Here’s a change of rules. There’s a change in the message.
This apparently had to happen to thwart Donald Trump and elect Kamala Harris as president on November 5, according to autopsy experts.
I’m sorry, but there is an elephant in the room. Policy? messaging? It goes much deeper.
We had a Republican candidate who campaigned by ticking all the ism boxes. He made a sturdy bet on the racism, white nationalism and toxic masculinity that have shaped his long history of misogynistic anti-feminism.
And voters even preferred that to the Democrat. Perhaps any Democrat. We don’t know if the outcome would have been different if Trump hadn’t faced a woman of color in this election.
This is not just a party problem. This is a nationality that exposes our majority identity.
Few will admit it, neither Republican voters who have embraced Trump’s message nor Democrats who dare not voice isms so as not to further discourage voters whose support they want in the next election.
We have to grapple with unsavory probabilities here.
This is who we are.
We are saying that voters simply preferred Trump’s recommendations to Harris’s. We say that Harris predicted weakness and Trump predicted strength.
We also refuse to acknowledge the deeply regressive impulses that underlie many of Trump’s recommendations, especially those on immigration. We also disagree that many attribute strength and weakness to gender, misunderstanding both true strength and weakness.
Yes, we heard Trump explicitly denigrate illegal immigrants as rapists and killers. We have heard his condescension towards protecting women, whether they want it or not. We were aware of his actions that turned Roe v. Wade upside down. We know about his affairs with authoritarians around the world. We decided that this election was about fixing an economy that really isn’t that broken. Voters bought into the fear that Trump is trafficking not only immigrants, who allegedly siphon tax dollars in exchange for benefits they have no chance of accessing, but also transgender people in bathrooms and locker rooms. We even knew about Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection, his criminal convictions and his still pending charges.
But people dismissed the news about Trump’s corruption, racism, anti-democratic goals and misogyny as politically correct whining.
Many are deluded about who and what Trump is. So we can all delude ourselves about who we are, the nation that elected him.
Fear: Democrats will learn the wrong lesson from Harris’ failed bid, refusing to acknowledge their own fault for not forcing President Joe Biden out of the race much sooner.
I fear the lesson they will learn is that the nation – men in particular – is simply not ready for a woman president, much less a woman of color.
“It’s too risky to let something like that happen again,” they will say – which is the same as tacitly admitting that this is who we are.
That’s right, this vote cannot be an expression of racism. After all, Trump was attractive a fair number of Latino and Black men at least Harris won the majority these voters.
The shift toward Trump may say more about these voters as men than about voters of color. We still have a national problem if a significant minority of men of color equate women with weakness.
Should we get carried away by these sentiments, ignore them before the next election, or address them in a patient and direct manner? That’s the question Democrats face.
If it’s a pander, voters of color may well start to believe that there’s really no difference between the major parties.
We won’t come back. This was Harris’s failed pitch to voters. But what if this vote sends a signal that we haven’t moved as far forward as we thought?
This is who we are.
The question moving into the future: Is this what we have to be?
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