All shock, but no awe.

America, at least the 25% of the electorate that voted in Donald Trump, did not express its better instincts.  Quite the reverse.  New Yorker editor David Remnick expressed the day-after dismay and sense of tragedy many of us feel in the starkest terms.  Frank Rich, as he always does, put it in clear perspective.  I cite them because they have said it better than I could, but also as examples of the many excellent post mortem pieces that have appeared in the last days.  (Isn’t “post mortem” the perfect term when we’re facing the probable death of so many positive initiatives.)  The problem is that we (Remnick, Rich and me in this post) are collectively talking to ourselves.  I live in Chapel Hill part of the liberal highly educated geographic Triangle bubble that in so many ways is totally cut off from, and out-of-tune with, what continues to be a very rural and conservative state.  You and I, like virtually all Americans of every stripe, essentially engage with and befriend (really and not in the Facebook sense) the like-minded.  In fact, we’re shocked, often outraged, by any in our circle who deviate from what we have set as the “norm” of group-think.  We dismissively characterize those glued to Fox News as narrow minded lemmings while being loyalty glued ourselves to the likes of NPR, New York Times and Washington Post.  This is not a value judgment of the media involved ¾ the NPR and Fox are in my view hardly equal ¾but rather an admission that we all live in our own self-congratulatory echo chambers.

Our elections, at least for those of us who vote, are evenly divided: currently 25% for Clinton, 25% for Trump.  Big surprise.  While it is probably too glib and simplistic to say so, each “side” has a different ¾ often vastly different ¾ world view and voice.  The media, often including the ones I follow so loyally, have often reacted to this numerically 50/50 split by slavishly giving “equal time” to each “side” which seems to assume moral equivalency.  That’s a fiction of course, on which is both misleading and even dishonest.  In its grossest terms during the campaign that meant often treating Clinton’s fact-grounded assertions and Trump’s documented lies as equal and, more damaging, as legitimate “news”.  We’re paying a high price for this kind of faux journalistic fairness.  The flip side of this, and speaking to our own echo chamber existence, is that we are not interacting or talking to those who live in what we see as an alternate universe to our own.  As Frank Rich wrote in his New York Magazine piece, “…nothing symbolized the culture gap of this election year more acutely than the stunt of a liberal Times columnist interviewing an “imaginary” Trump voter rather than a real one.”  Trump began his campaign talking about what we considered a mean spirited wall with Clinton, in contrast, increasingly speaking of bridges.  The irony is that we, on all sides, have built fortress-like virtual walls between “us” and “them” and have made little, if any, effort to build, much less cross, bridges.  There is no conversation, certainly no listening.  So we find ourselves blind sighted by Tuesday’s election results.  We were told over and over again, backed up by polls, that this could never be.  Right.

Donald Trump regularly campaigned in authoritarian and outrageous tones that were, to put it mildly, off putting and are now are nothing less than frightening.  Anyone who, like me, is a child of escapees from a brutal dictatorship can’t help feeling a sense of déjà vu.  At the very least, we see Trump as a modern day reincarnation of Huey Long or perhaps more to the modern point, the reemergence of the business tycoon turned Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi.  Neither are happy reassuring models.  Without doubt, some of those who supported him were characterized accurately by Remnick as people who buy into “…nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism”.  And Trump is truly a “…con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy.”  But we shouldn’t paint all of his supporters with that broad one-dimensional brush.  Nor are they all dumb.  Many may be misinformed but sadly that has become a pan-partisan characteristic.  Too many Americans across the board are disengaged and dangerously disinterested.

As I have written in earlier posts, many of those who supported and then voted for Trump are legitimately victims of a changing economic dynamic that includes globalism but perhaps more so automation, the necessity of reducing carbon output and being undereducated for our time.  Fact is, they have, beyond some lip service, been given far too little attention.  Lots of pious talk about the need to retrain but little done to make it happen.  While we may be rightly less sympathetic to the other side of their problem, it’s a fact that these largely white and often undereducated people, feel the life which they have been long promised and seen as their American entitlement is no longer.  Today they have to share not only with their own (which seems fair), but with the “other” whether they be of different skin color or national origin, people who figuratively or literally don’t speak their language.  Share their view or not ¾ which I don’t ¾ it is a real-life anxiety of real people.  Of course, it’s one that is not new or unique to our times.  It has been repeated often as America’s melting pot has expanded throughout our history.  As Ecclesiastes wrote long ago, “there is nothing new under the sun”.  True, but it doesn’t matter when it touches your life.

