I could wait a day or three and pepper this post with links to any number of articles that will soon appear in some of my favorite periodicals [edit: in the end I did just that] lamenting the results of yesterday's US presidential election. But I've got evoo to ship, groves to mow and brambles to clear in preparation for the second phase of our 2024 harvest, beginning Friday afternoon.
I could argue that the Electoral College is outdated or undemocratic [edit: except oops, looks like Trump also won the popular vote this time]. I could propose that the US Democratic Party is mired in infighting and contradiction: that, beginning with the Clinton and continuing with the Obama administrations, the party's ties to big money and to Wall Street alienated it from the middle class and working class constituencies that, in prior decades, were the core of its base, especially in the South and amongst Hispanics. I could blame the echo chambers of social media (on both sides) for rendering meaningful debate and dialog all but impossible where it matters most. Americans (and not just Americans) no longer get their news from the same channels. Soon it may be impossible to imagine what that was even like.
I'm disappointed, to put it mildly, that a convicted felon who faces a panoply of ongoing State and Federal lawsuits, including charges of inciting a violent insurrection against Congress, a billionaire who's bragged about paying no income tax and who has declared bankruptcy multiple times, a misogynist and serial liar, a man with contempt for institutions and alliances who enjoys cozying up to autocrats and dictators, is being re-elected as President of the United States. Strangely enough, the quote that has remained with me from all the news I've consumed over the last few hours is from a single Michigan voter who had voted Obama in 2012, sat out the 2016 and 2020 elections and voted Trump yesterday because of his pledge to eliminate taxes on overtime, saying "That's how I make most of my money."
Postscript, end of day: I wrote the above paragraphs this morning (Italian time). The race hadn't been called yet, but Trump had won North Carolina and Georgia and had a commanding lead in Michigan and Pennsylvania, so the outcome was pretty clear. The articles I refer to above have started to show up. I admired Susan Glasser's piece in The New Yorker for its sense of outrage, but it was The New York Times' Editorial Board's "America Makes a Perilous Choice" that really helped crystallize the shock and disbelief I've been feeling all day. I challenge any Trump voter, no matter his or her concerns or fears or dreams, to refute, point for point, the damning facts the Times editorial enumerates with relentless clarity. From said facts flow(ed) consequences: past, present and future. The Times rightly calls on all citizens, including those that will serve closest to Donald Trump in his upcoming Administration, to check his most egregious behavior and stop him from acting illegally. Nonetheless, given his record, I find it astounding that so many millions voted to return such a demonstrably irresponsible, malicious and erratic man to what is perhaps the most powerful office in the world.
Post-postscript, November 7: The result still feels deeply wrong of course, but I'd be remiss in not linking to this important rebuttal of the prevailing wailing (on the American left). The article appeared today as the "Lexington" column (a weekly comment on US affairs by senior editor James Bennet) of The Economist. It seems written for Susan Glasser (bless her) and the sense of betrayal she expressed in the first paragraph of the first piece I linked to in my postscript, above. It seems, too, written for folks like me. As hard as it is to believe that most of America has turned away from the party that was for decades the defender of the common man's rights and aspirations, that is what has happened. This piece in Politico offers an observation that the American "left" might reflect on. Its author, Jamie Dettmer writes, "In the years since [Ronald Reagan] the trend has been clear: The more progressive the Democrats become, the more blue-collar voters are turned off."
Final thoughts, November 9: All the same, plenty of people are freaked out while others are urging liberal-minded Americans to channel outrage into a no holds-barred opposition, all with good reason. Although, over the last few days, I've ceased to be astonished, I'm pretty concerned myself. Is Tuesday's result the last paroxysm of the slice of the US that can't deal with the thought of a multi-polar world? If so, it's a pretty fat slice. Like many Europeans (I'm a dual EU-US citizen) I'm looking to Germany to show some moxie. With timing that doesn't seem coincidental, Olaf Scholtz seems, in the immediate wake of the election, to have found his cojones. Not a moment too soon.
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