Three weeks after the election
and it’s still hard to know where to begin in discussing the nation’s new political
landscape.
We have seen some pretty spectacular
failures by a number of the country’s institutions. The Electoral College,
designed to prevent an incompetent rabble-rousing populist from winning the
Presidency, has instead enabled victory by a man of such unprincipled essence
that neither his supporters or his opponents can speak with assurance about
what he will do in office.
The Democratic Party that eight
years ago championed a candidate of audacious hope and change, this time rejected
its best hope for audacious hope and change and chose a pale imitation of the
last two Democratic incumbents, a candidate seemingly unable to articulate a
core message that even acknowledged, let alone addressed, the electorate’s
overwhelming desire for the end to a rigged system.
The Republican Party
establishment proved itself spectacularly incompetent to halt the hostile
takeover of its party banner by a man no more loyal to its precepts than
Nixon’s dog, Checkers.
And the Fourth Estate, armed with
every sophisticated tool and device imaginable, totally missed the underlying
guts of this election cycle; cable television in particular allowed its greed
and hubris to dismiss Trump’s antics and treat him as free program
entertainment to the tune of almost a billion dollars in free publicity. They
simply knew he could not win the nomination, could not secure more than 40% of
the electorate, and could not surmount the levees of the Electoral College. And
while they were spectacularly wrong, there they were the day after the
election, bloviating about how he did it and what will happen next.
The truth is, Donald Trump won
for a bevy of reasons, and Hillary Clinton lost for even more reasons. But
fundamentally, Trump connected with the passions, fears, and resentments of
enough voters in the strategically important places to turn them out. And it’s
the passions, fears and resentments of all voters to which attention must now
be paid.
For all his undeniable media
mastery, the President-elect probably does not have a clue how to manage the
expectations of the not even a plurality of voters who elected him. To be sure,
a lot of those who voted for him don’t really expect him to keep all of his
campaign promises. They just liked the fact that he made them; they especially delighted
in the way he seemed to do it, sticking his fingers repeatedly in the eye of
political correctness, with apparent indifference to the hall guards and monitors
of the narrow political corridors. Will that be his style of governance? Could
that approach possibly be an effective substitute for well-thought out,
carefully executed policies? Does anybody think Trump has thought that far
ahead?
Let’s set aside policy for a
moment and consider what we do know about the man who will be sworn in as our
President on January 20, 2017. We know he loves to make deals and he loves to
win them. It’s what turns him on and he will break all the rules to win. We
know he loves attention, craves it, can’t do without it. And we know he’s
thin-skinned, rash and impulsive on a personal level, with a toddler’s
attention span.
How does that compute to the
daily running of a Trump administration that we also know is contemptuous of
the political establishment, uses the media, and plays the public? No wonder
his sensible allies are as frightened as his foes.
Among those who do need to be
frightened but not paralyzed are people of color, Muslims, those whose sexual
preferences or other characteristics make them less than the newly-defined
mainstream of American people, which turns out to be the same as what was
Constitutionally-baked in as the mainstream: white men who profess the
Christian faith.
Those whose genes, pigmentation,
accent, faith, or preferences do not accord with that mainstream are having a
difficult time these days. A dear friend of mine — I have to say he’s white for
clarity and pertinence — told me that after the election his 15 year old
granddaughter went to school at Shaker Heights High, and that when the election
was brought up, the whole class dissolved into tears, including the teacher.
This story was not unique. We all have to acknowledge and deal with the fact
that nearly half of our fellow citizens pretty much said “f*** you” to half the
country because of their anger, pain, and resentment. Does it matter if they
were manipulated into voting the way they did?
Perhaps that 15-year-old girl,
along with her parents and classmates, should attend tonight’s town hall meeting
sponsored by the Cleveland Branch NAACP. The meeting will feature a
post-election conversation on the emotional impact of the election. A licensed
clinical psychologist, Dr. Natalie M. Whitlow, will be on hand to speak to the
immediate trauma of the reported results and the potential for long-term
damage. Dr. Whitlow told me yesterday that the consequences of anxiety,
post-traumatic stress, and other symptoms are real and should be dealt with
appropriately.
The meeting starts at 6:30pm
tonight at St. James A.M.E. Church, 8401 Cedar Ave. These meetings usually have
secured, free parking.
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