Now Is the Time to Be Gracious and Get to Work Being Honest with Ourselves
Whew.
We squeaked by with that one despite Biden/Harris winning more votes than any other ticket in history. Donald Trump also won the second most votes than any other candidate in history. In more ways than a few this shit was historic.
As obvious the road is all uphill, I’ll admit to bawling like a child when it hit me that we were rid of Trump and that it was Joe Biden and Kamala Harris taking the reins. Tears of joy, of relief, of optimism paying off.
Still the Left lost some of the House and might take the Senate but this was not the election we were promised. As I wrote last week, the will of the people has been cast and we are almost 50/50 in worldview here, gang. Bitter as it is to swallow, nearly half the country does not buy the progressive vision. This isn’t just the South. This isn’t just cities vs rural areas.
Trump received the largest percentage of non-white votes of any other conservative candidate — you guessed it — in history. Pretty much debunks the monolithic viewpoint that Trump supporters are all white supremicists, huh?
I’ve heard squawk that Biden won because of black voters. And progressive voters. And young voters. Horseshit. How typical, the jockeying for credit in something historic. The credit goes to a vast multicultural liberal number not one demographic category. Forty-five million independent voters (neither affiliated with Blue or Red) voted this year. That’s historic, too. Biden won because of people not in line with either party or ideology. Biden won because so many of us hated Trump.
At this phase, Trump ain’t going quietly. Lots of lawsuits. Recounts. Tantrums. Conspiracy theories. We now get to witness the full madness of our King George, a meltdown so massive it would be good to take serious note of how badly we can get things wrong in our democracy. One fact we need to acknowledge before our nipples get hard and we go running in the streets naked, flogging MAGA hat wearers with our engorged cocks:
If it hadn’t been for a pandemic, he would’ve won.
No. It wasn’t the woke message of the victim classes that sealed this win for us. It wasn’t the democratic socialists dressed in black fighting against fascism. It wasn’t the fat, black lesbian instructing white people that they are all racist that brought out the vote for Blue. It wasn’t the Bernie Bots raging against the one percent. It wasn’t the cultmind of the white fragility hucksters and anti-racism grifters that thwarted the horrible man.
It was a virus that he handled like a demented, angry man who truly believed that only the weak get sick.
We did not defeat Trump. He defeated himself. The man has been accused of multiple rapes, tax fraud, and was impeached by the House of Representatives and skated right on past it all but his inept refusal to humble himself to an act of savage nature was his undoing.
Despite his bumbling incompetence in the face of Coronavirus, seventy million people voted for him. Are you so arrogant and morally vacuous to label seventy million people racist monsters? Are you that stupid?
There will be months of justifying why half the country disagrees with the Left in terms of governance. It wasn’t half. We won by five million votes. It was beyond decisive. There will be thinkpieces in Medium claiming that Hispanics are full of white adjacents and that we should round up all the Trump Enablers and have them shunned and shamed (in between essays about how difficult it is to be black in an Ivy League university and how that guy who ghosted her was actually proliferating a rape of feels). Yes. There will be plenty said and absolutely no self reflection.
We (and I use ‘we’ to signify a collective encompassing all of us who value the ideals of a liberal democracy comprising seventy-five million citizens who voted Blue) fucking blew some serious stuff on this one.
What do we know?
Neither Bernie nor Warren would’ve won (even in the razor thin margins that Biden did).
That the loss in 2016 may have been less about Hillary Clinton or her campaign and more about this fifty/fifty split in worldview.
That Hispanics are not a monolithic voting bloc of similar ideologies. Neither are blacks. Or Asians. Or whites.
That race polarization is far less important than class stratification.
That “Defund the Police” is a shit slogan. And a worse strategy.
That seventy million of our countrymen and women would rather have a piece of shit like Donald Trump in charge than hand things over to the humorless cult members of the Woke.
That calling seventy million people racists didn’t somehow convince them that they were and cause the scales to fall from their eyes.
Most people find some humility when they lose. In 2016, we found none. It was sexism! It was racism! It was that we fucked Bernie out of the nomination! This week we won but we won small. We won because of a natural disaster not because of the strength of our ideas or the compassion for our fellow citizens or for our brilliant communications skills (which is a surprise as so many liberals have degrees in marketing and communication).
We won. And we need some goddamned humility for not beating a hopeless incompetent and morally bereft turd like Donald Trump with a repudiation only seen by the light of damnation and hellfire. We won but just barely given the brazen horror of the man (and, no, you don’t take down a dictator by voting meaning as awful and embarrassing as the man was and is, he was and is definitely not a dictator). In any other reality (except for a Black Mirror episode) we should have beaten him so badly that he, Giuliani, and McConnell changed their names and became dentists in Brazil.
We won but we lost.
I’m thrilled to be rid of Trump although we are not rid of the reality that his stances on immigration, the police, democratic socialism, American isolationism, and the idea that COVID only affects the weak are incredibly popular with just a bit less than half the country. Until the man dies, he will have an undue influence on things.
So what now?
We celebrate in direct contrast to the CDC advisories to avoid crowds. The ‘rona loves this shit and is wholly apolitical. A Trump rally and a Biden celebration look pretty much the same to the virus. Republicans caution us to avoid being sore winners as if the rules change if they lose. Democrats scream like children “But they were mean to us so I will be mean to them!”
I hope the adults in the national room hear the song being played. I hope that we can listen to but not be bound by the complaints of the fringe. I hope we can reframe our ideas to convince a plurality of Americans that progress is a good thing for everyone not just a select few who hunker down in their guns rights and racial division cults.
We’ve spent at least two decades behaving like Donald Trump — angry, self-involved, namecalling, divisive. It took having that avatar of unself-reflective narcissism occupying our highest office for just over half of us to get tired of it but wholly adopt his methods to defeat him. We can be better than that so why not try to be?
