This article was posted by one of my friends on Facebook, who is a professor in my same field at a different university. He said that it may have been the best article he had read all year, and I quite understand the reaction.
Here is the link. I strongly encourage a read.
It explains, from what I find to be a very cogent and well-reasoned perspective, why we should not have been quite so surprised about Trump’s success. I am not yet 100% percent convinced, and it is certainly an argument I will be mulling over (and no doubt writing about) in the weeks to come. The propositions are bold, and if accepted will require a significant realignment against the ways in which we have been conditioned to think about our political divides and the definition of our major political parties. But given the dramatic upset we just experienced, just such a realignment seems necessary.
I’ll leave it at that for now, but there is one particular quote which (although very much not the theme of the piece as a whole) perfectly captures the unfairness of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and defeat:
Isn’t what happened to Clinton unfair? Of course it is. It is unfair that she wasn’t a plausible candidate until she was so overqualified she was suddenly unqualified due to past mistakes. It is unfair that Clinton is called a “nasty woman” while Trump is seen as a real man. It’s unfair that Clinton only did so well in the first debate because she wrapped her candidacy in a shimmy of femininity. When she returned to attack mode, it was the right thing for a presidential candidate to do but the wrong thing for a woman to do.
Again, this article serves to make a point very different than the unfairness toward Hillary, and it suggests that this concern is extraneous to the outcome at hand. But I couldn’t resist sharing such a strong and concise indictment of the social inequity inherent in this election.
But our job now is to consider these arguments, and consider them carefully. For many years now, the Democratic Party has been the party of progress in the march toward social inclusion. You will never convince me that this is anything other than right. And from my perspective, this is the wave of the future and must take an ever-increasing role in political discourse. But that is also something that I can say, as someone whose economic future remains promising. Such focus is, now more than ever, clearly not a view shared by many middle-income Americans struggling in the heartland of our country. If we are to make solid progressive gains again in the future, we are going to have to wrestle with these alternative dimensions of political discord, especially the frustrations of working-class white Americans (who are important and valid, and clearly all-too-often ignored) and figure out a way to marry the concerns of minority populations with theirs, rather than engender and encourage disharmony between the two groups.
Doctor Dvorak's Delirium 