AVoice from the past here. Not a political expert, just some thoughts.
Last night was horrific. Disgraceful. How the fuck could 53% of white WOMEN vote for this guy?
We should have seen it coming. Stupidity & white fear are natural laws in this country & they’ve been building up for 8 years. We thought the Bush years demonstrated without question the damage an unchecked Conservative mandate can do. We were wrong.
It’s a bad day for everyone & a worse day for brown people. I’m genuinely frightened for women. For gay people. Kids. The poor and middle class. The military. Immigrants. Everyone.
The SCOTUS is fucked for a generation. The damage that can potentially be wrought on the environment and our national parks has me to the point of tears. Not looking forward to the likely but hopefully not inevitable recession.
Even so, I’m not frightened of Trump, himself. There is a silver lining there. He’s not the first scumbag to hold the office, or the first moron. He’s not Hitler. He’s not Pol Pot. He’s not a despot. He’s not even W.
The difference is that he’s not an ideologue. Not even a politician. He’s a tabloid buffoon and has been since you & I were kids.
The difference is that he lacks conviction. He subscribes to no ideology beyond Trumpism. The fulfillment of his ego.
First, beyond anything else, he’s an egoist and a child. To him, our Presidency is a toy. It’s the top of the celebrity pyramid. It’s the holy flush validation of his ego. That’s it.
Beyond that, he’s Archie Bunker. An armchair politician. A Monday morning quarterback. A dormroom conspiracist.
You know what being President is? It’s a job. A very fucking difficult one. It will age you by decades. IF you want to work the machinery of government to accomplish something.
There will be damage across the board, to be certain, but he’s not going to try to establish a New World Order. That requires vision. That requires work.
Someone spent eight years trying to do it and we survived the attempt. We survived it’s war. We survived the recession that came afterward. And we are battle hardened. We know those lessons well. We know where to stand and how to fight.
During the primaries, I thought of Bernie as “Woodstock”, Hillary as “Woodstock '94 brought to you by Pepsi”, & Trump as “Altamont”.
So now we live in “Altamont”…and you know some brothers are gonna get stabbed before it’s over.
When Trump pulled ahead last night, my thoughts went to the Correspondents Dinner a few years back when Obama made jibes at Trump. The camera went to Donald, stiff upper lip, with a look that said, “You just wait, motherfucker”. The steely entitlement and coiled anger.
Those are qualities I see often in white men over 50 out in the world & in the workplace. Usually in reaction to myself, a person of color. The steely entitlement and coiled anger. The suspicion. That’s half of America and it’s nothing new.
The thing about knee jerk, reactionary Conservative/Fox News politics is that it’s dumb, poorly thought out, emotional and not entirely feasible in practice. It’s white inflammation, guarding itself from “the other”. Though real, the damage will be scattered, unfocused, painfully dumb. If we hold on and fight, we’ll make it through the storm of stupid.
With Trump, THE DARK KNIGHT comes to mind. White conservative America, in their desperation, have turned to someone they don’t fully understand.
He’s not gonna tow the Conservative line as other Republican presidents have, he’s gonna tow the Trump line. What that means, who the fuck knows. Either way, it’s gonna require work and I’m not entirely convinced that he’s prepared to put his back into it. The job is ostensibly PUBLIC SERVICE, after all.
I can see his presidency going in two directions:
one, after a year in office, realizing how much actual work is required with no immediate, visceral return, we’ll see him retreat further into the perpetual recess of the golf club. A largely absentee president with Pence & Ryan calling most of the shots. Evil but not crazy. We’ve survived that & come back swinging.
Or, two, the presidency will be a four year vehicle for his worst reactionary impulses. Perpetually surrounded by enemies both real and imagined. It will get ugly. There will be costs.
I pray for the former and believe that our best weapon against the latter is reason, communication, civility, and immovable resolve.
With that in mind, my thoughts turn to Obama. He’s still a rock star. He still has enormous cache here & abroad. And he still has a voice that matters.
With the DNC in tatters, I can only hope that Obama will be a unifying presence of reason that helps to guide us through the next few years while leading the party back to fighting form. I can also see him in Jimmy Carter form, traveling the world putting out fires and keeping the old relationships from straining irrevocably. One hopes.
Oh and fuck Debbie Wasserman Schultz. This is on you, honey.
