Now We Broke the Supreme Court, Too

Photo Credit: Stephen R. Brown/Associated Press

In the year 2020, it seems that Murphy’s Law has become not merely an occasional nuisance but a binding norm. As norms continue to die violent deaths all around us, it almost seems logical that in such a relentlessly cruel year, this would be the one norm that sticks around. It is against this backdrop—a global pandemic, an economic crisis, a bitter and contemptuous presidential election—that we find ourselves with yet another empty seat on the Supreme Court. And we know just how hard it is to fill one of those these days.

The last time this happened, I wrote on this blog about the death of the United States Senate as a storied institution. In the wake of now-Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation, what was once heralded as “The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” had degenerated into the same cesspool of polarized squabbling that typifies the rest of our nation. And now, with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—an all-time legend on the Court—I fear we are on the cusp of irrevocably breaking what might already be the last institution standing. How did this happen?

The answer, at first glance, seems quite simple. It all started when Justice Antonin Scalia—another all-time legend—died in February 2016 and the Republican-controlled Senate refused to grant so much as a hearing to Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee for the seat. Things only degraded once President Donald Trump was elected and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did away with the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees so the Republicans could ram through their preferred candidate, now-Justice Neil Gorsuch. It was, in many ways, a stolen seat. Then came the mess surrounding Justice Kavanaugh, which I will not rehash here. These overtly political machinations made the notion of an impartial, nonpartisan Supreme Court seem like a sham. In the wake of Justice Ginsburg’s death, and the subsequent rush to replace her with staunch judicial conservative Amy Coney Barrett, that veneer of judicial comity seems all but gone. But is the answer really that clean? Did this process really only start four and a half years ago? Or should we look further into the past to find the roots of our highest court’s degradation? Well, of course we should, because problems this grave don’t merely arise over the course of a few years.

One common refrain I have heard among my more liberal friends in reaction to Justice Ginsburg’s passing is that it is profoundly unjust for the death of one 87-year-old woman to imperil the rights and liberties of entire classes of Americans—that any system of government which allows this to happen is fundamentally flawed. I would agree, if that were truly the system of government we were supposed to have. But here’s the thing: that’s not how it’s supposed to be. That’s not how our federal government was ever intended to operate. Our Constitution established the Supreme Court for fairly narrow purposes: to serve as the court of last resort on appeals in particularly important cases and to have original jurisdiction in niche areas like consular law. Indeed, in the Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton referred to the judiciary as the “least dangerous” branch because of how limited its reach was. “[T]he judiciary, from the nature of its functions,” he said, “will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.” It wasn’t until Marbury v. Madison in 1803 that the Court even had the power to review and invalidate laws—and that’s only because Chief Justice John Marshall (another absolute legend) straight-up invented it.

That power, while awesome indeed, exists nowhere in the text of our Constitution and was never intended to be the primary means by which the rights and liberties of everyday Americans are to be protected. The Constitution itself, by way of the Bill of Rights and through its careful enumeration of federal powers, was supposed to serve that function. When its failings became evident before and during the Civil War, we changed it. The Reconstruction Amendments even more forcefully guarded individual rights, this time against state government infringement as well, and gave the power to enforce those protections to Congress, not the courts.

So am I saying that Chief Justice Marshall broke the Supreme Court when he articulated his vision of judicial review? Of course not. Judicial review is a cornerstone of our unique form of government and when used responsibly is as powerful a protector of individual liberty as any mechanism in our Constitution. Judicial review has been the death knell of many horrendous laws—laws that segregated schools, prohibited interracial marriages, and protected government officials from public criticism. But it has also led to some equally horrendous outcomes—the Court has upheld laws allowing for the internment of Japanese Americans, the incarceration of individuals for minor drug crimes, and overturned key portions of laws allowing us to regulate our elections. And the effect of this power has had a distortionary effect on our political process. Momentous policy decisions that could have been more cleanly debated and resolved through our legislatures ended up at the Court instead. Time and time again, those who found their positions to be losers in the field of public debate—whether their positions were righteous or not—turned to the courts to achieve victory by other means. That’s how you end up with an environment where individual seats on the Supreme Court become important enough for political parties to steal them. 

Which brings me back to RBG. Policy goals achieved through the judicial process are inherently fragile and often fleeting. That’s because it’s easier to overturn a court decision than it is to repeal a law already on the books. Just look at Obamacare—the Republicans couldn’t overturn it when they had control of the Presidency, the House, and the Senate, but the Supreme Court could have destroyed it in one fell swoop back in 2012 if Chief Justice Roberts had changed his vote. That’s a lot of power for one guy to have. And that’s illustrative of the dangers inherent in leaving too much up to the whims of unelected judges. And that implicates other problems as well, namely that Supreme Court decisions are inherently undemocratic. When gravitational shifts in policy come from nine unelected geriatrics, there tends to be backlash. In fact, that was one of Justice Ginsburg’s main criticisms of the Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade. When seven unelected old white men—rightly or wrongly, that’s up to you to decide—summarily invalidated all abortion restrictions nationwide, it inspired significant blowback. (For my friends who, like me, support a woman’s right to choose, think instead of Citizens United and how that made you feel.) My point is not that one of these decisions was right and the other wrong, but that they made sweeping policy determinations with input from exactly zero American voters. Decisions that reach too far too fast, Justice Ginsburg said, don’t do much to truly serve the rights they protect. “Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped,” she said, “may prove unstable.”

And that is how we broke the Supreme Court. By allowing polarization to fester and poison the well of our legislatures, rendering Congress completely and totally unable to govern, we put our biggest questions of policy into the hands of an institution unable to adequately guard them against the backlash it inherently creates. Now, I know what a lot of you would say. You’d want to point out that when it comes to an inability and unwillingness to properly govern, there is one party in Congress that has been much worse than the other, especially of late. And you’d be entirely correct. I’m not going to stoop to my usual penchant for both-sides-ism this time. But my point still stands. We are a country divided, with two slices of the electorate that have now lost all respect for each other and have no inclination to look for any common ground. From that awful state we have elected legislators with no ability or desire to work together, solve problems, and govern. And as a necessary result of that impasse we find ourselves living under a system of government where the death of one 87-year-old woman has left everyday Americans fearing for their rights. But that’s not the Supreme Court’s fault. It’s ours.

Everyone is Losing the Coronavirus Culture War

I had a very enlightening conversation a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine, someone who is significantly to my left politically. We were talking about the same topics everyone is talking about these days: the coronavirus pandemic, our government’s response to it, and the ever-present specter of a reopening economy. But what made the conversation so enlightening was not that either of us learned anything new about public health or macroeconomics, or even that the two of us agreed that having to choose between the two was a false dichotomy. What was enlightening was that we, as two politically distinct individuals, could agree on anything at all when discussing these things.

As I struggle to take in the news each day (as I’m sure all of you do too), what worries me most is not the fact that the coronavirus has already killed more Americans than the flu did all of last year or that we still don’t fully understand how the virus operates on the human body. Rather, I am most frightened by the fact that America’s toxic political culture—in which we as a people are divided sharply along partisan lines, with each camp existing in a contained, parallel universe that operates with a different baseline of truth and reality than the other camp’s—has extended its cancer-like spread beyond purely political matters and now dictates how the American public is processing a literal global pandemic. This is, for painful lack of a better word, dangerously unhealthy.

