Post- Mortem

 

~Paraphrasing Ali Velshi~ The most powerful person in America is not Donald J. Trump, it's you.

 These are tough times for progressives and democrats in America. There was a red wave this past week, and everyone in democratic circles are scratching their heads and trying to figure out why. Even the winners seemed a little shell shocked by the scope and magnitude of the outcome. 

I'm not, and if you are a student of American history, or if you pay attention to the psyche and mindset of the white majority population in America, you would not be either.

Frist, let's stop with all the talk about white working class and economic angst, and democrats not addressing their concerns. (James Carville, and Bernie Sanders, old white men themselves, will never get it.)  If you gave a lot of these white working class voters a million dollars, and in order to keep it they would have to have voted for Harris, your money would have been safe. They still wouldn't have done it. It has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with identity. Kamala's race and gender made it damn near impossible for her to win. Her opponent, at times, was acting like he wanted to lose, and he still beat her by a country mile. Performing fellatio on a mike at a rally, declaring that immigrants are eating cats and dogs, threatening political violence against his enemies, is not a winning message, but it worked for trump because it was never about the message. It was always about the people who are running. Plain and simple. 

As Americans we never like to hear this, because we like to think of ourselves as somehow being above bigotry and ignorance. We believe that this experiment in democracy is complete, and that we have created a perfect union. We have not. Take a look around you. Look who we are sending back to Washington. Not only Trump, but all of the slimy loathsome self-serving politicians who thrive in an environment of hate and division. Trump is the face of it, and he made it cool to hate without having to act like we are the haters. We channeled our hate through him. That's who we elected as our next president. A man who has spent his entire political life dividing people, and demonizing those who look different and who he perceives as being less than. This includes not only ordinary citizens, but military service members as well. The people who served in his administration and know him best told us who he is, and we still chose not to believe them. Why?  Because deep down most Americans ( I can say most now based on  the election results) know that we are no different than he is.

 I feel bad for black women who truly thought they had allies with white women. That their solidarity of sisterhood, united in their fight for reproductive freedoms, would be enough to beat the tyrant in waiting at the ballot box. It was not. At the end of the day, whiteness and fear of others comes first. Trump knew this, and he used it to his political advantage. 

A few years back a white women who worked for me told me that she might be coming into work a little later for a few days. She told me that she had to renew her parking privileges at a garage that was much closer to our place of work. And until then, she would have to rely on someone else to drop her off.  In the meantime, she couldn't park in a garage that was farther away. She just couldn't take the chance of walking a longer distance to work. Center City, Philadelphia (by all accounts the safest part of anywhere in the city), was just too dangerous for her. 

I thought about my former co-worker a lot during this election cycle. When those scary dark and ominous trump commercials of young brown men were running over and over, I knew that they would have their intended outcomes. Talking heads on cable television and political pundits were saying that there is no way Americans (especially suburban white women) would embrace Trump's message of fear and division. They were wrong. Harris and her message of joy, hope, and not going back, was never going to work with a majority population, whose fears and prejudices were a much more motivating factor in how they voted. 

I will let Elie Mystal's quotes close this post.

"America deserves everything is about to get. We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better work for not just ourselves, but our sisters and brothers in at lease some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid...America did this. America, through the process of a free and fair election, demanded this.. And America, as a collective, deserves to get what it wants."

These next four years will be interesting. And I will be hear for it. Hopefully, so will you.