Wherever we stand on the political and social spectrum, there is one thing that probably all of us share in common.  We couldn’t wait for this election cycle to be over.  It was long and it was exceedingly ugly.  We all have some soul searching to do about both of those things and those of us who are Democrats have some real soul searching to do about our party.  Let’s be honest, we gleefully expected that to be the post-election problem of Republicans, but the shoe is now firmly on our collective foot.  Democrats, as has been pointed out in the wake of the ballot counting, took for granted constituencies whose changed situation or true needs were at best ignored and certainly were never addressed.  Surely a big part of Rust Belt’s problems stem from the systematic destruction of trade unions ¾ blame the   Republicans for that ¾ which decimated the middle class more than anything else.  But Democrats have often sat by watching it happen, taking union support but not fighting for its survival.  We also have a very thin and (even worse) aging bench.  The main two contenders for the presidential nomination in 2016 were Medicare qualified and one wasn’t even a Democrat. 

I have said and repeat here that Hillary Clinton was highly qualified, perhaps, as President Obama said, the most qualified candidate for the presidency in recent memory.  She is smart, tough and, in my view, right on most of the issues that face us.  I voted it “for her” with conviction and not “against him”, though it was hard not to do that as well.  She ran a generally content rich serious campaign, though some have suggested not as a “natural” campaigner.  She shined in the debates and delivered a polished and sometimes inspiring (at least in political terms) convention.  That said, I think it’s not unfair in retrospect to suggest that she was probably the wrong candidate for this time and this election.  She didn’t speak to what ailed Trump’s followers and, relative to the concerns of Bernie voters, never passed the optics smell test of being too aligned with Wall Street and easily earned (in her case speeches) big money.  While it never became the issue it was in 2008, the dynasty question always hung over her head.  Much of the burden she carried had to do with her sex, a very sad commentary on how far we still have to go.  But being a woman alone doesn’t explain it.  Back in early 2015 I wrote in a post about receiving mail headlined “are you ready for Hilary?”  In part because of the timing ¾ these campaigns go on far too long, a different subject ¾ my response was “not so much”.  I had mixed feelings about her, not the least the dynasty issue which played a significant role in supporting Obama over Hillary in ’08.

Perhaps discomfort is too strong a word, but I was reminded of it a few days before the vote in watching Vice President Biden speaking for her on the campaign trail.  He was compelling, not only in his case for Clinton which was strong, but in the way he made it.  I could not help thinking why not Joe, the title of a June 2015 post written when his potential candidacy was being actively discussed.  We’ll never know, but somehow he might have been the perfect baggage-free antidote to Trump in 2016.  No one is more plain spoken or carries it off with greater authenticity than Joe Biden.  His habit of sometimes speaking before he thinks exposes Trump’s so-called “candor” as an Emperor without Clothes.  It isn’t done for affect and it doesn’t depend on crass language.  Perhaps more important Biden is of the very people (if not their soured attitude) that once were the Democratic base and this year supported Trump.  He understands their problems including having to live within a modest budget, a man whose tax return’s only possible embarrassment lies in its humble numbers.  I’m not offering this as hindsight and I surely don’t know if Joe could have, would have, prevailed, but am not alone in posing the same question.

I won’t go into why Clinton lost in this post; others are doing that, many with better credentials and insights.  What can be said here is that the reasons are manifold and complex often differentiated depending on the voter.  The fact that she is held in such low esteem, albeit often very unfairly, by so many even in her own party can’t be discounted.  It certainly may have impacted turn out.  What I will say is that if we continue to avert our eyes, ears and minds from those who voted for Donald Trump, we do so at our own and the country’s great peril.  But that’s not all.  The years ahead are going to be tough and even brutal.  Sadly, that probably would have been the case even if Hillary had won, if for different reasons.  Different but also the same.  This polarization fostered in part by only talking to ourselves and more so by believing so emphatically in the echo conversation while shutting out any contrary view is killing us.  I think we will somehow survive, but only if we take a hard and honest look at the causes and the potential for self-destruction.  We better start doing something about it.   We have no choice in this time of shock without awe.

Reboot required.

The election, marked by a most deplorable and frightening campaign, is but weeks away.  Polls suggest Hillary Clinton is likely to be our next president.  If so, we will have collectively dodged a catastrophic bullet.  But let’s not start raising our celebratory glasses.  We should have no illusions about what’s happened here.  When it comes to the country’s future direction, much remains unresolved.  We will be left with fundamental questions not to mention deep, still not fully understood, scars.  I for one draw a direct line between Donald Trump and John McCain’s astounding selection of the highly unqualified opportunist Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008.  His unforgivable folly almost immediately gave way to the Tea Party and a total radicalization of the Republican party.  Some might argue that it all began with the so-called Reagan Revolution or even with Richard Nixon.  Those roots are undeniable, but it really wasn’t until eight years ago that things turned so absolutist partisan, or that one could even imagine a Donald Trump leading a national ticket.