We are not going to be able to recover easily—or perhaps ever—if we as a nation cannot agree on whether the virus is real, if it is dangerous, if the experts have our best interests at heart, and if we should want to minimize the loss of life from this worldwide threat. As a person who leans strongly libertarian in my politics, I sympathize with the reaction of many on the political right to the strict and pervasive lockdown orders issued by governors all over the country. It all happened so swiftly and with such rhetorical force, accompanied by constantly shifting projections, goals, and deadlines, with very little in the way of satisfying explanations. Such abrupt and heavy-handed state action is galling and offends basic conservative notions of autonomy, deliberation, and the consent of the governed. But none of that automatically means it was wrong, or that it is in our best interest to ignore it. Just because you have a philosophical objection to your governor using emergency powers to keep you out of restaurants and hair salons doesn’t mean you are doing what’s best for you, your children, and your neighbors by disobeying it. In fact, it might mean that there is an actual emergency—one so novel and unexpected that even people who are in the best position to understand it didn’t immediately know how to properly respond to it. And if that’s the case, then we as laypeople certainly don’t know what’s best.

And therein lies the dangerous assumption underlying so much of the anti-lockdown rhetoric. Those who want to rush to reopen America’s economy seem to think that medical experts (especially those working for the government) don’t really know what’s best for us or, if they do, that they don’t have the best interests of ordinary citizens at heart. Again, I am not devoid of sympathy with this view. Our “expert class” has betrayed us time and time again: they told us there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; they told us that the housing market was healthy in 2007; they told us Donald Trump could never be president. But when they’re telling you that by leaving your homes and assembling in crowded places you are increasing the spread of a deadly disease, do you want to take that risk and assume they’re wrong? Do you really want to believe that medical doctors have suddenly abandoned their oaths to do no harm? Are you truly willing to believe that our government has elected to ravage our nation’s economy to serve some elaborate hoax? Are you blind enough to dismiss as coincidence the fact that the only people downplaying the effects of the virus are those with a political incentive to do so?

But I’m not writing this post just to wag my finger at the discontents who want haircuts. I also take umbrage at my more liberal friends who dismiss concerns over the economic effects of the pandemic as a “conservative” talking point. This couldn’t be farther from the truth and only exacerbates our country’s destructive political divide. Gun-toting protesting man-children aside, voicing concern about the economy doesn’t mean you’re a domestic terrorist and certainly doesn’t mean you want to sacrifice grandma to the stock market. Indeed, as so many of my liberal friends were fond of pointing out before this crisis came around (but are notably silent on now), the economy is more than the stock market. (Indeed, we don't even need to send people back to work for stocks to rise.)The economy is your friend who drives for Uber to pay rent and your neighbor who works at a nail salon and your cousin who prefers to buy her gluten-free flour at Kroger instead of Whole Foods. Our economy is fueled by everyday Americans who work hard and spend their money at ballparks, movie theaters, and restaurants.

And these well-meaning government lockdowns have the mortifying potential to make all of those things disappear forever. Every day, I am filled with existential dread over the plight of the world-class restaurant scene in my adopted hometown. It is not an exaggeration for me to say that I very well may have already eaten at each of my favorite restaurants in Richmond for the last time. Businesses that rely on mass gatherings of people to generate paper-thin profit margins—live theatre and restaurants especially—simply cannot survive even a few more weeks of our current status quo. The Nordstrom where I used to work has already closed permanently. J. Crew filed for bankruptcy last week. All of these closures (and I assure you, there are a staggering amount yet to come) will mean lost jobs, lost tax revenue, and ruined livelihoods. Twenty million Americans lost their jobs in April. The jobless rate is approaching Great Depression levels. And we’re still in the early stages. The long-term effects will be catastrophic, and no sector of our economy will be spared. Smaller and less prestigious colleges and universities will close, movie viewing will become an exclusively home-based activity, and millions of jobs will simply never come back.

The worst part is that I don’t think enough people who are making policy decisions (and those who are so quick to condemn concerns about our economy) understand just how bad this will get if our current state of affairs continues for much longer. There will come a time when we must ask ourselves the coldly utilitarian question of which option will cause fewer deaths: keeping everyone in quarantine or opening things back up. This isn’t as simple as the train-track problem from your freshman ethics class; there are millions of people on both sides of the fork. And regardless of the answer, our government has a responsibility to spend whatever amount of money is necessary to minimize the number of shuttered businesses and lost jobs. Because no lockdown is worth it if there isn’t an economy to reopen once it’s over.

And so we find ourselves in a uniquely dangerous moment, facing disease, death, and worldwide economic depression at a time when we have no faith in the institutions that must help us through this crisis and no faith in our fellow Americans who must get through it with us. If we can’t find some way to step back, take a hard look around us, and realize that we really are in the same boat, that we really are at our best when we care about one another, and that we have to pull together and act as one nation to survive this, then we’re doomed. For some time now, the American people have been teetering on the edge of a cliff, inching ever closer to the status of a failed body politic. Turns out it might just be an invisible virus that gives us that last nudge into oblivion.

Blue Wave: Point Break

Well, here we are folks. Usually, I have quite a bit more to say after an election than before one, and I suspect this year will certainly be no exception. Nevertheless, I’ve been thinking particularly hard about this one, and that’s really saying something. This election is, in many ways, an enigma. A sizable amount of uncertainty still lingers as we pull into the final straightaway. Will there be a Blue Wave? Will the Republicans hold the Senate? Are the polls accurate? Is that Republican from Virginia’s 5^th District really into Bigfoot porn? Is it weird that I’ve probably lost the most sleep over that last question? Let’s tackle some of this. I’ll be brief—I want to save up some of my election-analysis-babble for the days after this all goes down. But here’s where my thoughts have been the past few weeks: Yes, I think there will be a sizable (but not tsunami-like) Blue Wave. Yes, I think the Democrats will take the House. No, I think they have almost no shot at taking the Senate. And yes, I think the polls are generally accurate—insofar as most races will be decided within the polls’ margins of error.

Take a look at the RealClearPolitics House election page. You’ll see that, at its core, the race for the House is actually quite close. Adding up all the “safe,” “likely,” and “lean,” seats for each party only separates the Democrats from the GOP by 5 seats. It’s when you look at those tossups that it becomes clear why the Dems are the odds-on favorites to take over: 29 of those 32 seats are currently in Republican hands. (This is to say nothing of the fact that 10 of the 16 “lean” Dem seats are currently in Republican hands.) Of those 29 tossups, nine are open, meaning there is no incumbent. This is usually the first sign of a wave election—members of the majority party see the writing on the wall and decide it’s time to retire or abandon ship. Republicans had a whopping 26 such retirements this year, a total that rises to an astonishing 39 if you count every Republican who left their seat to run for another office. Compare this with only 18 open Democratic seats, and it’s obvious which party had a disadvantage out of the gate.

