I unearthed this blog post from early February, just as the Republican primary was kicking off. (I was looking to see if I have named a blog post in the past something to the effect of, "The Enemies Among Us," and that post was close enough, so I titled this blog post something different, and longer.) I was making fun of these people, living in America's hinterlands, overwhelmingly white, and most using dumb and racist logic when siding for their candidate in the primary.
Well, enough of them lined up behind Donald Trump, especially in Florida, North Carolina, and the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, to give him the win and glided path to loot the nation for his own personal fortune. Well, that and 25 years of unbridled smearing of Hillary Clinton's reputation, sexism, voter suppression efforts and the vagaries of the Electoral College (which, if I haven't said before, I'm not as gung ho to jettison as others).
I'm still trying to digest this loss, and to understand how Clinton could have been defeated, especially when the vast majority of polls had her winning. There are still leads to be chased down, especially the ones concerning James Comey, Russian meddling and the enabling by WikiLeaks. But possibly the real and main reason is, wait for it, racism.
I've been going back and forth with how much race, and stoking racial animosity, was a factor in Trump and the Republicans sweeping into power. I've had many people, some friends of mine, not only dispute but push back hard by my visceral feeling that most Trump voters are bigots. My counterargument was that, even though people might be able to prove that some Trump voters are not racist and did not vote out of racism, the fact that Trump said all this bigoted bullshit and they still voted for him makes their vote for him morally objectionable at best and, at worst, racists.
I am still vacillating in painting all these Trump voters with a broad brush. I mean, if I am fighting back at the notion that all Muslims should be considered terrorists and all Mexicans should be deported, do I have the right to regard Trump voters as a monolith like Republicans think Muslims and Mexicans are? (I could argue that the difference is that you have a nationality and a religion on one side and a mere aggregate of people who committed to the same person on the other, and therefore that's a very false equivalence -- you know, that argument holds a lot of water.) But then I see Charlie Pierce arguing that The Media has spent a lot of time reporting what Rural Americans felt about Campaign 2016, contrary to the notion that The Media and Democrats didn't listen to "Forgotten America." And here and here and here, I gather the strong inference that Pierce believes the real reason Trump won was because ... well, white people are racist. I may be drinking his Kool-Aid, but if he says so. ...
Look, this is such a global cavalcade of disaster that I could go down any number of rabbit holes in trying to figure out why this shit happened and think until I go mad. My bottom line holds, however. This grossly unqualified -- and gross -- thief is going to be The Leader Of The Free World, and he's racist and he used racist imagery (amongst other gross things) in order to win. People knew what he was saying, and they voted for him anyway. If they didn't agree with his racism, they weren't offended by it enough to vote against him, which is a dealbreaker with me and with many other right-minded folks.
And that's why I am kind of upset with people protesting and railing against Trump. That, of course, is necessary. But logic demands that if you are against Trump, you have to be against the people who voted for Trump. That's why I keep believing that we get the government we deserve. My fellow countrymen had the free will to vote for whoever they wanted as President, and they picked that fucking asshole. You not only have to go after the boss at the end of the level, but also every single goddamn enemy helping that boss throughout the level. This might mean fighting in the streets, but this country is already pretty divided. I don't think I'm paranoid; our enemies surround us. Well, not here in the Twin Cities, but you know what I mean.
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