Come January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the forty-seventh president of the United States. A grossly unfit, vulgar man, Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral college. Worse, Republicans took back the U.S. Senate and will likely continue to narrowly control the House of Representatives. With full knowledge of Trump’s racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, and criminal conduct, a majority of voting Americans voted him into office. Rational, thoughtful people saw Trump as unfit for office, but tens of millions of rural white working-class people and Latinos thought differently. Even women, knowing Trump is a sexual predator who routinely and frequently dehumanizes women, voted for him. We want to blame white Evangelicals for blessing the United States with a second term of Trump’s lunacy, but the fact is, Trump won virtually every demographic category that matters.
Kamala Harris had a hard road to walk in her attempt to defeat Donald Trump:
- Harris, largely an unknown candidate, had 100 days to mount an effective campaign. Trump has spent the past nine years, from the trip down the escalator to today, campaigning and promoting the MAGA/Trump brand.
- Harris refused to distance herself from Joe Biden, saying that there wasn’t anything she would do differently from President Joe Biden. Hooking her wagon to a President with a 40 percent approval rating was a bad idea.
- Harris is a woman. Some men won’t vote for a female candidate regardless of her party and policies.
- Harris is Black. Many Americans won’t vote for a Black candidate regardless of his or her party and policies.
- Both Harris and Tim Walz failed to adequately address the skeletons in their respective closets.
Harris made several mistakes that cost her votes.
First, Harris chose to ignore and distance herself from Israel’s war against the Palestinian people. Not allowing pro-Palestinians to speak at the Democratic Convention was a big mistake. Not supporting an Israeli arms embargo was a bad idea.
Second, Harris flip-flopped on numerous policies, abandoning the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and attempting to position herself as a centrist (as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton before her).
Third, Biden, Harris, and the Democratic Party as a whole, ignored the economic plight of working-class Americans, telling them that their struggles with inflation and never-ending price increases were not a big deal; and that the U.S. economy was booming. Democratic politicians and cable news pundits — especially on MSNBC — ignored the plight of the poor and working-class people, choosing instead to tout and preach up Bidenomics.
Fourth, Americans are tired of endless wars. The United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan was, by any measure, a debacle. Harris uttered not a word about the American war machine, the military-industrial complex, and runaway defense/security budgets. My God, Harris climbed in bed with Dick Cheney — a war criminal.
Fifth, Harris provided no comprehensive answer to the illegal immigration crisis at our southern border. Trump is right to point out we have an immigration problem even if his “answers” are racist and immoral.
I do not doubt that Trump will cause untold harm to our Republic and standing in the world. With Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as trusted advisors, it is likely the American people have hard times ahead. How Democrats respond remains to be seen. Personally, I am unsure of my continued support of the Democrats. I need time and distance before I decide who I want to support with my vote and money. As of today, I wonder if I should refocus my efforts on local/state issues. It’s been three presidential elections since the Democratic candidate for president was someone I voted for in the primary. Clinton, Biden, and Harris were not my first, second, or third candidates. I increasingly think that I have become too progressive/liberal for the Democratic Party.
An excerpt from Chris Hedges’ latest article perhaps says it best:
In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.
This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity, and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumped her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic, and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base – 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
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The American dream has become an American nightmare.
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care, and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness, and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger, and a sense of worthlessness.
“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim wrote. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social, and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.
All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment, and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.
We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.
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We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims, or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world, and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose, and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.
As you might surmise, I will have a lot more to say on these issues in the days/months/years that lie ahead. Today, I am depressed, filled with despair and anger towards millions of stupid Americans. In time, I will reorientate myself to the present reality. I am not ready to quit fighting, though I do plan to rethink my methodologies and support of the Democratic Party.
Let me conclude with a few words from Senator Bernie Sanders:
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.
Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.
Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.
Today, despite strong opposition from a majority of Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.
Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.
In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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