But why, you ask, can there still be so much uncertainty? Well, first of all, read this nice little blurb by my idol Sean Trende if you want the expert’s take. And I’ll shamelessly parrot some of his points here, too. Basically, at least as it pertains to House races, we’re looking at polls that come disproportionately from one source—The New York Times/Siena College partnership. Do I think their polls are high-quality? Without question, but that’s not really the point. Any pollster, however prescient and scientific they may be, is still guessing as to what the electorate that shows up to vote is going to look like. If most of the polls we refer to are making the same guess, and that guess turns out to be even a few percentage points off, then we end up getting the whole thing wrong. That’s why it’s always good to look at polls in the aggregate.

Still, to my mind, the question isn’t really if the Democrats will take the House. It’s just a matter of how large their majority is going to be. Give them half of those tossups, and they have a razor-thin majority. Give them all 32, and they have a comfortable one. My guess—this is me going on record—is that the Democrats will probably win around two-thirds of those tossups. Generally, in a wave or wave-like election, there is a late break toward the winning party by undecided and independent voters. I remember there being a similar amount of polling uncertainty going into the 2014 midterms, only for there to be a massive break toward the Republicans as they took the Senate and expanded their House majority. Look for a healthy—but, again, not quite tsunami-like—break toward the Dems this next Tuesday. Keep in mind, too, that when this kind of break happens, the effect will be seen across all races, meaning the tide could spill over into some of those “lean” and even “likely” Republican seats. If you want an example, those of you watching this election from Virginia like me should take a look at the races in the 5^th, 7^th, and 2^nd Districts. If the 5^th goes blue, it’s a definite blue ripple. If the 7^th flips, it’s a wave. And if the 2^nd switches hands, we’re in full-on bloodbath mode. (The 10^th is a foregone conclusion already.)

As for the Senate, the Democrats have almost no hope, in spite of the fact that they will probably flip a seat, or even two. Their problem is that the map is really skewed in the GOP’s favor. In fact, it may just be the most unfair Senate map of all time. The Republicans have just 9 seats to defend, only one of which is in a state that voted for Hillary Clinton, while the Democrats are playing defense across a staggering 24 seats, 10 of which are in states that voted for Trump. Talk about a handicap. I’d say given these conditions and the current state of the polls, the Republicans will probably end up with 52 or 53 seats when all is said and done. I actually think Kyrsten Sinema will pull off the major feat of becoming the first Democrat to represent Arizona in the Senate in 30 years, but it won’t matter when the GOP picks up seats in North Dakota (almost certain) and Missouri (call it a hunch). The only other pickup opportunity the Democrats have is Dean Heller, the lone blue state Republican in Nevada. Call me crazy, but I see him eking out a win a la 2012. And never, never sleep on Lex Luthor…I mean, Rick Scott.

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to think of it as 'world optimization'." - Lex Luthor

 I could give you another meaty paragraph about governor’s races, but I’m already approaching 1100 words so I’ll just say this: the Democrats will make some sizable gains here. This will especially come into play come 2020, when we have our next census and state legislatures start drawing new Congressional districts (this is actually quite important, so don’t think I’m throwing this away because it doesn’t matter).

And now, for my endorsements: I’ll be voting for Tim Kaine for Senate for the second time, which blows my mind. He’s a solid Senator who represents the interests of my state well. He’s a liberal for sure, but a reasonable one with significant bipartisan appeal (Hillary chose him as her running mate for a reason). He’s also running against a carpetbagger, faux-neo-Confederate windbag who has precisely zero exciting ideas, so that helps my case too. I’ll also cast a ballot for my incumbent Congressman, Democrat Don McEachin, who similarly reflects the interests of his district. He has admirably served Richmond, the city I love, for over two decades and has been particularly active on environmental issues during his first term in the House. If there’s one area where I’ll let a Dem be a Dem, that’s a winner.

Last of all, I’ll give you some fun races to watch on Tuesday that I’ll be paying particular attention to:

California’s 39^th: can a female Korean immigrant keep the LA suburbs in Republican hands?

Florida’s 27^th: what’s more important in Miami—being a Democrat or being able to speak Spanish?

Utah’s 4^th: why oh why do the Democrats always have a shot in this blood-red district?

Virginia’s 7^th: you think felons have it hard? Dave Brat has ads attacking him on TV!

Georgia Governor: is it time for America’s first black woman governor?

Wisconsin Governor: remember Scott Walker? Yeah, me neither!

Arizona Senate: will the Grand Canyon State elect its first woman senator? (Actually yes, both candidates are women.)

Florida Senate: I told you not to sleep on Rick Scott

Kavanaugh and the Death Knell of American Institutions

Hello, reader (or readers, if I’m being especially optimistic). This is usually the time and place where I would go through the ritualistic motions of acknowledging that I haven’t written anything in a very long time, blame it on the toxic nature of our current political climate, and throw out some nasty adjectives to describe our president. I won’t bother you with that today; I’ve done it enough times and I’m quite sure anyone who knows me or has read any of my past missives knows exactly where I stand on contemporary American politics. So let’s just get to the point.

I’m pretty sure the United States Senate died this week. Mind you, what was once known as “The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” had been on life support since at least 2013, when then-Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option” to allow most executive branch nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority vote. But things have gone uniformly downhill from there, with the Merrick Garland stonewalling followed by current Majority Leader Mitch McConnell extending the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominees last year and now this.

You know what I’m talking about—the Kavanaugh Debacle. From Cory Booker’s “I am Spartacus” moment to Lindsey Graham’s Tyra-Banks-level screed, the confirmation hearings for retired Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement have been an epic display of partisan meltdown. We all already hate each other so much, and the raw tribalism fueling that hate has now spread, virus-like, across our entire federal government. First it was the House, then the Presidency, and now—thanks to Brett Kavanaugh and the Beach Week Ralph Club—it has reached the Senate, and through it, the Supreme Court. By my count, that leaves us with exactly zero governing institutions free of partisan taint. This is bad, folks. This is really bad.

I’d really rather not wade too deep into the matter of the accusations surrounding Judge Kavanaugh. In our current state of play, it’s more than a little tricky for a straight, white male to offer any kind of opinion on sexual assault without getting into some kind of trouble. This is especially true if what I have to say is something other than unequivocally believing Dr. Ford and categorically dismissing Judge Kavanaugh as a boorish, lying rapist. (Or, alternatively, I risk being branded a coward by the other side if I give Dr. Ford even one inch.) That, in and of itself, is a problem—and yet another symptom of our hyper-divided polity. As with everything else, essentially no room has been left for middle ground here, which is particularly troubling considering we are talking about an event that happened 35 years ago with almost no way to know definitively what actually occurred. So let me ask just this one question: is it really so bad that I believe that both Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh told the truth last week? Is it really impossible that Dr. Ford was sexually assaulted and remembers it vividly while her assailant was so drunk—or the event so insignificant in his adolescent eyes—that he doesn’t have any recollection of it whatsoever? Because I watched both her testimony and his and that’s what I saw.

