by Lowell
I’m not even going to attempt to do a full news roundup today, as I am just too filled with anger and worry for our country and the planet to simply return to routine. Just a few things that caught my eye this disastrous morning, more to get it out of my system a bit than anything else…
How Could We Have Let This Happen?: “But I also believe that a lack of anger—a lack of moral rage—is partially to blame for how we got here. Yes, the Trump supporters were plenty angry at the media, the Jews, the blacks, the immigrants, etc. But where was the anger directed toward this hateful candidate? Where was the anger at every last one of his supporters and enablers in the Republican Party? For a culture that so often appears tiresomely judgmental, the inability to make an instant, withering judgment about this monstrous man should be a mark of eternal shame.”
There’s no way around it: Donald Trump is going to be a disaster for the planet: “At worst, the entire arrangement could collapse, and we set out on a path for 4°C warming or more. These are decisions that will reverberate for thousands of years and affect hundreds of millions of people. We can’t easily undo the effects of all that extra carbon dioxide we keep putting into the air. Without drastic reductions in emissions (or possibly risky geoengineering), global temperatures will keep rising. The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica will keep melting. Once that process gets underway, we can’t reverse it. The seas will rise. South Florida will eventually vanish beneath the oceans. Megadroughts will become more likely in the Southwest. For generations and generations. This is the future of humanity. We’re at risk of departing from the stable climatic conditions that sustained civilization for thousands of years and lurching into the unknown. ”
Paul Krugman: Our Unknown Country: “There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label. I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible. I guess we have to pick ourselves up and try to find a way forward, but this has been a night of terrible revelations, and I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to feel quite a lot of despair.”
Ross Douthat: The Trump Era Dawns: “I retract none of the warnings that I issued about the likelihood of catastrophe and crisis on his watch. I fear the risks of a Trump presidency as I have feared nothing in our politics before. But he will be the president, thanks to a crude genius that identified all the weak spots in our parties and our political system and that spoke to a host of voters for whom that system promised at best a sustainable stagnation under the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite. So we must hope that he has the wit to be more than a wrecker, more than a demagogue, and that his crude genius can actually be turned, somehow, to the common good. And if that hope is dashed, we must find ways to resist him — all of us, right and left, in the new chapter of American history that has opened very unexpectedly tonight.”
The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished: “The few Democratic leaders who remain are going to say that it was just a bad note struck here or there, or the lazy Bernie voters who didn’t show up, or Jim Comey, or unfair media coverage of Clinton’s emails, to blame for this loss. I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue “wall.” They will say, just wait for Republicans to overreach. Then we’ll be fine. Don’t listen to any of this. Everything is not OK. This is not OK.”
Trump Won Because He Promised a Resurgent White Supremacy: “Fifty years after the black freedom movement forced the United States to honor its ideals, at least on paper, it’s clear this was premature. Like clockwork, white Americans embraced a man who promised a kind of supremacy. We haven’t left our long cycle of progress and backlash. We are still the country that produced George Wallace. We are still the country that killed Emmett Till… I see a man who empowered white nationalists and won. I see a man who demanded the removal of nonwhite immigrants and won. I see a man who pledged war crimes against foreign enemies and won. I see a man who empowers the likes of Rudy Giuliani and others who see blacks as potential criminals to control, not citizens to respect.”
President Trump: A colossal failure for democracy, and our terrifying new reality: “It’s impossible to overstate how colossal a fuck-up this is. At every level, across both parties, the media, pollsters — all the democratic institutions that are supposed to prevent something like this from happening, or at least warn us about it. Donald Trump, a candidate who ran an openly racist campaign, who is as proud a misogynist as you’ll find anywhere, who is manifestly ignorant of public policy, who is brusquely authoritarian, who has little respect or understanding of democratic norms, and who embodies every moral failing that’s supposed to disqualify a candidate from higher office, has apparently been elected the next president of the United States.”
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/hillary-clinton-gets-blindsided-by-change-again-how-the-white-house-and-so-much-more-was-lost/: “The American people, in our infinite wisdom, have chosen suicide. There is no less dramatic way of describing it….Just as [Hillary Clinton] was the wrong candidate to turn back the wave of change ushered in by Barack Obama in 2008, she was the wrong leader for this dark and angry time, the wrong person to try and keep the lid on all the anger roiling beneath the surface of the country and occasionally bursting through the surface like a Yellowstone geyser. That she will now go down in history as the candidate who lost the White House to a nugget of orange-flavored saltwater taffy who conned his way into the office and is as likely to loot the national treasury as restore any balance to it is such a painful humiliation and payback for a lifetime of service that one cannot even comprehend it. The mind just recoils.”
It’s now on America’s institutions — and the Republican Party — to check Donald Trump: “But our institutions are only as good as the people running them. Parties have strong incentives to back their president — that’s how Trump united the GOP after he became the nominee, and it’s how he’ll hold it together after he takes the White House. There’s been little evidence that Republicans — even the ones who clearly recognize Trump’s danger — are willing to risk electoral sanction to protect the country they profess to love.”
Oh, and here’s what our Raising Kaine/RK/Blue Virginia colleague Josh Chernila wrote this morning:
It’s important to understand just how deeply horrible this result is.
“The core of the GOP is the Ryan Budget. It is the “Devil’s Budget” and America has voted away its soul.
In essence, what Lakoff calls “The Public” is the millions of connections and investments that make up the common good and the moral idea that we are all in this together. What the Trump Administration will attempt and what it will seek to achieve is the obliteration of this moral worldview. It will violently punish diversity, of course, and stifle dissent, but it will do this in the service of the absolute right of the individual to do what it likes to enrich itself at the expense of anyone and everyone else.
91% of everything in the public sphere, that’s education, healthcare, roads, courts, parks, air… everything we share and that makes up american life other than police and the military will be eliminated, and the net effect as the middle class is destroyed is that the wealth and power of oligarchs will become absolute and irreversible.
By alienating working people everywhere, Democrats allowed every lever of power in America to fall to those who will destroy our every institution and freedom as Americans. This Demagogue stoked just enough fear of the elimination of rights and prosperity to get American voters to allow him to end our every right and prosperity.
That is Ryan’s budget, and we have a power mad President-Elect who will do everything he can to ensure the end of the soul of America.”
Democratic political activist Lamar White: “I think the first stage of grief is denial, right?
But before we all move through that stage, can someone- anyone- please explain how and why the polling was completely wrong? It was outside of the margin of error. Not just in one poll, but in almost every single poll, over the course of months, both in swing states and nationally. A few hours ago, the Trump campaign thought it’d take a miracle for them to win. I am trying to make sense of this, but nothing seems to add up. I have a very, very hard time believing that everyone’s polls were so off; it seems implausible to me, and I absolutely loathe conspiracy theories. PS: Just now, Vladimir Putin and the Russian Parliament sent out a warm note of congratulations to President-elect Trump.”
Great point by Coy Barefoot: “‘This is what happens. Junk magazines. Reality tv. Crap. crap, crap. Cut education. We asked for it.’ – — a friend of mine just texted me this” (My note: Yep, after years of this deluge of trash pouring into our homes, we are now officially an Idiocracy.)
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