The Fall of Night
Well.
I went to bed at eleven, since I knew that staying up and refreshing Twitter would just ruin my mood without actually affecting anything. And though I didn't get much sleep, partially through worry and partially because that dastardly baby is at it again, I did get enough that I didn't hear the results until I woke up at 6 a.m.
Hindsight bias will inevitably corrupt our memories in the future, but I think it's important to remember that while the polls were wrong, they were consistent. They almost all showed Clinton winning, to a greater or lesser degree. Including the internal polling by both candidates. This was legitimately an upset, because for once there actually was a silent majority of white rural voters who turned to support Trump's platform.
I don't see how the Republican Party doesn't become an explicitly white supremacist party after this. After 2012, they had those roundtables and discussions and decided that they needed to appeal more to Latinos, Asians, and other growing minority groups. Then they picked a candidate that said we should build a wall, ban Muslim immigration, consistently insulted women, mocked the disabled...and won probably the greatest coup the Republican Party has had in a hundred years. They will conclude that covert racial appeals are no longer necessary and overt racism works, and they are almost certainly right. White women went for Trump by ten points, white men at 2 to 1.
And they also learned that voter suppression works too, and that whether they explicitly say they want to prevent black people from voting or not, as long as they get they keep their majority, well.
Assuming Trump has any intention of keeping his course, this is the end of the post-war economic order. I expect we'll default on our debt now, which will almost certainly kick off Great Depression 2.0, Now With Social Media. It's setting us on the course for the end of industrial civilization. And it has far more immediate effects on anyone who relies on Obamacare for their insurance, or on the marriage equality ruling for their marriage, or what little federal trans rights protections there are.
I saw this on Twitter earlier. It made me laugh, for a moment:
Today is also the 78th annniversary of Kristallnacht, which is the kind of dark joke I would roll my eyes at if I read it in a novel pic.twitter.com/3z3elsx9BY
- Esther Breger (@estherbreger) November 9, 2016
The Chinese government is already saying that this is the problem with democracy, and in despairing moments it's easy to agree. But there's no alternative, is there? And Clinton won the popular vote, so perhaps the problem is with American democracy. Enough brake points that a determined group can seize the levers of power and keep them despite the actually population of the demos. Or maybe a reminder that demos doesn't mean "the people," it means "the body of citizens" and quite a lot of Americans have a less-expansive view of what that should contain.
At the moment, that's all I have.
I went to bed at eleven, since I knew that staying up and refreshing Twitter would just ruin my mood without actually affecting anything. And though I didn't get much sleep, partially through worry and partially because that dastardly baby is at it again, I did get enough that I didn't hear the results until I woke up at 6 a.m.
Hindsight bias will inevitably corrupt our memories in the future, but I think it's important to remember that while the polls were wrong, they were consistent. They almost all showed Clinton winning, to a greater or lesser degree. Including the internal polling by both candidates. This was legitimately an upset, because for once there actually was a silent majority of white rural voters who turned to support Trump's platform.
I don't see how the Republican Party doesn't become an explicitly white supremacist party after this. After 2012, they had those roundtables and discussions and decided that they needed to appeal more to Latinos, Asians, and other growing minority groups. Then they picked a candidate that said we should build a wall, ban Muslim immigration, consistently insulted women, mocked the disabled...and won probably the greatest coup the Republican Party has had in a hundred years. They will conclude that covert racial appeals are no longer necessary and overt racism works, and they are almost certainly right. White women went for Trump by ten points, white men at 2 to 1.
And they also learned that voter suppression works too, and that whether they explicitly say they want to prevent black people from voting or not, as long as they get they keep their majority, well.
Assuming Trump has any intention of keeping his course, this is the end of the post-war economic order. I expect we'll default on our debt now, which will almost certainly kick off Great Depression 2.0, Now With Social Media. It's setting us on the course for the end of industrial civilization. And it has far more immediate effects on anyone who relies on Obamacare for their insurance, or on the marriage equality ruling for their marriage, or what little federal trans rights protections there are.
I saw this on Twitter earlier. It made me laugh, for a moment:
Today is also the 78th annniversary of Kristallnacht, which is the kind of dark joke I would roll my eyes at if I read it in a novel pic.twitter.com/3z3elsx9BY
- Esther Breger (@estherbreger) November 9, 2016
The Chinese government is already saying that this is the problem with democracy, and in despairing moments it's easy to agree. But there's no alternative, is there? And Clinton won the popular vote, so perhaps the problem is with American democracy. Enough brake points that a determined group can seize the levers of power and keep them despite the actually population of the demos. Or maybe a reminder that demos doesn't mean "the people," it means "the body of citizens" and quite a lot of Americans have a less-expansive view of what that should contain.
At the moment, that's all I have.