A Black Letter
This is a Black Letter which I did not want to have to write. I wish I could say I am surprised at the outcome of yesterday's election, but in all honesty I had begun outlining something like this a week ago. I would say I am disappointed, but again that seems to imply a positive expectation of the electorate, which does not exist. Instead, I will simply say that I am disgusted. I know that is only one small word, and insufficient, but I am never going to be able to write out how I actually feel, both because I lack the skill and patience and most of all the energy, the wherewithal, especially now, but also because there are things I feel like saying that I do not permit myself to say.
But the feeling is not hard to define, even without adjectives. All I have to do is draw a comparison to another Tuesday night, eight years ago. By mid-evening on the west coast, it had become clear that things were not going well. At a certain point, my brother and I could no longer stand to watch the TV, so we absented ourselves to an empty Dairy Queen. When we had wrung all the cold comfort we could from wry, mirthless jesting, we returned home to find the balloons dropping on Trump’s first victory party, and the children’s chorale opening of You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Even at that moment, the Trump campaign’s talent and taste for artful mockery, rubbing salt in the wound, was clear.
For the last eight years, I have seen no end of this mockery. I admit that my impression has been skewed by my presence on Twitter, an increasingly vitriolic cesspool run into the ground by Trump’s wealthiest supporter. But the way in which people have treated others on there, before my eyes – and in many other contexts, too – is real. All I wanted then was for a reckoning, not for people to suffer, but to admit that they had been cruel and wrong and repent. And now it feels that will never come, in our lifetimes. I am confident that some of them, if they see this post, will immediately jump into the comments to mock me and jeer at my pain, because that is what motivates them, and what they like to do. Even now they are celebrating the ‘liberal tears,’ and citing that as what they wanted to vote for. It is beyond frustrating; but I don’t think the answer is to pretend to be all right, or to fake polite indifference, or to hide away like hermit crabs. We must live to spite the Devil.
I feel obligated to fret into this letter all manner of caveats about my own moral self-doubt, knowing myself to be overly motivated by pride in matters of politics, bitter, convicted of my unChristlikeness – and I have also done awful things, and I recognize that I write this partly in the wrong motive. I acknowledge it – but I do not want to silence myself because the magnitude of the outrage demands that we cry out over it.
What is especially hard about today is the fact that the electorate has actually moved toward Trump. Now, the writer Hannah Anderson made a good point a couple of hours ago, that there are proportional degrees of responsibility – Mitch McConnell’s decision to not hold Trump to account after January 6th was more consequential than any ordinary American’s vote, and the endorsements, the falling into line of the party-in-government signaled to longtime GOP voters that Trump was acceptable. I concur that these people are more responsible than some others. But what is also clear is that the voters who supported him have agency, and they made a choice. They are, one hopes, responsible adults, and as such they should not complain if I hold them responsible. Whole swathes of the Fourth Estate, the Punditeriat, the elected Democratic Party, many many faithful former Republicans who broke with Trump, have spent the last eight years bending over backwards to give these voters the benefit of the doubt, to sympathize with them, to try to understand them – and in the end, I feel that all that has been accomplished is to coddle and make excuses for them. One thing is clear: Trump was an unqualified, malicious, and ridiculous figure from the day he came down the escalator. Nine years have passed, in which this has only become more clear, and so I think today we can say the people are wholly without excuse. I don’t know the proportions of people’s motivations – what is ignorance (at this point difficult to excuse), what misguided selfishness, or willful malice – I only know that more than enough grace has been extended, and no repentance is in the offing. Enough then.
Political professionals are blaming Democrats for their messaging, their strategies, their keeping their head in a bubble. Much of this is sound political advice: clearly they do need to change tack. I’m not going to pretend they never made any missteps. But I am sick of people placing the blame for this on the Democrats, who at least tried to do the right thing, and not on the 51% of the electorate who should actually own the credit for what they have done. This is an indictment of that America. I know that people seem to think that Trump is somehow normal now. That has never been an acceptable view. We knew what he was in 2016, we know doubly so today, and I refuse to admit this type of politics to my view of normal and acceptable, any more than I did in 2016. Here I stand, here I remain.
That is the whole of my political advice, at this point, seeing as I clearly do not understand my country, and perhaps I no longer wish to understand it: however much they insist on it, for however many years to come, refuse to treat man, this movement, and this choice in the ballot box, as normal.
