HEALING DIVISIONS
Media cast the vote as ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ But voters showed ‘they’ are America, too.
NEW YORK— We all got it wrong. We all got it wrong. We all got it wrong.
That’s what the Trump triumphalists want to hear as an admission. From the pollsters, the political sages, the pundits and mainstream media — 240 newspaper editorial boards across the United States endorsed Hillary Clinton, 17 endorsed Donald Trump.
But even the “we” is part of the problem in that statement. It implies a superiority of integrity and virtue.
Social media, which was so brashly exploited by the man who will be America’s 45th president in January, saw it differently and said it differently, often steeped in a prideful and unapologetic coarseness. Because that’s the language they speak and Trump made it OK. That’s a cultural convulsion we should have better grasped.
Much as we decried the jagged divisiveness that Trump fostered on his road to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., legitimizing the American great crevice cracking open between “them” and “us,” we did the very same thing. Except we cast Trump’s swelling support as the odious them, focusing on the crackpots.
And on election day, they told us in resounding terms, humbling terms, that they are America, too. They are the 30 states that went blood-dripping red, despite Clinton winning the popular vote nationally, as of the latest count Wednesday night. They are the disenfranchised white working class who’ve given up on upward mobility. They are the men and women who don’t have a college degree, who are unemployed or threadbare employed; a generation whose skills are no longer needed and, for the first time, is worse off than their parents. Whites, who make up 69 per cent of the electorate, voted 58 per cent for Trump. Non-whites, who make up 31 per cent of the electorate, voted 74 per cent for Clinton. (According to exit polls, though clearly we should be more skeptical of big data.)
And yes, theirs is a tuning fork pitched to the whine of disgruntlement over immigration and a demographic landscape that has rendered the America they love unrecognizable. The melting pot that has defined America for centuries was put on the back burner in favour of identity politics, where the rights of suspicious others — or so Trumpists fervently believe — have big-footed the rights they still hold sacrosanct. Those suspicious others, sadly, include Muslims, illegal Mexicans, a la-la intelligentsia, a vainly patronizing celebrity aristocracy, business profiteers, technocrats and, of course, a despised Washington establishment.
They relate more to trolls and avatars — and a saloon brawler — than nuanced pedantry.
Clinton’s greatest sin isn’t that she was a woman seeking the presidency, because the U.S. will have a female commander-in-chief at some point. It’s that she was not the right woman — person — for these tumultuous times and, frankly, Americans don’t like political dynasties unless their surname is Kennedy. Jeb Bush found that out, among the 16 Republican candidates set aside by Trump en route to the nomination. At that point, he should have ceased being a joke that many of them just didn’t get. To our eternal discredit, we continued treating him and his frothing adherents as such. As if they were all LOCK HER UP! caterwaulers when they clearly are not, any more than they are adherents of the Ku Klux Klan despite the dirty sheet crusaders endorsing Trump. That’s part of the abysmal picture on the day after, but it should be an inset photo, not the widescreen.
They hit the pause button, I guess. But the worst of the past won’t be resurrected in an enlightened nation. This isn’t the Weimar Republic, even with Trump controlling the legislative, executive and doubtlessly the judicial arms of government.
Trump was the heretic, pounding away at the orthodoxy of government — Democrat and Republican — inside the Washington Beltway. The swamp he’s vowed to drain.
He connected with harsh voices that have been raised in protest for a long time, certainly through the two terms of President Barack Obama, and orchestrated what was a lament, a dirge, for a way of life rapidly disappearing into the rearview mirror.
So Trump will begin to dismantle Obama legacy policies, most promptly repealing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) — throwing 20 million people off health insurance — and rip up multilateral trade agreements that have sucked manufacturing jobs out of the country, benefitting primarily corporations (as Bernie Sanders so passionately argued), and likely ditch climatechange targets that Trump dismissed as a hysterical hoax perpetrated by China.
There’s a crucial lesson to be learned in this outcome: The liberal tent is too small, too exclusive even as it champions inclusivity as a core value.
The term “racist,” so hurtful, is flung about too easily, defaming and denigrating everybody who, I honestly believe, don’t have a bigoted bone in their bodies. Trump indeed courted the hidebound prejudiced, but that’s hardly the nearly 60 million voters who cast their ballot for him.
Objecting to the niqab doesn’t make you an Islamophobe. Chanting Go Indians! at a ball game doesn’t make you a cultural appropriator. Discomfort with transgender bathrooms doesn’t necessarily make you homophobic. At least, I am willing to give those many factions the benefit of the doubt at this moment. So, I would respectfully suggest, the Democratic Party should respect a divergence of views on the spectrum of liberalism without slamming the door on multimillions who aren’t social conservatives, but voted for Trump anyway.
Trump may build his stupid wall, but a vast middle-of-the-road constituency has felt itself walled in by accommodation run amok. That doesn’t make them xenophobic and intolerant. It makes them bewildered and vulnerable to a demagogue like Trump, who shamelessly rubbed grievances raw. However, Trump is not a traditional ideologue and liberals should take some comfort in that — as well as the fact he doesn’t owe the social conservatives anything.
The electorate backlash was against the status quo in Washington and the perceived extremism of disentitlement everywhere else.
Those are wounds that need binding rather than amputation of the afflicted. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.