I reject this kind of unconstructive and harmfully dichotomous reasoning (if it can even rightfully be called that). I don’t have to choose between a Christine Blasey Ford who is a paid agent of Democratic sabotage and a Brett Kavanaugh who is a calculated, professional perjurer. I do, however, agree with Ross Douthat and Frank Bruni at the New York Times that our country and our institutions would be best served if Judge Kavanaugh were removed from consideration, regardless of what happened that night three and a half decades ago. We deserve—no, we desperately need—to confirm a Supreme Court Justice who is at least seen as legitimate (if not necessarily agreeable) by both sides. And let’s be clear—these accusations have rendered Judge Kavanaugh illegitimate and his fiery, partisan testimony has disqualified him for this position. Of course, with Senators Collins and Manchin announcing yesterday that they will vote “yes” on Kavanaugh, his ascension to the high court seems all but assured. And that’s a damn shame, because now we’ll have a forever tainted Justice on our Supreme Court, one who could trigger a culture war Armageddon if he goes anywhere near Roe v. Wade.

So yes, I believe this represents the simultaneous death knell of the Senate and the Supreme Court. Whose fault is it? There’s plenty of blame to go around. As I mentioned earlier, Harry Reid got this train rolling (or, really, Bill Frist did when he first raised the specter of the nuclear option back in 2005). Mitch McConnell did nothing to help with his audacious roll of the dice on Merrick Garland and, later, Neil Gorsuch. And now we have Dianne Feinstein entering the fray with a nasty, below-the-belt blow of her own. Yes, as I’ve said, I find Dr. Ford to be a credible witness and I believe every word she said, but I don’t think I will ever be convinced that the timing of Senator Feinstein’s release of the allegations was anything other than sheer political calculation. She held onto that letter from Dr. Ford for weeks, only to make its contents known at precisely the moment at which Republicans would be unable to withdraw Kavanaugh from consideration and put forward another nominee before the midterm elections. It looks dirty, underhanded, and quite frankly horribly disrespectful toward Dr. Ford. Did the Republicans deserve it after what they did to Merrick Garland? Probably. But the Senate is supposed to be above that kind of eye-for-an-eye pettiness and Senator Feinstein should be ashamed for handling a woman’s courageous account of sexual assault the way she did, whatever her reasons were.

But, if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m having a great deal of trouble working myself up into my usual “the Democrats have been no better than the Republicans in the way they’ve handled this” fervor. I’m just so tired of all of this—the anger, the vitriol, the Facebook newsfeed littered with arguments and memes spreading misinformation to literally thousands of people at a time. And I hate that our governing institutions have sunk to that same low. If we can’t respect each other and we can’t trust the governing institutions that have kept our country standing for nearly two and a half centuries, then what’s left? I don’t know, but I do know that when Brett Kavanaugh gets confirmed later today, it’ll only make things worse.

Well, that’s it for today’s uplifting rhetoric. Here are a couple of quality links if you want some further reading on Kavanaugh: from Rod Dreher at The American Conservative; Caitlin Flanagan at The Atlantic; and the aforementioned conversation between Ross Douthat and Frank Bruni at The New York Times. And let’s not forget my good friend CJ Bergin’s sober analysis via viral Facebook post.

Stay tuned for my next post (yes, I’m actually planning another one) in which I endorse a couple Democrats (gasp!) and talk about the forthcoming electoral bloodbath next month.

All the President’s (Klans)men

I have mentioned many times before in this blog that I find precious little joy in writing during the Age of Trump. I’m not honestly sure, but I feel as if I’ve opened up every blog post in recent memory with some variation of that line. I’ve spent the last two years well outside of my comfort zone—I’ve trashed the Republican Party, condemned the hostile takeover of said party by Trump and his fascist goons, and last month I even found myself discussing the merits of tweeting a WWE gif that shows the President of the United States punching someone with the CNN logo for a face. This is madness; it is the world turned upside down. And now, as I desperately look anywhere for a reprieve, I find myself called upon to tackle the easy, always-enjoyable topic of white supremacy. Yes, folks, that was sarcasm.

I’m quite sure I don’t have to explain to any of you why I’m writing about such a grisly topic this week. The events in Charlottesville earlier this month were a stark distillation of our hyper-polarized nation at its very worst—a heinous display of racial animus, violent unrest, and pure, undisguised hate. This wasn’t just harmless picketing and chanting; it was terrorism. It left a dozen and a half people seriously injured and unthinkably cost an American citizen her life. I am shocked and ashamed that an act of such blatant retrograde bigotry occurred merely an hour away from the city I call home. But, as I’ve said, we’re in the Age of Trump.

And how does Trump respond to a gathering of violent white supremacists in his backyard? By blaming violence “on both sides,” only condemning white supremacists a few days later, and then giving a press conference doubling down on his initial impulse to distract us from homegrown race terrorists by pointing fingers at the “antifa” (anti-fascist) counter-protestors. He even went so far as to say there were “very fine people” on both sides, which presumably implies there are some “very fine” race terrorists out there. This is insane, unpresidential, and mind-boggling in its obtuseness. Here we see a certain President of the United States—a man who has been consistently dogged by accusations of racism, fascism, and xenophobia—given a golden opportunity to speak out against all of the unsavory elements with which he finds himself associated, and what did he do? He took the silver platter that had been handed to him and he took a giant, steaming, metaphorical shit on it. He spat in the eyes of anyone (read: most everyone) who is offended or outright harmed by the behavior of overt white supremacists. He spurned the memory of the American citizen who was murdered by one of them. Make no mistake: if it hadn’t been clear already, this man is not worthy of any American’s respect. He is a fraud, a worm, a charlatan of the lowest order, a speck of filth more debased than the dirt beneath the soles of my shoes. That’s what a good condemnation looks like.

But that’s not even what upsets me the most. What truly baffles me is that I find various denizens of the American Right—bloggers, journalists, Facebook commenters, friends—following Trump’s lead in steering the discussion about Charlottesville away from white supremacists and toward vague Black Lives Matter and antifa bogeymen. Not only is this a false equivalence (a darling term of the American Left that I use with just a little bit of vomit in my mouth), it is completely tone-deaf and not worth anyone’s time. And that should be a no-brainer. When a group of avowed white supremacists stage a protest, turn violent, and plow a car into an innocent American citizen, I find myself caring very little what the “other side” was doing to incite them. If some of my cohabitants on the Right want to have a discussion about the tactics used by BLM and antifa and whether or not they are misguided, that’s all well and good. It’s a discussion I’m very willing to have, but for god’s sake, not now. That particular topic has almost nothing to do with what happened in Charlottesville. And attempting to distract from a very real act of domestic, white supremacist terrorism is not only harmful, but constitutes an act of complicity in that terrorism. The first, second, and third thoughts we should all be having as reasonable human beings in response to these events are: white supremacy and terrorism are bad. This one’s easy, folks.

I increasingly fear, though, that this is what being a part of the American Right has come to be. These days, we find ourselves called upon to defend white supremacist terrorists. They are, after all, a vocal and important part of President Trump’s base. What’s more, it seems they have hijacked the ongoing discussion regarding Southern heritage as well. (Let’s not forget the rally in Charlottesville was organized in response to the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.) As someone who has defended both the Republican Party’s small-government platform and the right of Southerners to preserve elements of their Confederate heritage, I despair at both of these developments. It is quite impossible for me to stand by a party and a cause that are both in bed with the scum of the Earth.

