Well, it has happened. Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.How did this happen? What does it mean for immigrants, people of color, women? We'll be taking your calls live on the air.
Like many people in our listening area and across the country, I thought that I'd be getting on the air this morning smug and self-righteous that another Wall Street neo-liberal democrat would be taking the White House, and we would have to criticize her invasions of Syria, her trade policies and her flip-flopping on promises made.
Instead, like many of you, I watched the count last night of the electoral college votes and with increasing dread, began to realize that the unthinkable was happening. The nervous shock combined with nausea that ran through my body pales in comparison to the absolute terror that must have shocked the systems of many immigrants, central Americans, Syrians, Muslims, Jews, trans people, people of color of every background and political persuasion - when the news became clear that a proto-fascist con-man had essentially conned his way into the most powerful position on earth.
Now we can do the Monday morning quarter-backing, looking at the states that were close and ended up going to Trump - many of them the same states that lost their protections under the 1965 Voting Rights Act when the Supreme Court struck down those protections in 2013, deciding that racial discrimination in voting was a thing of the past - leading to the shutdown of more than 800 polling stations across the south, and the removal of hundreds of thousands of people of color from voter rolls. We can talk about misogyny, which clearly played a bigger role than most women in this day and age would have thought possible. We can talk about how the Democratic party decided on a centrist, hawkish candidate instead of listening to a populist movement that supported Bernie Sanders in the primary. States like Alaska and Michigan, which had gone for Sanders in the primary, ended up going to Trump last night.
We could talk about the rural-urban divide, the despair of white rural men, as they watch the crumbling of an economy and a system that they truly believed was built on their hard work and perseverance, and blame cities - minorities, immigrants and immoral decadence, for this decline. Never mind that their candidate represents the most extreme of this immoral decadence. They are looking for a demagogue who voices their fears, entitlements and bigotry out loud, and in Chump they have found one - a con-man bully who promises a return to the idyllic days of blatant racial discrimination, misogyny that many of these rural white men, and white women, look back upon as some sort of golden age.
But is this the conversation we want to have today?
Or can we go deeper.
Is not this selection of Donald Trump indicative of a broken system - in which an outlier clown can rise to power? Is this not the pinnacle of the so-called American dream of the rich, white 'founding fathers' of this country, who based their government on the subjugation of native Americans and the enslavement of Africans? Is this not reflective of a populace that has no sense of history - not only their own, but European history of the 20th century, when a great depression similar to the one we are in now led to a rural, working class base of support for governments that went on to carry out genocides against minorities?
Are we in a fascist state? Not yet, but I would argue that it could very quickly become one - that we are only one false flag attack away, or a couple of climate-related natural disasters away, from a declaration of national emergency that could very quickly lead to the rounding up of Muslims (first Muslims, then other groups).
Let's get serious - let's look at resistance to the German, Italian and Spanish implementations of fascism in the 1930s - 80 years later, here we are again, on the precipice.
- KBOO