Yes, It Is Us Vs. Them in America. That's What Trump Supporters
Voted For.
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The Divided States of
America. That’s who we are now.
It’s not who we needed to be and it’s the greatest tragedy of our
lifetimes that we are, but it’s an unpleasant
reality that we need to be clear-headed about in these moments so that we can
understand the path forward.
Throughout the postmortem of the Harris-Walz campaign, I’ve heard some
familiar critiques of the Democratic Presidential ticket from many media
members, left-leaning think pieces, and other Blue voters:
”They were out of touch with working Americans.”
”They didn’t acknowledge people’s financial pain.”
”They came across as elitist and out-of-touch.”
Nonsense.
That’s just simply not reality.
The entire Harris-Walz platform was erected on attention to and
care for working people:
tax cuts for the middle class.
lower prescription drug costs.
financial help for first-time home buyers.
incentives for small business startups.
support for adult caregivers of elderly parents.
affordable healthcare.
lower grocery prices.
student loan debt relief.
Their platform, their proposed policies, and the presentation of those
policies were all pitch-perfect. They did not err on those levels, regardless
of the narratives floated by Monday morning
quarterbacking pundits and politicians. The Dems offered a clear and easily
understandable alternative to what was being presented across the aisle.
No, the one mistake Kamala Harris and Tim Walz did make,
was that they underestimated the hearts of tens of millions of America’s
people.
They expected them to respond en masse to an open-hearted campaign of
hope, positivity, shared opportunity, and mutual respect.
They actually had the stupefying naivety to believe that a joyful
movement of interdependent fortunes and love for one another would move the
majority of this nation.
They spent three months passionately putting their chips down on
the high road and the better angels, imagining that an optimistic “there is no
them” message would bring the healing this nation has desperately needed since
November of 2016.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz confidently bet the house on unity—and they
lost.
They lost, because 77 million Americans chose division, they
ratified separation, they amen-ed exclusion; because despite their professions
of a love your neighbor faith and their America
First nationalistic fervor, they chose wars and walls and
tribalism.
For the entire presidential campaign, while Kamala Harris
unapologetically sang the hopeful refrain in, “the belief that we have so much
more in common than that which separates us", Donald Trump drew the sharp,
jagged battle lines of us and them:
the immigrants are poisoning this country.
public school teachers are polluting young people’s minds.
transgender people are peddling perversion.
the media is the enemy of this nation.
blue voters are dangerous and vile people.
He turned foreigners into monsters, LGBTQ people into pedophiles; he
fashioned ordinary human beings into a lawless, blood-thirsty legion of enemies
and adversaries for uninformed voters to be hysterically terrified by, so that
they would look at their disparate neighbors, not with compassion but contempt.
Trump’s campaign offered zero policies, no tangible ideas, no
unifying aspirations, no galvanizing agenda.
He simply dispensed hatred and fear, paraded lazy
stereotypes and tired caricatures— and that proved to be a winning strategy.
That’s why these days are as heartbreaking for the rest of us as they are: like
the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and like the Democratic Party, we realize unity
isn’t attractive anymore.
And in the wake of an election where 77 million of our
fellow Americans posture and pump their chests and fly strident middle fingers
to the rest of us as if they’ve defeated us—we just feel stupid.
We feel like idiots for believing that the majority was too
decent to buy Donald Trump’s cheap weaponizing of difference, his desperate
vilifying of the already-marginalized, his transparent middle school scare
tactics.
We watched Kamala Harris and Tim Walz articulately deliver
a message of empathy and collaboration; something appealing to the best of
America’s ideals, and regardless of the ways we want to analyze or spin or
parse it out, that message failed. They was a shock that we will never fully
recover from.
And so, yes, this nation is now
comprised of the us and the them in
stark, unmistakable clarity and that’s simply the tragic and sober truth.
And that’s not because we desired it at all, it’s because
77 million Americans made it absolutely clear: that’s exactly what they want
and that’s what they voted for.
And so we are going to have to
decide where we go from here.