I’ve written before about the relationship between Confederate memorabilia and race terrorists. In “We Are Not Dylan Roof,” I defended Southern heritage as a product of regional pride, not racist hate. I did, however, ask this question: “Is there perhaps some unseen font of particularly vile racism that lurks somewhere in American society—somewhere where Dylann Roof was able to tap into it and feed his own demented hatred?” While I thought then that the answer to that question might very well be yes, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it would be confirmed in such stark and blatant terms a mere two years later. In a weird way, maybe I owe President Trump a thank you for bringing this scum to light. They have helped me realize that even though a well-intentioned Southerner like myself can admire a statue of Robert E. Lee without harboring any resentment toward by brothers and sisters of color, this doesn’t mean we might not be better off without public memorials of past sins. And maybe I was a fool in the first place for believing that if I defended the display of monuments to men who fought to own slaves, I wasn’t throwing my lot in with a bunch of full-throated racists and bigots. Obviously I was always aware that a small, unsavory minority of the American Right consisted of this ilk, but I never thought I’d live to see a time where they were brought enough into the mainstream to be vocal and accepted as legitimate. Well, if that’s truly the case—if defending my old party and my heritage puts me in bed with open white supremacists—then I’m out.

Postscript: I know it probably seems downright vapid for me to act surprised that I’m being joined by racists in defending statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, but I promise you I’m going for something more nuanced than that. In my view, even if Confederate statues were constructed by white supremacists one hundred or so years ago, a contemporary defense of Confederate statues would ideally come from a sense of regional pride and historical inclusion, not white supremacy. Perhaps I was naïve in thinking that most of my allies felt the same way. Maybe most of them do feel this way, but that’s irrelevant if they’re going to waste their time obfuscating about what happened in Charlottesville. 

CNN is Fake News

First of all, please let me explain. To anyone who has spoken to me about politics more than once (or, really, at all), my general loathing of the news media should be quite obvious. I imagine the majority of my posts on this blog would make that fact rather self-evident as well. Nevertheless, I should probably endeavor to offer some sort of justification if I’m going to do something as inflammatory as slapping CNN with the Trumpian epithet of “fake news.” And don’t fret, friends—I think I can do it without actually defending the President.

I’ll start off by making one thing perfectly clear: I unequivocally believe that it is unbecoming of the office of President of the United States to tweet personal attacks, unsubstantiated claims, or late-night rants in the manner preferred by our current commander-in-chief. From the nonsense of covfefe to the boorishness of his middle-school-level attacks on Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, our President has put on a master class in how to debase himself and his office before the eyes of the internet (read: the world). But just because President Trump’s tweets are unprecedented and wholly unprofessional does not mean that they should automatically dominate our 24-hour news cycle. This is where the mainstream media and I apparently disagree.

Cable news in particular has made a veritable sport of breathlessly covering President Trump’s Twitter misadventures, with each major network vying to outdo the others in bumping more important storylines in favor of a roundtable discussion regarding POTUS’s most recent 140-character outburst. Never mind Senate Republicans’ ongoing efforts to complete a Congressional repeal of the Affordable Care Act or North Korea’s recent test of an ICBM theoretically capable of reaching Alaska. What really matters is keeping a daily list of everything he tweeted, retweeted, and didn’t tweet at all.  

The circus reached a fever pitch last week when President Trump tweeted a gif of an old Wrestlemania clip that showed him punching an individual whose face had been replaced with the CNN logo. Now, I must admit there are some newsworthy elements here—a President who not only has been on Wrestlemania but also decides to use that footage as ammunition in his ongoing feud with a major news network is certainly worth mentioning (and mind-bogglingly bizarre). The adult thing to do, though, is to point out the obvious fact that such behavior is beneath the POTUS and then move on to the real stories. But CNN, of course, would rather take the bait, stoop to Trump’s level, and keep the feud going strong. What does that entail? It entails things like ambushing a freshman Congressman from Virginia into discussing the merits of the tweet, the newsworthiness of tweets in general, and the adequacy of the condemnations of said tweet by Republican leaders in Congress before he is permitted to discuss anything of substance. Scott Taylor (R-VA), the Congressman in question, sits on the powerful Appropriations Subcommittees on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security, but really what he needs to be talking about is an animated gif. As Congressman Taylor himself points out, “You guys are getting played, man.”

CNN, and the media in general, have gone a lot farther than merely attacking the President for hurting their feelings, though. They feverishly worked to spin the tweet as encouraging violence against the press or, as Robert Reich contended in The Guardian, an attack on democracy itself. This is overblown and patently absurd. Trump’s CNN tweet certainly further diminishes his credibility and demonstrates an astonishing lack of judgment, but that’s about as far as any reasonable person can interpret that gif. While I’m sure there is someone somewhere in this country who could watch Donald Trump punch someone with a CNN logo for a head and become inspired to physically harm a journalist, that person does not represent the average (or even below-average) American. This hypothetical person is a dangerous idiot and would have been a dangerous idiot in the absence of this particular tweet.

But this saga doesn’t stop there. CNN took it upon themselves to track down the Redditor who supposedly created the gif, made him repent for his sins (he apparently posted vile anti-Semitic and racist material in the past), and then showed mercy by deciding not to release his identity to the public. This is what CNN, the Holy Arbiter of Truth, had to say about HanA**holeSolo, the offending troll:

CNN is not publishing ‘HanA**holeSolo’s’ name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

Holy cow. This is what is looks like when a media giant abuses its power and thought-polices an individual American citizen. Now, don’t get me wrong—I agree with The Federalist’s David Harsanyi in thinking that this troll deserves no sympathy and that CNN would have been wiser to just release the guy’s name instead of going full Spanish Inquisition on him. After all, what CNN has done here is reveal that if you promise not to offend them anymore, they can protect you. That statement is, as Harsanyi says, “a threat” implying that if HanA**holeSolo were to go back on his repentance, “the network reserves the right to put him in ‘danger.’” That kind of behavior is, I daresay, Trump-like. And building your entire news cycle around a juvenile presidential tweet and an anonymous, bigoted Redditor is—wait for it—fake news.

UPDATE 7/11/17: Maybe this scandal involving Donald Trump Jr.’s emails will give CNN something of real substance to talk about. One can only hope.

Winning was easy, young man…

A good friend of mine asked me a few days ago if I thought it might have been better for the Republican Party’s long-term prospects if Hillary Clinton had been elected president last year. I was very much surprised to find that my immediate impulse was to pay the expected partisan lip service to the utter irredeemable nature of a Clinton presidency; to deny that anything good could possibly have come of it. My shock was made all the more real by my realization that just about two years ago, I wrote in this blog that it would require not one, but two terms of Clinton in the White House to turn the Republican Party around. What’s craziest of all, though, is that when I examined my feelings on that question further, I became absolutely convinced that I really was wrong those two (long) years ago. Why? Because the Republican majorities in Congress have, in a very short time, demonstrated that no election is going to teach them how to actually govern. And even if they somehow got their act together, the Democrats wouldn’t just decline to help them; they would actively try to stop the GOP in its tracks. (And I don’t necessarily mean that last statement as a condemnation.)

