours of the morning conversation with my father (badly wounded in WWII) who long before the 1980 election was ramping up predicted the rise of Reagan. We both arrived home from different places after the bars had closed for the night and stood there on the front porch just shooting the breeze. Politics came up and that’s when he said Carter would probably lose and it would be to Reagan. The engineer in him laid out how things would swing back and forth but in the end the pendulum would swing so far it would never return to center. It would get stuck and in the wrong place.

The look on dad’s face (there was a full moon and it was late fall so no leaves on the trees – we could see each other just fine) was eerie as he said “You’ll live out your life under a different form of government.” And he meant that that different form would NOT be good. He turned and went into the house.  I was deeply troubled in the moment and ever since when I’ve thought about it feel that moment and those emotions coming back.  To say it’s never been comforting is a huge understatement.

Now, I know in my heart the America my dad and others in his generation fought for and handed over to me and future generations is truly gone.  Sure, the racism and misogyny have always been there but in my lifetime we’d made some progress towards overcoming it. Not enough it seemed and now we know not nearly enough. Trump winning in 2016 even if it took the Electoral College to do the trick showed that the progress we thought we’d made by electing Obama twice was a mirage.

In truth it unleashed dark, ugly feelings and only needed a demagogue who knew how to tap into them to burst forth. Donald Trump, stone cold racist and a man who sees women as only worth being someone to f**k when horny and if he thinks they’re “hot”, who’s only true gift was for self-promotion was the person who stepped up and seized the moment.  Bad as so many of us thought it would be it was worse. That’s how Joe Biden got elected.

Order, balance and hell, saneness were restored but it wasn’t enough.  Then Biden was forced from the race and Kamal Harris stepped up. She was hugely qualified and had everything one could want in a President including policy positions most Americans agreed with. The problem was she was a WOMAN and a BLACK woman.  Trump instinctively knew what so many of us didn’t want to accept. Which is that there are more Americans who won’t accept another black person as President anytime soon. And that they still aren’t willing to accept a WOMAN.

We are Germany back in the 1930s.  I mean it. We had someone tell us and show us exactly who he was yet allowed him unchecked power. Even with SCOTUS this summer granting Presidents power our founder DID dream of and greatly feared, so much that they took great pains to divide power to ensure no one person could wield King like power, over half of the voters have made their choice.

Our country and the free world will never be the same. America, the America I was born and raised in is dead. It won’t even get a proper funeral.  Freedom around the world will also start dying off. I’m old and though not in danger of dying anytime soon (at least as far as I know) won’t see the worst of what’s to come. But I’m glad I’ll likely be dead and gone when the world becomes as it did in the 1930s, only this time there won’t be America to lead the free world to defeat the dark forces that gave us WWII.

The bad guys have won.  All we can do is try to delay the end but the end will come. Because America is NOT the country we claim to be. We never really were but at least we usually tried to become what we said we were. Now, it’s clear that we never will be, and that there aren’t enough of us to make us try.

The only thing I will have to be thankful about in a few weeks is that my father, with all those scars he so carefully kept hidden (the physical ones – the psychological ones I’d come to understand more and more as I got older) is long dead. So are the others of his generation I so admired.  What they did, and those before them was all for nothing.

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