A reflection on the US election - a long road ahead...
A reflection on the election
The world has breathed a collective sigh of relief with the (imminent) departure of Donald Trump from the White House. He was an unexpected nightmare that we suffered through, and his knee is (mostly) off our collective necks now.
I was fortunate not to be in America and to have retired from the US Foreign Service before he came to office. The hell I went through trying to explain to the policies of Reagan and Bush to rational people overseas, and to deal with their incompetent political appointees, was enough, although both (and even Nixon) seem benign and intelligent compared to Trump. It is hard to understand how over 70 million Americans kept their faith in him. I say faith since there is no rational reason to believe such a psychopathic liar, but these are the same people who believe in God or dishonest evangelical preachers - also a stretch.
I think back 50 years to when my baby boomer generation was coming of age … I see images of the first Earth Day, sexual liberation, women’s lib, racial agitation, and protests against evils such as the Vietnam war, CIA coups, rapacious capitalism, and inequality. And remember George McGovern and the “Don’t blame me I’m from Massachusetts” bumper stickers (the only state he won)? He embodied the hopes of a new generation, but the US was far from ready for him.
Has it really been fifty years?! Aren’t our kids still fighting for the same things? What happened? Or better, what happened in America, since most European countries figured most of this out in half a century. How could smiley fools like Reagan, with his inequality creating supply side economics, manipulated dimwits like Bush, with his terror-creating “war on terror”, or nasty egomaniacs like Trump, set us back decades? It’s hard for those of us who grew up privileged in well-educated, cosmopolitan, largely non-religious families, to understand.
I had an awakening of sorts on how little I knew of the other America when I toured the mid-West in the band of a traveling circus in 1980. I saw tidy towns full of white Christians in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and elsewhere in the “heartland”. While there were more churches than bookshops, they did not seem like the hotbed of future Trumpian fanaticism. In fact, they bred the kinds of Republicans we can only dream of now, and people still believed that America had a constructive role to play in the world. But then, in 1980 they were not yet “under attack” from China, immigrants, blacks, gays, environmental activists, and other vaguely understood threats to their lifestyle.
The problem is that, in their eyes, these perceived threats will not go away but only grow. Frankly, if I were a poor, unemployed, aging white guy living in a trailer, I might feel the same fear and frustration and prefer Trump, guns, and oxycontin to empathizing with the “teeming masses yearning to breathe free”, blacks and Latinos competing for scarce jobs, or coastal denizens whose sex in indeterminate. Humor aside, the forgotten poor, less-educated whites do have valid concerns which have to be addressed. You cannot ignore or heckle Trump’s hard-core base of 30-40 million Americans if you want to improve our country or win elections.
Unfortunately, in the present environment there are no quick solutions. If the Senate remains Republican and Trump continues agitating his base, a huge stimulus package, like the one Obama used to clean up the last Republican mess (the financial crisis), will not be approved. And without funding Biden’s hands will be tied, including by right wing COVID-denying governors. Moreover, the pent up frustrations of America’s new Left, whose crime is to want to turn “our great country” into a socialist dictatorship like Sweden (!), will give fuel to Republicans to hold the Senate and possibly take the House in the 2022 mid-terms. And then Trump, who will set up a kind of a parallel presidency manipulating his sycophant senators, could run again in 2024. He could use the tactic that brought him to power in 2016, calling America a mess. He should know since he created the mess and will work hard over the next four years to mold it to his advantage.