It all started with what I consider to be the GOP’s biggest blunder so far in the Trump Era: the decision by leaders in Congress to make fast-tracking an Obamacare repeal their first order of business in the new session. Never mind that the replacement bill was under-baked, unworkable, unsatisfactory, and wholly despised by everyone everywhere—the real mistake was in lining healthcare up as the first legislative priority and then sprinting toward a vote without so much as a water break. It truly astounds me that a party that had a front-row seat to watch their opponents make the same mistake back in 2009 would turn around and repeat it almost exactly upon returning to power. Let’s face it—the Democrats paid a huge price for their decision to make healthcare reform their first priority after President Obama came into office. They got what they wanted, but successive drubbings in 2010, 2014, and 2016 have reduced their party’s strength at all levels of government to historic lows. On paper, this is both a triumph for Republicans as well as a roadmap for what not to do with their newfound power. But, true to form, they just went ahead and did it anyway. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that not only did they waste a massive amount of political capital, but they didn’t even get what they wanted in the first place. And what’s even more insane is that their response was to float a worse bill that is also in the process of falling apart.

The failure of Paul Ryan’s conference to utilize its robust majority and actually get an Obamacare “repeal and replace” package through the House is a stark illustration of how much more difficult it is to be a governing party than it is to be an opposition one. And the Republicans have never been much of a governing party to begin with. I’ve railed before about their inability to learn from their electoral defeats—hell, it took a phenomenon like Donald Trump to simply begin the process of walking away from the mistakes of the Bush years—and 2016 will go down in history as being no different. After spending eight years clamoring for Obamacare’s demise (the easy part), Republicans fell flat on their faces when they actually tried to come up with a real plan to replace it (the hard part). This isn’t wholly surprising—drafting an actual replacement plan is actively against an opposition party’s interests. But what I can’t forgive is the GOP’s utter unwillingness to get serious about the healthcare debate.

I’d be willing to entertain a fleshed-out “market-based” healthcare reform package, but I have no confidence that Congressional Republicans are up to that task. Their refusal to take their time drafting a bill is indicative of their inability to actually craft a workable one. They were more concerned about escaping the corner they had boxed themselves into for nearly a decade than actually trying to improve people’s lives. And I think this boils down to the fact that the Party, so steeped in the philosophy of austerity, simply can’t accept the fact that comprehensive healthcare reform requires spending a boatload of money. Take Tom Price’s plan: it’s a solid outline for a reform package, but (in my humble opinion) you’d have to shell out as least five times as much money as it allots for tax credits in order for it to be even remotely realizable. That’s just not a conversation the Republicans are willing to have. And it’s a tragedy for me to watch a unified, nominally conservative government stumble into these traps of their own creation.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, Mitch McConnell has killed the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees. I’ll just go ahead and say that I think there is plenty of blame to go around on this one—Republicans first cooked up the so-called “nuclear option” because of Democratic obstruction of George W. Bush’s lower court nominees, but it was Republican intransigence that led Harry Reid to ultimately go nuclear on that count. Similarly, although the Democrats’ current partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee is a nearly unprecedented event, they’d be the first to remind you that Republicans refused to even give Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone a vote. These are all valid points, which leads me to conclude that everyone is wrong and both parties are at fault, as usual.

I have very mixed feelings on what now appears to be a party-line confirmation vote for Neil Gorsuch. I view Judge Gorsuch (as do most conservatives) as an extremely capable and flawlessly pedigreed candidate for our nation’s highest court. I actually agree with liberals who characterize his views as outside the mainstream, but so were the views of the man he would replace—a man who was himself a brilliant jurist and (in my view, invaluable) conservative bulwark on the Supreme Court. Choosing a man like Judge Gorsuch to succeed the late Justice Scalia maintains what I view as a nearly-ideal status quo on the Court: four conservatives, four liberals, and a right-libertarian swing vote. And so obviously part of me is quite pleased to see that Judge Gorsuch’s path to the Supreme Court is assured.

But an equally significant part of me is terrified for what this could mean in the future. What will happen when the Democrats find themselves in power again? How many Supreme Court seats will be up for grabs when that time comes? What exactly will Supreme Court nominees look like in a world where only 51 (or even 50) Senators need to support him or her? And the Democrats should be afraid, too—their unwillingness to make a deal this time around has robbed them of their ability to even consider one next time. They had better pray “next time” isn’t in the next four years.

And so, in what I’ve already said should be a triumphant moment of unified Republican control of government, I find myself discouraged and unengaged. I’m watching a party that can’t get its House conference in order and has to make Faustian bargains in the Senate even when their members are united. Add in a partisan environment that has done nothing but grow more rancorous for the past decade, and the only thing I know for sure is that the Republican Party has learned nothing from winning and would have learned even less from losing. Ditto the Democrats, for whom the reality of their own vulnerability clearly hasn’t sunk in yet. And all of this, of course, is to say nothing of the creature in the White House. The Trump years are, I think, predestined to be a train wreck. Sure, we got the “conservative” majorities that we always wanted and the Supreme Court nominee of our dreams. But, I can’t help but ask, at what cost? 

Goodbye to the Right, but good riddance to the Left

I have spent ample time on this blog in the past going after the Republican Party for its complicity in creating the monster that is Donald Trump’s ascendancy. In fact, that is just one of many things I have lambasted the GOP for over the better part of the last two years. They are a party that has no idea how to set an agenda, how to govern, how to come up with new and useful ideas, and (most importantly) how to win elections—the results from earlier this month notwithstanding. Going into this fall, I firmly believed that once the Republicans lost the presidential election (and with it their control of the Senate and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court), they would learn absolutely nothing from their defeat and move toward nominating yet another empty suit in 2020 whose policy positions would be virtually indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush.

Well, I was wrong on one rather large count. The Republican Party did not do poorly at all at the polls on November 8^th. But I remain steadfast in by belief that the party will never own up to its all too real shortcomings and its undeniably disastrous mistakes. If anything, their victories all over the country on Election Day will give the bumbling idiots in charge of the GOP all the cover they need to ignore their many deficiencies and deny that a reality television star ever managed to successfully complete a hostile takeover of their party. And let’s not forget—as someone who, on about 75% of the issues, can find a lot of common ground with Republicans, I don’t say any of this with relish. I think it’s a tragedy of epic proportions that only a party as uniquely inept as this one could even pull off.

But wait. I’m forgetting about the Democrats, aren’t I? I had spent so much time criticizing the people on my side of the aisle as Trump obliterated them that I, defeated, had checked out of this presidential race completely by July and went blind to the (now stunningly obvious) fact that there was still one more dumb, arrogant party left for Trump to lay waste to. The Democratic Party exploded when Trump won two and a half weeks ago. Their fall has been as swift as it has been stunning to watch. Trump exposed the Democrats as a party out of touch not only with their base but with working class voters all over the country whom they had taken for granted. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it? The Democratic establishment may have been able (with great effort) to turn back the populist tide of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, but his swift rise and strong challenge to Hillary Clinton should have shown us all then and there that anti-establishment revolts do not happen solely on the right. The Republican Party as we know it might have died on Election Day without anyone noticing, but the gutting of the Democratic Party has been laid bare for everyone to see.

