If you're like anyone with an Internet connection or ears, you have been hearing a lot of outrage over Trump's victory. If you're like many people, you can't comprehend how this could ever have been possible. And if you're like a slightly smaller group of people, you figure it must have a lot to do with racism and xenophobia.
When you're dealing with near 50 million Americans, it is both incredibly elitist and foolish to assume that you can explain away motivations so dismissively and simply.
Although a minority of Trump voters are truly racist, misogynistic, etc., overwhelmingly they are just people who have had enough of elite atrocities. The truth is that this has been long coming, that it was as inevitable as the Brexit. It is the response you get to failed neoliberalist policies.
When did this start? Decades ago, at least. As Matt Stoller of the Atlantic explained in this article, it really kicked off with the weakening of the left that followed after Nixon was ousted, and bright young Democrats who did not understand financial evils took office:
"Indeed, a revolution had occurred. But the contours of that revolution would not be clear for decades. In 1974, young liberals did not perceive financial power as a threat, having grown up in a world where banks and big business were largely kept under control. It was the government—through Vietnam, Nixon, and executive power—that organized the political spectrum. By 1975, liberalism meant, as Carr put it, “where you were on issues like civil rights and the war in Vietnam.” With the exception of a few new members, like Miller and Waxman, suspicion of finance as a part of liberalism had vanished.
Over the next 40 years, this Democratic generation fundamentally altered American politics. They restructured “campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and congressional organization.” They took on domestic violence, homophobia, discrimination against the disabled, and sexual harassment. They jettisoned many racially and culturally authoritarian traditions. They produced Bill Clinton’s presidency directly, and in many ways, they shaped President Barack Obama’s.
The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century. This is not what the Watergate Babies intended when they dethroned Patman as chairman of the Banking Committee. But it helped lead them down that path. The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump."
If you're angry or worried that Trump won, you should be. But not at your fellow Americans who voted for Trump in 2016. Most of them didn't want Trump. They wanted anything but the horrors of a system that has utterly failed them, and Clinton is that system incarnate. Put blame where the blame lies: with every American who put up too little fuss at the increasing financial, moral, and every other kind of corruption of their government over decades. With people who supported establishment politicians like Clinton over those who spoke to the urgent need for revolutionary change like Sanders. With the corporations that sought control and with the politicians who let them. With democratic and republican assaults on citizens of the world, like Bush's Iraq and Obama's drone strikes and assassinations. With the broken system that enables it all. We need massive reform. We need revolution. Trump is a mere symptom of a much, much bigger problem.
This government cannot function when people are silent. The American public have failed to speak out sufficiently against government assaults on both them and foreigners. We have failed to protect incredibly important whistleblowers and government watchdogs like Chelsea Manning or John Kiriakou, thus passively contributing to the corruption of journalism. We have failed to adequately express outrage over income disparities ever-widening and government contribution to the 1%, to the death of hundreds of thousands of foreigners and Americans through a war based on lies and an awkward evacuation, and so many more things. We have been lazy. We, like the Watergate Babies who weren't thinking about corporate corruption, haven't been properly vigilant.
And now we are seeing the result. But I can't put it near as eloquently as Glenn Greenwald, the journalist chosen by Edward Snowden for his NSA leaks. Read this article for an eye-opening experience. Greenwald has laid it all out brilliantly.
Seriously, read it. Promoting Greenwald's article is why I wrote this article.
Your anger or worry is valid. But not against a supposedly idiotic or prejudiced 60 million people, and certainly not against those who chose to vote for neither the corporate millionaire nor the monstrous billionaire. Our division only allows this disgusting system to limp on. We shouldn't cry out against the election of one man or sit around waiting to vote in a more moderately corrupt and despicable human being. The system is flawed. Campaign finance reform, the addition of ranked choice voting, rolling back Citizens United, checking the unacceptable power expansion of the executive branch, blocking further atrocities like the TPP or Internet control, etc. -- we need enormous change. And we need to stop focusing on our differences and treating people with drastically different views on social life like second-class citizens, because ultimately we all want the same: government corruption to end and our lives to be better. It's time to come together and do our duty we have been neglecting as Americans for so long.
