Between the group of euphoric highs and devastated lows, it is hard to decide who is more arrogant. Arrogant people fly higher and fall harder. No matter what the result, there was going to be a lot of VERY unhappy people. Meantime, stepping back, what did we learn? What happened that was not expected?
Some of us wondered: who are the real Americans? What do the silent majority really think and feel in their hearts. I think we found out. It turns out “average” Americans were not so easily manipulated by a well-oiled seemingly powerful Democratic party establishment, nor deterred by the alarming disarray of what remains of the Republican party. The attempt to wag the dog failed miserably.
It seems to me what we saw, very ironically, was a significant number of voters who were spooked and insulted by the chutzpah of the Democratic Party to try and get them to vote for someone as abysmally unprepared as Kamala Harris. So, ironically, they did not vote for Trump, they voted against Harris. A surprising number of Democratic voters crossed party lines, very few went the other way.
Stepping back from the widely accepted aberrant personality of the president elect, which much of media commentary was about, the voters in general were more concerned with the issues, and the lies surrounding them. The swing within minority groups, including among the Jews of America, was beyond the imagination of the Democratic party elites. So, very surprisingly, the election turned out not to be about Trump the toxic narcissist, or at least, certainly not only about him. Front and center was inflation (the elites told lower income folks they just imagined it), immigration, taxation, Israel and Ukraine. (As unpredictable as Trump might be, many shuddered at the thought of Harris tackling the intricacies and subtleties of foreign policy.)
And looking deeper it is possible to see the sparks of a fundamental ideological realignment in America. Neither of the two main parties is what they used to be, especially the Democrats whose current mix of transformative policy positions strikes “reasonable” Americans as very un-American in its arrogance and scope. Disillusionment with crazy, costly, irrational climate policy, high taxes and uncontrolled spending that evidently has not done much good for anyone, and more. And, the Republican party too, has moved far from the Party of Reagan toward an embrace of big brother government on some issues. The politicians are out of touch with the silent majority. One wonders how this will play out, what steps they will take to course correct and what changes to policy platforms this will bring. Are we at a pivotal moment?
I confess that some of this gives me a bit more hope than I had. It could have been much worse. Many voters did not vote for anyone for president, they voted against the alternative they feared and resented most. The swings in the votes for the Senate and the House suggest it was much more than Trump’s personality.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is the complete collapse of the Democratic party in this election. There are simply no redeeming results for them. Every metric that is remotely relevant went against them. Just how bad it was is expressed by the splash of red ink covering the entire map, with a few blue spaces peeking out here and there. And if you take out California, with its whopping 54 votes, the imbalance is mind blowing. And when we realize that much of California is populated by sleep-walking dreamers wondering around in their impenetrable bubble, completely out of touch with the rest of the country and with reality itself, this sharpens the contrast.
But now, we have to contend with a presidency of unpredictables, and we better hope, that, one way or another, it strikes the right balance that will push us closer to the real Americans.