And this dismantling is arguably far worse than anything that has happened to the GOP. The Democrats now control the governorship and both houses of the legislature (“trifecta” control) in just five states after only managing to flip three state chambers this month. In contrast, Republicans managed to flip three chambers of their own while also holding onto the Senate, the House, and increasing their already dominant number of governorships to 33, leaving them with trifecta control in 25 states. The Republican Party may have some serious troubles at the top, but in terms of down ballot success, they are nearing historic highs. The Democrats, meanwhile, are a party without either a standard bearer or a bench from which to cultivate future leaders.

And the Left’s reaction to the Democratic massacre of 2016 has really been something to behold. In the wake of Trump’s ground-shifting victory, progressives seem frantically eager to abandon their principles and point their fingers at nameless “deplorables” rather than take a look in the mirror and have an honest discussion about how they helped get us here. And make no mistake about it—the Left in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, share culpability in creating the Trump monster. The Republicans may have incubated this movement, but once it hatched the Democrats were all too happy to fatten it into a size capable of toppling the entire American political establishment. The Left’s distressing habit of stifling debate, smugly asserting their own moral superiority on every issue, and decrying anyone who disagrees with them as hateful bigots, misogynists, and racists didn’t exactly mollify the angry, economically devastated Americans who were flocking behind a candidate who defied “political correctness” and smug coastal elites.

But rather than engage in some much needed introspection, the Democrats have apparently decided to keep engaging in the exact behavior that created this mess in the first place. After years of wielding identity politics as both a rallying cry to unite disparate pockets of voters and as a cudgel to demonize conservatives, their own methods came back to haunt them in a big way when Donald Trump came up with the rather radical idea of playing the white identity politics game. Turns out that heaping scorn on a diverse group of people whose only commonality is the color of their skin does quite a lot to inspire them to start voting against you as a monolith. And following up an electoral loss with what Eric Sasson at The New Republic refers to as “outrage porn” certainly doesn’t constitute a constructive path forward.

And it doesn’t end with just the screeching cries of “RACIST! MISOGYNIST! XENOPHOBE!” that have been directed at anyone who voted for Trump for any reason at all. No, the Left has decided to go one step further and refuse outright to accept the election results. A group of computer scientists is calling on the Clinton campaign to audit the vote in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, where they claim there are odd discrepancies between her vote totals on paper and electronic ballots. The Left has seized on this completely spurious claim (Nate Silver says so!) and have decided that what really happened was the Russians hacked into those electronic voting machines and swung the election to their comrade Trump. Even Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and shameless Democratic windbag, took to Twitter to say that “given the role of Russian hackers in the campaign,”—they were the ones who hacked John Podesta’s emails—“it’s all too plausible.” Seriously, this would make Alex Jones blush. And all this coming from the people who railed against Trump time and time again for implying that he might not accept the election results if he lost, calling such a thing a fundamental threat to democracy. It sure didn’t take long for them to throw that deeply held principle right out the window.

The Left is notorious for shifting their beliefs on the proper use of power once they no longer wield it, but this post-election conspiracy theory hogwash is really beyond the pale. And that would be the case even if they hadn’t spent the past eight years (rightly) mocking their opponents on the Right who invented far-flung fantasies about President Obama’s birthplace, religion, and the legitimacy of his two elections. Really, I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself by waiting for the Democrats to stop spewing vitriol and figure out where to go from here. First, they’ll have to actually accept that they lost. The same goes for their allies in the mainstream media. I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw Chris Cuomo of CNN proudly assert that “the media cannot yield” in the face of a Trump presidency. I think he fails to realize that as an anchor for CNN, he and his colleagues on all of the major cable news networks fed the Trump juggernaut all the attention and free airtime they needed to climb all the way to the White House. Don’t expect those fools to learn their lesson either.

I’ll take a moment right now to admit that I’m being a hypocrite by writing an entire post that glosses over Republican misdeeds while simultaneously taking pot shots at the Democrats while they’re down. But you know what? This was a long time coming. Years of smugness and condescension from the Left, as well as their utter lack of any magnanimity as they racked up huge victories in the culture wars, has finally come back to bite them in the rear. And now, they’re doing what they do best: blaming their losses on hordes of bigoted phantasms that are angry not because they’ve been mistreated and left behind by both parties, but simply because they are racists, even if they don’t realize it. Don’t get me wrong—I’m deeply troubled by the impending Trump presidency. I fear what it means for our democracy, our institutions, and for marginalized people everywhere (including the rural whites who see Trump as their salvation). But I’m also not too proud admit that a sizeable part of me relishes watching the Left self-destruct as they are finally forced to reckon with the fact that their methods are not infallible, that their smugness is not always justified, and that their ideas are not always winners. It’s about goddamn time. 

What now?

No one was prepared for this. No one outside of Michael Moore and my friend CJ Bergin at The Devil’s Advocate even considered it a serious possibility. Half of our nation—as well as most of the world—watched in shock and disbelief on Tuesday night as Donald J. Trump, the single most unqualified person ever given a major party’s nomination for president, was elected to be our next chief executive.

I had started my evening all but assured of a Clinton victory. As the returns started trickling in, I noticed that the count was considerably closer than I anticipated, but I held firm in my belief that the eventual outcome would be the same. About two hours later, I began to entertain the notion of an upset. And about half an hour after that, it hit me. I had been been spending the entire evening telling myself that there was no way Trump could possibly win, even as his electoral vote count grew ever higher. I was so convinced it wasn’t possible that I was ignoring what was right in front of me, just as every pundit had done since he declared his candidacy last year. After each poll that was published and each primary won, they continued to deny reality because a Trump win just didn’t seem possible. I had prided myself on seeing through their arrogance and predicting a Trump win after South Carolina. But there I was on election night making the exact same mistake. I was experiencing this entire insane election season in microcosm over the course of one night. I should have seen it coming. We all should have seen this coming.

“How on Earth did this happen?” you are all no doubt asking yourselves. Well, the answer is really quite simple. Almost everyone on my Facebook news feed who is asking this question is much like me: middle or upper middle class millennials who grew up with hard working parents, were raised in cities or suburbs, went to good public schools, attended a 4-year college or university, and now have some form of steady employment. Even though we don’t think of ourselves this way, we are part of what is called the “educated elite.” We view and think about the world in a very particular way that is shaped by our background and education. But, as it turns out, not everyone in America sees things the way we do. Not all of us have grown up in a diverse, cosmopolitan environment where service jobs are abundant and college degrees are ubiquitous. Some Americans live in impoverished rural areas where all the good jobs have been shipped overseas, where the most common causes of death are drug overdoses and suicides, and where their cries for help are dismissed by people like you and me as the incoherent ramblings of uncultured hillbillies. David Wong at Cracked.com (of all places) wrote a piece back in October that describes the plight of the Trump voter better than any other piece of journalism I’ve read on the subject. He paints this bleak picture:

“In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town -- aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The "downtown" is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart's blast crater, the "suburbs" are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic. I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive. And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege.”

These rural, uneducated, white Americans are angry, folks. And on Tuesday, they made their voices heard loud and clear. Let’s take just a moment to look at the numbers (for those of you who aren’t polling junkies like me, feel free to skip the next paragraph or two). Exit polling from 2016 tells us a few key things: Trump trounced Clinton among white men, performed notably better than Mitt Romney did among minorities in 2012, and managed to win in spite of a less white electorate than what we had four years ago. In 2012, the electorate was 72% white. In 2016, that number had dropped to 70%. Overall, Trump’s margin among whites was almost exactly the same as Romney’s was in 2012—Romney won the white vote by 20 points (59%-39%), while Trump won it by 21 (58%-37%). Trump did improve upon Romney’s performance among white men, winning their vote by a stunning 32 points (63%-31%). This was offset, however, by a slightly poorer performance among white women, although the fact that he won that particular cohort by 10 points (53%-43%) is still rather incredible given his past comments and behavior.

