THE STATE OF THE UNION

I’ve written about this subject before, but in light of the results of the Presidential Election this month here in the United States and Donald Trump’s unprecedented, seditious attempts to undermine our trust in our democratic institutions and our confidence in our electoral process, together with his refusal to honor the most fundamental principal of our representative democracy, the peaceful and orderly transition of power, I believe the subject is well worth revisiting.

Joe Biden clearly won the election. He received the most votes ever received by a Presidential candidate in the history of this country – 79.8 million votes. He also won 306 Electoral College votes, which is the same number of Electoral College votes that Donald Trump won when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Trump called it “a mandate” even though he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes.

However, another 73.6 million Americans did vote for Donald Trump in this election. The vast majority of these Americans are NOT ignorant and they are NOT deplorable. In fact, a great many of them will admit that they don’t really like Donald Trump as a person. So, why did they vote for him? One word - FEAR

The people who voted for Donald Trump will tell you it was because the Democrats will raise their taxes; or the Democrats will take away their guns; or the Democrats will socialize health care, which will lead to communism; or the Democrats will make “political correctness” the law and take away their freedom of speech. But that’s not what they are really afraid of. Donald Trump has been feeding his supporters these lies so they could justify voting for him and not have to face the real, deep seated fear that is driving their thinking and their behavior.

The demographics show that the majority of the Americans who voted for Donald Trump this year are white, working class, Christians. What they actually fear , even though they will never admit it, even to themselves, is that people who are not like them – people of color, people with different religious beliefs, people with different sexual orientations, immigrants coming from different cultures who speak different languages – are going to gain power in this country and then they are going to do to the white folk what white folk have been doing to them for the past 500 years. Donald Trump tapped into this fear during his 2016 Presidential Campaign and he has been deliberately feeding, aggravating and exploiting this fear ever since in every imaginable way.

In the early 1970s, it was reported that the demographics of the United States were changing and a time would come, probably sometime in the early 21^st century, when white folk would no longer be the majority in this country. The change was labeled “The Browning of America”. As you might imagine, it prompted a great deal of heated discussion and wild speculation about how the country would react to such a population shift and the resulting shift in power. We haven’t quite reached that point, yet. However, in 2016, after we had elected a black man President of the United States - twice - and he served his two terms in office with competence and dignity that earned him worldwide respect, white folk suddenly realized that “The Browning of America” was not just some scholarly exercise in demographics, but was really happening and that they could actually lose the power and privilege they have always enjoyed. And they were terrified by that realization. Donald Trump’s election as President in 2016, and what we have been seeing since then, is the backlash that minority folk expected to see, back in the seventies, when we considered the population shift and shift in power forecast by “The Browning of America”.

To be fair, history gives some credence to the Trump supporters’ fear. How many times have we seen the lie of revolution - people rising up to challenge the power structure in a country in order to “change the system” then winding up with no real change and the leaders of the uprising just controlling the same system in the same way as the people they over threw? Fortunately, our revolution in 1776 is one of the few examples where that did not happen. We did change the system. We replaced a monarchy with a democratic republic and, despite the struggles and challenges we have faced, we have been steadily working toward “a more perfect union”, which has made us the envy and the leaders of the free world. This demographic shift in power is just another challenge that we need to struggle through. And we can struggle through it and come out of it “a more perfect union” just as we’ve done with all of the other challenges we’ve faced and overcome (i.e. slavery in 1862, women’s suffrage in 1920, FDR’s New Deal in 1933,  civil rights in 1964, voter rights in 1965, gay marriage in 2015, etc.).

Unfortunately, Donald Trump has taken over the Republican Party. The people who voted for Donald Trump this year voted for him, not for the Republican Party. All the other Republican politicians who continue to support and enable Mr. Trump obviously feel they need those Trump votes to stay in office and they have apparently decided that in order to keep their power and privilege they are more than willing to ignore their oath to defend the democratic principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States of American and essentially become Trump’s whores. So, they are on board with Donald Trump when he says he is going to Make American Great Again, which his supports understand means, “There will be no shift in power regardless of the demographics. We are going to take the country back to a time when white folk held all the power and everyone else knew and stayed in their place.” Trump supporters are OK with that. It calms their fear of retribution.

That’s racist thinking, obviously, but there is also a lot of self-preservation in there, as well, especially when white folk believe the people they have mistreated for centuries are going to do the same to them when the shoe is on the other foot. This fear may be unfounded, as was the fear of women voting, civil rights and gay marriage, but one’s perceptions are one’s reality, and this fear is going to have to be abated before we can expect these folk to trust those of us who are not afraid of a shift in power and work with us instead of against us for the common good. Unfortunately, the behavior we are seeing now, following the election of Joe Biden, from Donald Trump, the Republicans in Congress and their supporters, has never been seen before in this country; and we have had plenty of hotly contested elections. This is the behavior of desperate, terrified people who believe they are literally fighting for their lives; and they will not stop until someone stops them.

I am NOT suggesting that Republicans should abandon their party and become Democrats. On the contrary, I am urging Americans who voted for Donald Trump this year to recognize that he lost the election by a substantial margin. Stop supporting him and demand that the other Republicans you elected to public office stop supporting him. Stop listening to his lies and tolerating his tantrums and focus your efforts on taking control of the Republican Party away from Donald Trump so that it can return to its respected position as the party of Lincoln and Reagan and continue to represent your interests and values in a civil manner following the democratic, deliberative processes and the time honored traditions that have made the United States of America the great country that it has become over the past two centuries.

Democracy is not a winner-take-all game. It is real life and it is about inclusion and compromise.  Government in a democratic republic is not about the power of its leaders. It is about serving the needs of its citizens. Mick Jagger probably didn’t fully realize the significance of what he was saying when he sang, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.” That’s the best description I’ve ever heard of a functioning democracy and we can have that again here in the United States if we stop thinking about what we want all the time and start thinking about what we all need. Only then can we work together to try to find ways to make sure we all get what we need.

The alternative is we crash and burn as a country and EVERYBODY LOSES EVERYTHING.  

 

posted by Jose de Olivares @ 4:30 PM

 

 

.