Why Our Country Isn't F*cked

3 People who have Never Voted for Trump lay out the Case for Hope

By: Mark Johnson, Geoff Laughton, and Julian Adorney

On Tuesday, November 5th, Donald J. Trump won the presidential election. And, predictably, many Democrats have been acting like it's the end of the world.

Christina Applegate summed up the general tenor of the left's reaction in a tweet that, as of this writing, had amassed 173,000 likes.

"Why? Give me your reasons why????? My child is sobbing because her rights as a woman may be taken away. Why? And if you disagree , please unfollow me."

Author John Pavlovitz, in a tweet that racked up 57,000 likes within 9 hours, promised that, "I will never forgive my family members and former friends for voting for him. Never."

The consensus seems to be that Trump's election shows that our great nation is irredeemably racist, sexist, and hate-filled. As author Jill Filipovic claimed, "This election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America."

This reaction isn't unexpected: the same hopeless fear gripped many leftists when Trump won in 2016. Then, too, depression rates rose, mental health declined, and many patients suffered from what clinical psychologist Jennifer Panning called "Trump anxiety disorder." Now, as then, a significant part of the left is in a state of terror.

But we are here—as three people who didn't vote for Trump, who spilled much ink calling out his lies and character flaws—to say that this terror is not justified. Rather than fear, the rational response to this election is hope.

How can we say this? For one thing, the data just don't bear out the conclusion that our country is irredeemably patriarchal and white supremacist. Trump won just 55 percent of the white vote. He also won 45 percent of the Latino vote. He won 44 percent of female voters. Harris won white college graduates of every age.

If racism and sexism didn't drive Trump to electoral victory, what did? Class politics. Trump won voters with no college degree (54 percent). Contradicting breathless claims that the GOP is the party of the wealthy, he lost high-income voters (those earning $100,000 or more) to Harris. He won big with voters who said that the economy was "Not so good" (52 percent) or? "Poor" (86 percent) and voters who said that their family's financial situation was worse now than it was four years ago (80 percent). Inflation and an uneven economy seemed to hurt Harris more than her being a black woman.

Putting it all together, Trump's coalition looks less like the KKK and more like a broad, multi-ethnic working-class coalition—exactly the kind of coalition that Democrats once prided themselves on attracting.

Of course, Trump has said and done some despicable things. He has race-baited and bragged about sexually assaulting women. But we have to remember that very few of us vote for a candidate based on their worst characteristics. Exit polls asked voters which character attributes mattered most to them, and Trump scored well with people who value "the ability to lead" (65 percent) and the ability to "bring needed change" (73 percent). Given Harris' inability to articulate a positive vision for the country, this should come as no surprise. Ditto her ties to a regime characterized by high inflation, economic stagnation, and a crisis at the border. Perhaps Harris owes her loss more to these factors than to Trump's most incendiary comments.

At some point, leftists who insist that our country is irredeemably bigoted need to reckon with the fact that data shows the opposite. A recent poll from the bridge-building nonprofit Starts With Us asked Republicans how important they considered "A government that is representative of the people it serves." 87 percent of Republicans considered it "Extremely/Very important." 90 percent said the same about "Having mutual respect and compassion for each other despite our differences." 91 percent said that "The ability to learn from the past and keep working towards improving the future of the country" was "Extremely/Very important," which certainly gives the lie to the notion that Republicans just want to drag us all back to the 1950s. Even if Trump won every single mustache-twirling white supremacist and every single Pepe-frog-profile-pic Groyper in the entire country, the data suggest that that's just not a lot of people.

So, contrary to many of the loudest voices on X, the United States is not a racist and sexist hellhole. What should we do with this knowledge?

For one thing, we should let go of our fear. We should stop seeing our neighbor who voted for Trump as an existential threat, and start seeing her more accurately: as a fellow human being, with whom we may disagree about policy but who shares many of our deepest values and deepest concerns.

But letting go of our fear is also essential for getting our great nation back on track. Trump has done some terrible things; and if we are truly concerned for what he may do with the presidency, letting go of our fear will make us more able to stand up against his excesses and chart a positive course for the country.

On the macro level, fear clouds our ability to make positive change. Studies show that people who suffer from social anxiety are less likely to volunteer. The studies are correlative, not causal; but a causal connection makes sense. Fear eats up our energy. It burns through our reserves and leaves us with less mental and emotional bandwidth to serve others. It can make us see our fellow human as a threat rather as than someone to help. It can make us stay at home, huddled under a blanket and hiding from the world, instead of boldly wading into our communities and our nation to fix what is broken.

Fear can even cloud our senses. As Frank Herbert writes in Dune, "Fear is the mind-killer." Fear can narrow our perspective and stop us from accurately perceiving reality. It can twist our thoughts and how we see the world. It is the great lie that whispers in our ear that it is the great truth.?

Fear can make us blow minor issues out of proportion. When Trump said of Liz Cheney that, "She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?" his meaning was clear. In his crude way, he was calling her a chickenhawk. His meaning was plain from his very next sentence: "You know, they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying…let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy." It was, all things considered, a minor (and common) criticism.

But critic after critic accused Trump of wanting Cheney to face a firing squad. Roll Call's headline warned breathlessly that "Trump advocates 'nine barrels shooting at' Liz Cheney." Arizona's attorney general launched a full investigation into whether or not Trump's speech was a "death threat."?

These critics were determined to make a mountain out of a molehill. Their fear of Trump made them see his language through an apocalyptic lens.

But when we blow minor issues out of proportion, we have less energy to fight over actual mountains. When we insist that Trump's banalities are really an existential threat, we lose the credibility to call out actual existential threats to our great country (such as Trump trying to pressure Georgia's secretary of state into finding him 11,000 votes in 2021). The worst time to hallucinate the existence of wolves behind every rock and tree is when there are actual wolves in the forest. But too often, that's what our fear makes us do.

Fear inhibits our ability to make positive change on the micro level too. We all want our children to grow up to have better lives than we ourselves have lived, and many of us didn't vote for Trump because we didn't think he could give them that. But when we spend our days in terror, we do our children no favors. We become less present with them. That's partly because we doom scroll, our fear sending us down more and more rabbit holes of terrible situations that might possibly (or might not) unfold. But it's also because fear pulls us out of the present moment and into an imagined future. We cannot give our children the gift of our full attention when we have one eye on X wondering what terrible thing one of our political opponents might do next.

Finally, living in fear makes us miserable. It is a form of self-torture, as we imagine dozens of awful situations that might one day happen. We cannot cope with these scenarios, because they are not happening in the here and now; instead, our minds just perseverate on them, re-running the same nightmares over and over again. As Mark Twain famously said, "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened."

So we have a choice. We can choose to give into our fear by choosing to see our great country as irredeemably patriarchal and white supremacist, to see everything that Trump says or does in the most apocalyptic light, and to live in terror that our friends and neighbors voted for Trump because they fetishize the worst things he's ever done.

Or we can choose to see the world accurately. We can choose to look at the data and to let it guide our perception of the world. If we do that, we have before us the wonderful possibility of letting go of our fear and of grasping instead the bright and strong cord of hope that our country, like our neighbors who voted for Trump, is nobler and more virtuous than the doomsayers want us to believe.

For our part, we choose hope.