But it wasn’t Trump’s margin among white voters that swung the election in his favor. Rather, it was more a matter of which white voters he was able to bring to the polls, combined with his ability to win over a few more minority voters than his Republican predecessors (or, perhaps more likely, Hillary Clinton’s inability to replicate President Obama’s successes among those groups).

Trump won six states that President Obama won four years ago: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, and Florida. With the exception of Florida, all of these states have one thing in common—they are all very white and very blue collar. Sean Trende, perhaps my favorite political analyst, wrote a brilliant piece in the wake of the 2012 election called “The Case of the Missing White Voters.” In it, he hypothesized that a key factor in Mitt Romney’s defeat was the low turnout among white voters in rural areas who felt that an elitist plutocrat like Governor Romney didn’t speak for them. These hypothetical voters were described as blue collar, non-college-educated populists who had more in common with Ross Perot than George W. Bush. These voters are neither ideological nor particularly conservative. They distrust both big business and big government and they fear for their economic well-being. They are the people from David Wong’s article. Trende’s hypothesis was widely mocked four years ago, but I think (as does he) that the 2016 election seems to have vindicated him. Those missing white voters turned out in force this year and flipped every “blue” state in the Rust Belt, breaking the Democrats’ vaunted “Blue Wall” in the process.

Of course, increased rural turnout can’t entirely explain Trump’s margin in these states. I’d be remiss to give him all the credit; we mustn’t forget that Hillary Clinton lost these states just as much as he won them. Although I don’t have data to flesh this out, it certainly seems that there were plenty of white voters in states like Iowa and Wisconsin that were content to pull the lever for our nation’s first black president in 2008 and 2012 but were not similarly inspired by the prospect of electing the first woman. Is this just sexism rearing its ugly head? In some cases, maybe. But I think the real problem for Democrats this year was that they nominated a candidate who lacked President Obama’s charisma and oration as well as his ability to excite, inspire, and relate to everyday Americans. Secretary Clinton’s numbers among minority voters seem to reflect her inability to get out the vote. She won the African American vote 88%-8%, which seems absolutely dominant until you consider that it is actually a 7-point swing away from Obama’s margin of 93%-6% in 2012. That’s significant, especially when you consider that black voter turnout (at 12% of the electorate) was down one point from 2012, when that same figure was 13%. Astoundingly, Trump even performed better among Hispanic voters than Romney, losing them 65%-29% rather than 71%-27%. That’s an 8-point swing, which is—again—significant.

Hillary underperformed Obama among these voters because she was, by any measure, an abysmal candidate. The Democratic National Committee has to be seriously second-guessing themselves about now. They threw all of their weight behind a nominee who was unpopular, distrusted, unappealing, out of touch, and the ultimate Washington insider. I cannot imagine a worse candidate for the times (and before you say what you’re thinking, readers, remember: Trump was perfect for this environment. That’s why he won.) She felt the same populist backlash as the GOP in her own primary race, when Bernie Sanders nearly derailed her decades-long quest for the presidency. Her surprise loss in the Michigan primary, in hindsight, seems like it should have been a stark warning of what was to come.

So what does all of this mean? Where do we go from here? These are good questions that don’t have simple answers. First and foremost, I think this election signals a victory not for the Republican Party, but for Donald Trump. His brand of populism and nationalism seems to have resonated with voters far more effectively than the GOP’s traditional limited-government shtick. As a small-government libertarian, this both frightens and deflates me. But this election is also a stunning rebuke to President Obama’s legacy in particular and to the Democratic Party in general. Just a few short years after boasting of an “Emerging Democratic Majority” and continually mocking Republicans for their continued reliance on white voters, the Blue Wall is shattered, everything President Obama achieved over two terms as president is threatened to be erased, and the Grand Old Party has more power at its fingertips than at any time since Herbert Hoover was in the Oval Office. And I can’t even gloat about it, because it’s all owed to one particularly reprehensible man who got us here by taking all the wrong roads.

And therein lies the central problem. Donald Trump didn’t just sashay his way into the White House by stoking the fires of racial discord and nationalism, although you’d never guess that by looking at my Facebook news feed. As I scroll up and down, I see nothing but rampant accusations of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and misogyny. My liberal friends are ashamed to be white, ashamed to live in an America that hates women and minorities this much, or ashamed to know anyone who voted for Trump. They are angry, livid—people who were preaching and hashtagging about the importance of unity just four days ago are now spewing vitriol and hate like nothing I’ve ever seen from them. “God, I hope Trump dies alone & angry.” Hashtag strongertogether. “America, you disgust me. Every. Single. One. Of. You.” Hashtag lovetrumpshate. Come on, guys, do you really think this is the best way to move forward?

Look, I understand that many of my friends are feeling lost, hopeless, and scared. My heart particularly goes out to my friends who are people of color, members of the LGBT community, who are Muslims, who are immigrants. They can and should be frightened; Trump’s election elevates along with him all of the sordid elements he used and abused on his way to the top. His ascendancy emboldens all of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who endorsed him. I’m not sure what this all means for our nation’s disadvantaged people, and that frightens me too. I worry for my sister and her partner, who is a woman of color. I know none of you want to hear another white, straight, cis male tell you that everything is going to be okay, but hear me—we can get through this, but only if we do it right. Mourn, grieve, cry, do whatever you have to do but please, please don’t panic. Don’t lash out. Don’t respond to hate with more hate. If we’re going to press forward, we have to do it together.

In closing, I will ironically turn you to the words of Hillary Clinton herself. In a series of comments that were much maligned afterward, Secretary Clinton on September 9^th described half of Trump’s supporters as belonging in a “basket of deplorables… the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it.” As is often the case with controversial political statements, she was mostly just telling the truth. As Jamelle Bouie at Slate writes, poll numbers generally back up the idea that about half of Trump supporters are actually racist. But what I want to turn your attention to is the rest of Hillary’s quote, where she hit the nail on the head even more cogently in discussing the “other basket”:

“…but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

Of course, the media paid no attention to that half of her remarks whatsoever. This makes total sense really, because the media is comfortably part of the coastal elite that wants nothing to do with these people. And these people that Hillary was talking about are real. They’re the ones David Wong was talking about. They are Sean Trende’s missing white voters. They are the hopeless, downtrodden rural Americans who propelled Trump to victory. He couldn’t have done it without them—there aren’t enough neo-Nazis and Klansmen to elect someone president on their own. And if we want to move forward and avoid another disaster like what happened on Tuesday—if we want to prevent these blue collar voters from being swindled by a con man who will satisfy his own ego by promising to hurt one group of people while offering another a hollow promise of hope they’ll never see—we need to do what Hillary said and make an effort to understand and empathize with these people. Because we already know what happens when we just yell at them and call them bigots. We end up with President Trump.