On “It’s not who we are”
Americans believe their own bullshit. A large faction, for example, believes the United States was founded under divine guidance as a nation of, by, and for Christians. Never mind that Christians built the country by ethnically cleansing indigenous populations and built its economy on the backs of enslaved Africans. We carry around pocket copies of the U.S. Constitution, wave our flags, brand ourselves Team Freedom, think reality TV is unscripted, and pretend professional wrestling is real. We’re simplistic and jingoistic like “great again.” It’s not just a right-wing behavior.
“We are the United States of America,” President Biden ends many speeches, so many that you know the rest. After particularly ugly episodes, politicians reflexively declare, this is “not who we are.” Biden’s closing always struck me as quaint, a little hoary, but sincere and well-meaning. “It’s not who we are” grates, another lie we tell ourselves while whistling past the graveyard the way Biden ceremoniously crosses himself with a grin.
On Tuesday, America proved the lie. We elected a pathological liar, an autocrat, a felon and worse, amoral, dishonest, and “fascist to the core.” His next most public lie will be when he places his hand on a Bible and swears before the world (again) to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States neither he nor his most ardent supporters believe in. The flag-humper will then set about wrecking both the Constitution and the country in a frenzy of vengeance. He will twist the law he doesn’t believe in to avoid prosecution, punish his enemies, and reward sycophants. I’d say reward friends except Donald Trump has none.
“With 51%, Trump is on track to win a majority of the popular vote,” writes David Kurtz, executive editor of Talking Points Memo. Without help from the quirky Electoral College system this time:
This is who we are. Not all of us, but a majority of us. It presents a stark picture of America in 2024, without sugarcoating or excuse. It makes it harder to fool yourself about the task at hand, which is an enormous cultural one more than a political one.
Donald Trump’s win isn’t the product of a constitutional quirk. It’s not the result of a poorly conceived or executed campaign by Kamala Harris. It’s not a messaging failure or a tactical error or a strategic blunder. Other broader dynamics at play – like a post-pandemic revulsion toward incumbents or an anti-inflation backlash – are too limited in their scope and specific in their focus to account for the choice that was made: Donald Trump. It would be a category error to ascribe our current predicament to a political failure.
If politics is merely a reflection of culture, then we get to see that reflection clearly and sharply as the sun comes up this morning. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.
Who are we kidding? Ourselves, over and over. Black women? Not so much, write Erica L. Green and Maya King in The New York Times on Trump’s reelection:
It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.
Michelle Goldberg concurs as she braces for a period of mourning before facing what’s ahead:
Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.
It’s too early, Kurtz writes, to attempt to rally people to action. And to what action, exactly? Pundits gonna pundit and blame-game. It’s what they’re paid for. The people who dish out bad advice will dish even more. They will blame Harris, Biden, “the Democrats,” college-educated elites, post-pandemic inflation. Gaza, etc. But what Black women know is that the deep divide in this country is more cultural than political or economic. In the end, there was nothing — no ad, no policy, no outreach — that could bridge it.
That said, so now what? Kurtz advises:
There is immediate and hard work to do in politics. The marginalized and the disenfranchised are always hurt first and most with the kind of upheaval that we expect to come, but it is worse this time because hurting them has been advertised as the point. People who have been doing their jobs under the rule of law and in support of democratic and civil society institutions – investigators, prosecutors, judges, the press, government workers, librarians, teachers, opposition party leaders – have been promised retribution. Protecting those under threat will be amongst the most noble work of the coming years.
The powers of federal officeholders, we have been told repeatedly and plainly, will be abused to exact revenge against perceived foes, which means anyone who presents a challenge to Trump and MAGA Republicans holding unbridled and absolute power. I take these promises at face value. Countering those efforts, upholding what’s left of the rule of law, fortifying what remains of the democratic system will be similarly noble work.
All of this work will be made infinitely more difficult if Trump is sworn in with Republicans controlling both chambers on Capitol Hill. While he has the Senate, the House may remain too close to call for several more days.
The challenge before us is enormous. It is not a challenge any of us signed up for. It’s been foisted upon us. The past decade has felt like a detour from the lives and aspirations we had hoped to have. I feel a special empathy for those who came of age in the 1960s at the peak of Great Society reforms and have spent their adults lives witnessing their erosion. Those of us with an act or two left, and especially those with their whole lives still to dedicate to making America better than she is presenting right now, owe it to those whose time is ending to summon our essential optimism, roll up our sleeves, and get to down to the hard work that our current predicament demands. That may sound like a rallying cry, but I’m also trying to convince myself.
The term “lizard brain” has fallen out of use since the aughts. It was a derogatory term for describing the appeal of demagogues like Trump and the visceral impulses they harness to build mass movements. They don’t appeal to people’s frontal lobes, to their policy preferences, but to their feelings and fight-or-flight instincts. Those instincts, born of millions of years of evolution, do not always offer evolutionary advantage. Hunters and terrorists use knowledge of their quarry’s instinctive behaviors to kill more of them.
The irony of the MAGA movement and the related Q-Anon cult is how believers see themselves as the real truth-seekers. It’s the rest of us who are sheep mindlessly going where and doing what we are told. But those Americans whose instincts told them to fear dark-skinned immigrants, women, and cultural change may be about to find out how led astray they’ve been by their guts, whether they like it or not. Not that any will admit it.
