We The People

On November 8, the United States’ Presidential Election took place. To the shock and surprise of everyone, the Republican Party’s candidate, Donald J. Trump, was elected president. This wasn’t supposed to happen. All the polls, all the experts, even the candidates themselves were shocked by the outcome. Seen as an inept, crypto-fascist, racist, misogynist, and xenophobic bigot of the first order, Trump had presented himself as a buffoon, a clown, an outrageous fool whose campaign rhetoric was filled with abstract claims and random unfounded and hateful accusations, bullying and base name-calling, crude and sometimes obscene behavior of a sort that almost everyone on both sides of the political spectrum found horrifying and grotesque. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, representing the first woman ever to enjoy the nomination of a major political party, presented herself as a professional politician, tried to remain on point and specific concerning concrete issues; her campaign, though, was wracked with scandals and missteps, some past some current, that alarmed many in the electorate because they suggested corruption and breaches of national security that were both irresponsible and dangerous. She also came off as distant, cold, aloof and unrelated to the worries and concerns of a majority of the people. To say she lacked charisma would be an understatement. Nevertheless, the assumption was that her political “machine” was better funded, better organized, and would automatically draw in the Democratic Party’s base and usher her into the White House as the first female president, and one with a mandate to promote both social and international programs that would advance the progressive gains made by the outgoing administration of Barak Obama.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Clinton, who captured a majority of the popular vote, failed to gain enough electoral votes to defeat Trump, who rode to victory on a healthy majority of electoral votes, much to the horror of the electorate that, even now, cannot understand how it happened.
The Electoral College is a peculiarity of the American democratic system that few Americans understand and that all foreigners are utterly mystified by. It is byzantine in a way, and it was designed originally to prevent a popular but ineffective candidate from organizing a movement and seizing control of the government based on some temporary hysteria or public appeal, or fanatical programs that might destroy the entire democracy. It was put into place at the birth of the nation’s constitutional history, and even though it today seems outdated and too complex, even though many, many Americans on both sides of the political spectrum think it should be scrapped, it remains the method by which presidents are elected. It would take a Constitutional Amendment to change it, and as such a bill would stand almost no chance of being passed by Congress, particularly because it would require the support and sponsorship of the party that had most recently enjoyed the benefit of a victory because of it. In short, it is a strange and difficult to understand the American method of electing a president, but it decided this election, as it has decided all the elections in the past, in spite of the expressed Will of the People.
At the same time, that will could have been expressed in such numbers that it might have altered the outcome; it takes more than a narrow majority of the popular vote to do that. It requires much more. Clinton was unable to achieve that. Trump was. No one was more surprised than he, I’m sure, that he prevailed in the election. But so he has.
Some few weeks or so ago, I wrote a letter to a friend that elucidated the notion that there was a large part of the active American electorate that felt disenfranchised, marginalized, alienated. As I watched the campaign unfold, I kept hearing others and myself ask the question, "Who in his right mind could vote for Trump?" And the answer I came up with was that it was this vast number of mostly but by no means entirely white, working class Americans, who are honest, who pay taxes and abide by the law, who hold conservative values grounded in religious commitment, and who feel that no one speaks for them. They watched Clinton campaigning courting minority groups, women’s groups, speaking to issues that were concerning to specific areas of the population, but who largely ignored the vast majority of the electorate, many of which had supported Barack Obama, many of which had supported Bill Clinton. When she did speak to working class people, as she did in West Virginia, she forecast the end of their livelihood, advised them that they would have to re-educated themselves for a new economy, without regard for the fact that what they did for a living—coal mining in that instance--was all they knew and what resources they had were barely enough to sustain them. How, one wonders, would a middle-aged coal miner who lacked even a high school diploma, prepare to re-educate and retool for a high-tech industry? This question was asked by many in the rural areas of the country—farmers, ranchers, small business owners to supported agriculture—and in the cities—among factory workers, truck drivers, oil field workers, shop owners, even by school teachers and police and firemen; it was asked by all kinds of people whose income was stagnant and whose cost of living was always rising, as well. These people, while not always well educated or politically astute, struggle just to make ends meet, to rear up children to be good citizens and hold patriotic values in a country that seemed increasingly to tilt away from them, to uplift and uphold minority segments of the population who, while admittedly deserving, were simply not them. They looked at their lives and realized that things would never get better for them; they also realized that things would probably be no better for their progeny. I suggested that their unarticulated question, "Who Speaks For Me?" was answered by Donald Trump.
The answers he gave were probably lies, empty promises that had no currency of truth behind them, no factual basis, no realistic expectations of fulfillment. But they did sound right; they did sound good. And for people who face desperation and hopelessness as they look at their individual futures, they sounded better than the grim realities and forecasts of harder times to come promised by Clinton.
And so it has come to pass. The Will of the People has been expressed. I am as shocked and sickened as anyone who found a Trump presidency to be horrifying and unimaginable might be. I have the sense that we have entered a nightmare that will last a long, long time and will treat us to apocalyptic terrors we can only try to imagine.
Still, another prediction I made to the same friend was that the sun would rise the morning after the election, and so it did. The world continued to spin, and life continued to continue. There is no percentage in lamenting what might have been ("the saddest words of song and pen") had things been different, had Bernie Sanders been the candidate, had Jeb Bush been more forceful, had more money been raised and spent, had Comey kept his infernal mouth shut, had Hillary Clinton had the sense not to use a private email server, had Bill Clinton not lied under oath. Such lamentations and agonizing only pours salt into the wounds of those who feel this morning so wounded and tattered.
The question is what lies ahead. We can only try to guess. And our forecasts, however dire, must take into account the fact that about half this nation has asserted its right to be heard, and there's a lesson to be taken from that, as well. “We the People,” are the first words of the Constitution of the United States, possibly the most important document written by man in the modern age, certainly one of the most influential secular documents ever written, and one that has become a model for other governments and peoples around the world. It is not a perfect document, but it is flexible, malleable, and it provides for that phrase to be realized, for better or worse, as history marches inexorably onward.
We operate in a democracy, and as such that means the vicissitudes and caprices of the Will of the People, and it means that right does not always triumph or that sensible minds will not always prevail. The people have been wrong before. They will be wrong again. And somehow, they will be right again, as well. We can only accept the result of what's before us, and all will face the consequences, one way or another.
Like about half the country, I am grief-stricken and heart-broken, genuinely concerned about the future of my children, my grandchildren. I know that the important threats to their welfare, their lives, truly, hang in the balance. But this is not the time "to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings." Rather, it is the time to renew our commitment to the humane and charitable work that must be done on behalf of those who have over the years struggled so long and hard to achieve the goals we have thus far achieved, and to protect them as best we can, until a new champion rises, one who can capture our imagination once more and inspire the nation in a progressive and positive way, hopefully to guide us out of the darkness that, today, we enter.