arguments and consequences
lessons this week
I run a risk of alienating many of you this morning but I fully accept that actions create consequences. My thoughts this morning are not intended to alienate but to start a process of reconsideration of how to move forward. The past is over so we can’t change it, period.
Before I hit send this morning, a devoted reader emailed me that the incoming administration, based on prior behavior, will always cast blame on anyone and everyone but the head of state. This reader was exasperated because, as the Navy particularly preaches and holds its leaders to account, the captain is responsible for what happens on his or her ship—period. This is why many military opposed the return of this man who shifted blame relentlessly, whether in his campaign or in office. I never mentioned this yesterday as I thought it was obvious but clarifying the apparent is what I discuss today, having entirely rewritten this four times since 0430.
The painful reconciling what many hoped for versus what unfolded is underway. It is a gradual and iterative process the nation must undergo, but Democrats especially. Republicans will need consider it ultimately be Sino party rules forever though they are basking in the glow of complete victory for a second morning. I mused to a colleague in 2018 before he retired that I wondered if democracy simply doesn’t work for this big a population because this reconciling is so difficult. He dismissed my thinking but this election resurrects the question through several lenses.
One of the common concerns I suspect we are likely to hear about the disinformation now pervasive across our country. Many statements were demonstrably false over the campaign but unchallenged because so many across the board no longer trust legacy institutions whether it’s medicine or media. We somehow have transformed Ronald Reagan’s condemnation that government is the enemy into institutions are not trustworthy, a proposition I have found ridiculous for more than 40 years. Are there mistakes? Yep. Are the institutions fundamentally bad because evil forces control them? Those controlling an institution are not the institutions themselves but citizens with views and personal interests rather than just space aliens; sometimes they include members of the other side of the political spectrum. People can have evil intentions but it is harder to say institutions as such do.
Too much messaging (including things I wrote) relied on policy shorthand which completely turned off millions of people. Using “hoity-toity” terms like fascism as a threat and democracy as a value didn’t translate into what concerned most Americans. Ever since 9/11, people here have craved predictability, assurance, and a world that is no longer the one we live in. As someone wrote months ago in a chatroom I participate in, don’t underestimate the conviction or voting power of those people who you think don’t understand things just because their views differ from your own.
Tens of millions of people chose to embrace promises they thought would resurrect that predictability and certainty by selecting appeal to their values, albeit from an understood-to-be flawed candidate, at the ballot box. Yes, they may see their standard of living, their freedoms, their future, and many other things deteriorate but they chose longed-for assurance above everything else. That may appall many of us but it is a powerful explanation for something that resulted from a myriad of factors.
Democracy, “government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system” allows them to do that. We can’t have it both ways, folks. We either accept this system or we don’t, as painful as that might be for the minority who voted day before yesterday.
Like it or not (and I have one friend of sixty years who was clearly disappointed in what I wrote yesterday as she saw me as acquiescing to odious forces to which she will not bend), in our democratic system everyone’s vote counts precisely the same in the end; the person with the most votes wins when the election ends. Punto final. If you cherish democracy and fear fascism, this is an iron clad rule.
Far too many voters feared the proposed Democratic solutions, the shorthands they heard, the benefits they felt only focused on everyone but themselves. Asserting that inclusive and diversity would be good for all fell flat as people thought of their own desires, needs, and futures—as they always do. What they did not hear was compelling explanation for why these policies would produce better personal outcomes so they chose to hue to what they thought they that the Trump proposals offered, to a world that never existed but sounded less threatening.
Governing means making the rules by which all of us living in this country operate. It’s not more complicated than that. And until the Republicans lose control over the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate or the Supreme Court, they will be making the rules. Anyone opposing that can take it or leave it as draconian as that sounds. That is the essence of a people’s run political system.
Don’t tell me that it’s not the people running it: 72.6 million people voted for Trump versus Vice President Harris’s 67.9 million. That is a margin of 4.75 million voters in the former president’s column. Sure, this is only roughly forty percent of the people who live in this country but it’s not as if the remaining 60% voiced strong support for Harris; they chose not to vote or were ineligible. The people voted Donald Trump back into the White House..
That is the hard fact until we change, as the result of a subsequent election, the course the nation pursues. Democracy says you earn the right to take power by making an argument that compels people to reject other arguments in favor of the your positions, policies, and actions. Republicans failed at that in 2008, 2012, and 2020 and Democrats failed this time. It’s pretty simple, if painful, for the losing side each and every single time.
It’s time for serious rethinking about who, what, why, where, and how we run this country. This is what elections allow us to do regularly. Thank goodness we are not a once and done place frozen in time, regardless what it seems some days.
I am prepared for your rebuttals, thoughts, and reactions. I don’t always like the world we live in but actions do in fact create consequences as elections do.
Be well and be safe. FIN
“Democracy” in dictionary.com