The election notwithstanding, celebrations are unwarranted until we resolve what has been set in such poisonous motion.  So long as we refuse to engage with each other, to find some common ground, we are likely to see continued frustration and gridlock.  That is virtually guaranteed if the GOP retains control of Congress, especially the Senate.  In a time of global flux, the increasing threat of still denied and not fully addressed global warming and gaping economic disparity we will face continuing danger.  Nothing less than a total reboot will do.  That’s going to take both leadership and our collective will.  It won’t be easy, most especially since we’ve gotten so accustomed to taking sides and self-righteously proclaiming to always be in the right.

While we have heard less talk of it this election cycle, conventional wisdom has long held that there is some kind of predominate “middle” across the land.  If so, it hasn’t shown its face in quite a while.  There certainly seem to be few if any “middle” Republican office holders and, albeit perhaps less so, even among Democrats.  In fact, in this hyper-partisan time those of us who are active or who follow politics closely often show disdain for anyone who doesn’t hold absolute faith with either our liberal or conservative ideology.  Perhaps we are becoming more secular, but this kind of attitude mirrors the religious fundamentalism that claims for itself ownership of “the” truth.  That doesn’t lead anywhere good in either faith or politics.

Barack Obama came into office facing an overflowing plate ¾ Iraq, Afghanistan and an almost unprecedented excess driven recession.  Eight years later, despite considerable accomplishments, the Middle East remains in conflict and the residual effects of the downturn continue to impact on too many Americans.  Our assumed “can do” and “land of opportunity” ethos is in question and many citizens of all political stripes are both frustrated and angry.  The challenges facing a President Hillary Clinton may be somewhat different, but they are no less daunting.  In fact, I would argue that the state of our national psyche is so fragile in that in some ways, they may be greater today.  Given the limitations of any president to bring about substantial change or progress, she will have to make hard choices and set some priorities.  Addressing our challenges abroad and economic challenges at home are obviously on the to do list, but bringing about a reboot may be equally or even more important.

Much attention has been paid in recent weeks to the challenges facing the Republican Party in the face of its 2016 fracturing.  But let’s not forget Democrats have their own challenges evidenced by a very anemic 2016 presidential bench and the extraordinary response to independent Bernie Sanders candidacy.  That he properly opted for unity and campaigned for Clinton does not mean that what drove his insurgent campaign was not real or that what drove it will have gone the morning after.  Very many of his followers were and are young and the future ¾ theirs and ours ¾ depends on them and addressing their issues.  There is good reason that politicians have become suspect and business as usual has been so discredited across party lines.  The enthusiasm gap of this election dare not be ignored nor can the very fact that one of the two major parties could turn to such an extreme candidate.  That’s not a GOP problem, it’s an American problem.  We should read it as an ominous warning signal.  All is not well and we pretend that it is at our own great peril.

Is a seasoned senior pol like Hillary the right person to address these issues, to launch a credible reboot?  That remains to be seen of course, but she may turn out to be exactly the right agent.  Who better to self-judge, to understand that what we’ve been doing no longer works?  A Clinton led reboot could represent real reform, an affirmation that she is of the future rather than the past.  It would give special meaning to signal that she is not just a second Clinton or even Obama Administration, but one of the world that exists today and will be with us moving forward.  It’s a tall order to not merely think “out-of-the-box” but to act out of it as well.  She will be entering the presidency at a time of a messy and often dysfunctional country and world. 

Other countries question whether our time of leadership is at an end and many at home question what the nature of that leadership should be and where.  Among the many complications, the UK with whom we have always had that “special relationship” is in flux after the Brexit vote.  Israel our closest ally in the Near East still has not been able to make the peace it needs for survival as a Jewish state.  Isis remains a threat to stability complicating the neighborhood in which both Israelis and Palestinians live.  China is facing economic challenges and Russia is aggressively trying to reassert itself.  The list of challenges at home and abroad abound.  Where our desperately needed domestic reboot fits into that puzzle remains the yet to be answered question.  Other problems have a way of making their way to the front of the line, but she shouldn’t let that happen.  We need a reboot and we need it today not tomorrow.