A long time ago I was at a family gathering. One of the young boys came running through the kitchen and out the back door—except he didn’t. The screen door was closed. Running hell bent for leather, looking into the bright back yard at the other kids playing, he didn’t see the screen. Splat! A reality moment. Oblivious to us grown-ups sitting around the kitchen table watching, he bounced off, shook his head, came to himself and figured out what had happened. Without a word he opened the door and ran out.
I call such an event a reality moment. We as a nation, and a lot of us as individuals, have just had one. The reality we’re facing isn’t what we thought it was. Splat! We have to get real. I recount one of my own everyday reality moments in an earlier post. Such events help keep us grounded, conscious, keep us real, remind us that we can error—if they aren’t fatal or irretrievably damaging. (In the present case I make no claims or predictions in that regard.)
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Five days ago Donald Trump became President of the United States. It’s taken me this long to even begin to wrap my head around that event as a brute fact. A lot of pundits and professors, quicker on their feet than I am, already have written a great deal about Trump’s electoral victory from their various points of view. I guess I was too surprised, stunned, dismayed, to have many coherent thoughts of my own, so I’ve been reading what others have been saying. Here’s a few things that stand out so far.
Trump did not win the popular vote. That must be said. More people voted for Clinton—though obviously by only a thin margin. But it also has to be said, as one observer precisely noted, some “sixty million two hundred and sixty-five thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight people” did vote for Trump. That’s a lot of people. It was enough to give him the electoral college margin he needed to win under our current system. Why?
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Eight years ago Obama won the Presidency. People thronged the streets in celebration. Close-ups broadcast on our TVs showed people crying tears of joy and relief, not just in the U.S., but around the world. This year we’ve seen, and perhaps ourselves cried, tears of grief, of stunned apprehension, of pain at contemplating the damage that Trump will do in four years. A far-right Supreme Court for decades to come is just one tip of the iceberg. In one of the most comprehensively grim accounts of what a Trump presidency will mean, Andrew Sullivan, writing in the New York Magazine titles his piece “The Republic Repeals Itself.” Read it. Worst case scenario? Maybe.
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A few themes keep coming up in what I’ve read so far. First, most fundamentally, like Brexit, Trump’s win reflects a huge reaction against “business as usual.” What does that mean? Here’s where things get weird.
Today’s business as usual for the U.S. began when the Reagan-Thatcher axis set the world on its present course of neoliberal economic policies. Reagan and Thatcher, and the interests they fronted for, made cabinet and judicial appointments, implemented policies, and just generally governed in ways that reflected their peculiar far-right-wing ideology. Those policies had predictable real-world effects: They concentrated wealth, hollowed out the middle class, economically squeezed working Americans at almost all levels, and heightened widespread fear and insecurity. No wonder people finally are pissed.
That’s what the Republicans do. As Jonathan Chait writes:
“The Republican Party in Washington has been organized over the last three decades as a machine to redistribute resources upward. It has no other ideas and automatically rejects any proposals with any other effect. The political cost of waging class war for the rich will not deter them because it is their reason for existing.”
So what do the very people most damaged by these policies do? They vote the Republicans into both houses of Congress and the Presidency. It’s weird, and it’s also deeply disturbing and scary.
You know the term, “post-reality politics”? That’s what we’ve just seen actually work in the real world. We can’t afford that now. There is a real world out there, with screen doors and hot burners, with climate change and looming economic crises. We have to pick ourselves up, shake our heads, and get real.