November 7th, 2024
A famous quote has been lodged in my mind all day, and I will present it at the end of this essay (Hey, always keep your reader engaged!)
Just before the election, a parade of would-be experts was repeating the same encouraging prediction. Political celebs like Michael Moore and James Carville, former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, various columnists for the liberal media that I gobbled up because it made me feel good—all of these people said that Kamala Harris would win decisively. Their reasoning: she was running a disciplined campaign, she had the superior get-out-the-vote effort, and most importantly—and they all put it almost the same way—that Americans were too decent and humane to vote yet again for Donald Trump. Thanks to the efforts of BOTH campaigns, anyone paying even minimal attention got a full dose of who Trump is, what he stands for, how he acts, how he sees the world—and it was all, to put it bluntly, ugly as all hell.
Taken literally, this argument clearly was incorrect. Trump was always going to get northward of 40 percent of the vote—and more realistically, much higher than that. This election always hinged on a small percentage of voters—let’s say 5 to 8 percent of them—who could be swayed either way. What the experts really meant was that a necessary sliver of the electorate would be persuaded by decency and humanity, and that would settle the matter.
But no, those voters swayed to the other side. They joined those 20,000 souls who filled Madison Square Garden to jeer and laugh at and degrade all of their enemies and people they deem unworthy, such as the denizens of that “Island of Garbage” in the Atlantic Ocean, not to mention democrats of all stripes.
I remain at a loss to explain all those votes for Trump. I can understand frustration or disillusionment with events of the past four years. Jeepers, I too am perturbed by the high cost of a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs—even at Aldi, nevermind Lunds and Byerly’s. That’s still no reason to switch sides from Batman to the Joker.
I like to think that I live in a different world than the angry-‘n-frustrated rusticos in rural Ohio and burghers in small town Pennsylvania and cheeseheads in curdled Wisconsin. But there are Trump fans in my own neighborhood in Massachusetts, and pretty much everywhere else, too. My bias may stem from being one of those smart-ass, east-coast liberal elitists that make up the “enemies of the people” that Trump vilified in the campaign. After all, thanks to that fancy-pants college education of mine, I use lots of multi-syllabic words and assemble them into complete thoughts. I’m the guy who applies all of those logical reasoning skills and a nasty sense of morality to complain endlessly about voting rights, global climate change, greedy corporations and the laws that foster them, and the culpability of a certain President who incited riots and committed other impeachable offenses yet somehow escaped any actual punishment.
The dilemma is not just that we hold opposite ideas about politics; it’s not that we don’t come close to understanding each other or invest the time to listen to each other. No, the gulf feels much deeper. We appear to be subject to different fundamental laws of human behavior, and perhaps Newtonian physics as well. For me, a pencil falls to the ground when you let go of it as surely as the price of strawberries will increase when you slap a tariff on them. I always ASSUMED that the same laws applied in the places I sometimes speed across on interstate highways, or in the back yard of any MAGA devotee, but I’ve never tested the supposition.
And now to revisit that “enemies of the people” quote that I glibly threw into one of those logically-written paragraphs. The most dire predictions for the next few years all focus on America turning, gradually but inexorably, into some dystopian fascist nightmare—and we can only hope that Trump and his minions are too incompetent to pull it off completely. We also can hope that at least some of the Trump voters, gradually and inexorably, will come to realize and regret what they have wrought on their country and the world, and that they join the rest of us in whatever resistance we manage to muster.
Which brings me, finally, to the quote that I teased way back when. Here it is:
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
–Anne Frank
