Hard Truths

How can we make sense of the nonsensical?

If you’re like me, you’re still in a state of stunned disbelief. The election results feel absurd and counterfactual, and you want desperately to make sense of what just happened.

This feeling perhaps is akin to watching a family member return to an abusive spouse, even after nearly being beaten to death. Or watching in horror as a loved one, whom you thought was finally clean, starts using drugs again and spirals helplessly out of control. How could someone choose that over what we have to offer?

I admit a bit of trepidation in trying to address this topic on the day after this travesty, because I know how raw emotions are running, and any messenger is pretty much asking to be shot. But here’s a bit of where I am today.

One could almost excuse this nation for electing Trump the first time. There were millions of people willing to take a chance on a “business man” they knew from television. Roll the dice and see, why not? A foolhardy and costly mistake, but one we could learn from, right?

But after all we went through with him, after all his crimes and assaults, after his disastrously mismanaged response to a pandemic that killed one million Americans, and after all he did to undermine and ultimately openly attack our democracy, it is inconceivable that we would reelect such a man.

Yet that is what we’ve done. We are officially in the upside down.

There is a temptation, completely understandable, to suspect something in the contest was amiss. We certainly saw the other side do so when they believed their guy couldn’t have lost the 2020 election fair and square. But unlike them, we require that any extraordinary claim produce at least some credible evidence, and we won’t likely find any here. Our elections are secure, despite Russia’s best efforts to disrupt them with bomb threats.

Moreover, to look to foul play, rather than foul decisions, is to absolve the majority of the American electorate of the blame they carry for this catastrophe. 

No, we must talk instead about some hard truths.

Before we do, let me be clear. I won’t spend any time assigning blame, and I’m not interested in hearing it from others. By any objective measure, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ran a superb campaign; raised record amounts of money; had a forward-looking, positive message; and ran through the tape at the finish line, pedal to the floor, all in just over 100 days time. We were all proud of what they’d accomplished. By contrast, and again by any objective measure, the Trump campaign was crude, mean-spirited, laced with violent rhetoric, fueled by hate and fear, and frankly boring and weird. You know it, and I know it. Even the other side knows it.

Nor was this ever about who was actually the better candidate. Harris, an eloquent, experienced prosecutor, drubbed Trump so badly in the first debate that he fled from even the idea of a second. Harris produced detailed policies and common sense plans for an opportunity economy. Trump had no plans other than his tariffs, and his speeches were uniformly unintelligible, rambling, and on many levels disturbing. His own top aides even came out against him publicly, and our senior military officials warned us all that he is fascist to the core.

His supporters did not listen, or they did not care.

And Harris’s electoral loss came not from any bad choices, such as who to pick as her VP.  You simply don’t lose all seven battlegrounds from that, just as Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because she “didn’t go to Michigan.” There is something far deeper at work.

One hard truth is that a majority of voters simply wanted what Trump offered: a champion for their grievances. I didn’t believe they actually would, but lower propensity male voters came out for Trump in appalling, historic numbers, underscoring the misogyny at the heart of his message and personified by JD Vance. 

Other voters decided to mortgage the future of American democracy out of anger over high grocery bills, failing to understand (thanks to the media) the worldwide nature of post-pandemic inflation, how the Biden Administration had actually succeeded in taming it, or how Trump’s tariffs and economic policies would empty their wallets.

Many progressives, myself included, placed our hopes in the basic goodness and common sense of the American people, who of course would ultimately know better than to put a convicted felon and Russian asset into the Oval Office. This was especially true given how Trump had promised openly to rule as an authoritarian and to come after the press and his political opponents, wielding all the might of a compliant Justice Department and even the military if necessary.

And there, another hard truth: Either the voters don’t believe Trump will do what he has openly promised to do, or they simply don’t care. Neither brings any comfort. 

I lay all this out because if we are to defeat the rising threat of fascism in America, we must be clear-eyed about how it preys upon our weaknesses as a society. 

The same deeply rooted misogyny that has twice kept far more qualified and capable women from the presidency is now also being weaponized to strip away fundamental rights to bodily autonomy. Their next, inevitable, and indeed plainly stated goals include national bans on abortion and contraception. We must understand and prepare for how they will bring these assaults, even while we try to understand why so many women, and in particular white women, continue to support Trump and even voted for him this time around.

Not an easy or comfortable question.

It doesn’t stop there. “Traditional” notions of gender roles are also justifying vicious and sustained attacks upon trans people, whom the GOP demonizes at every turn in order to teach its base how to hate and dehumanize. If we parrot their language, look the other way, and fail to stand up for them, we allow that wedge to be driven deeper, and for discrimination and even calls for “eradication” to flourish. These attacks upon trans people are tests of the extent of our compassion and the strength of our principles, and we must not fail them.

We must also develop a deeper understanding of how racism operates and drives white grievance and white supremacy, which in turn powers the MAGA movement. But this is far more complicated than we understood. For example, we believed, incorrectly, that Trump’s openly racist attacks upon Latinos and threats of mass deportations of migrants would keep those voters in our column. Instead, the hardships of the post-Covid economy endured by Latino families swelled support for Trump within that community, even while African Americans remained relatively committed to the Democrats. If we cannot find a way to win back these voters, the entire American experiment is imperiled.

None of these issues will be solved overnight, nor must we have any of these painful conversations now while we are still in shock and grief from this heartbreaking loss. I raise them here because they are the questions we should truly be weighing, certainly before assigning blame to any of the hardworking team or incredible candidates.

In the end, Kamala Harris did not fail us. We as a nation failed her.

And that is a very hard truth.