Welcome to the future, fellow Americans: An aborning autocracy of the deaf, damned and willfully innocent, the very prospect of which has left many of us in despair.
But in fact, this vision is no illusion. To quote one famous swamp dweller, “we have met the enemy, and he is us,” vast numbers of Americans being quite content to be outed as secret Trumpites.
Here are some other thumbnail takeaways from yesterday’s unpleasant surprise:
Just as most non-college-educated women and many diplomaed ones balked at voting for a woman in 2016, so they did again this time around — and to hell with the predicted electoral backlash against the Dobbs anti-abortion decision.
Despite Trump’s oft-expressed penchant for racist and misogynistic mudslinging, many African Americans and Hispanics of both sexes refused to punish him for it.
Gender and racial biases remained hidden determinants that eluded pollsters, and many eternal optimists were left to stumble through the compressed campaign season oblivious of how thoroughly Trump has hijacked our norms, priorities and values.
And the irony is that when all the ballots are counted in California and elsewhere, Kamala may have bested Trump in the popular vote, as Hillary did in 2016, or come close to it, thus making all postmortems and blame-gaming conjectural.
What happened to us on Tuesday is partial payback for our original sin — the result of our founding fathers sucking up to the small slaveholding states by writing the electoral college into the constitution. This compromise allowed them to create a union to be sure, but one of such delicate perfection that the very viability of a representative democracy is now being brought into question.
While the electoral college is only symbolically relevant when the popular vote favors one contender decisively, it has made for runner-up presidents five times in the past, including in 2016, and may do so again, with equally disastrous consequences.
The need to prevail in the electoral college often forces candidates to spend inordinate time and treasure campaigning in states that scarcely reflect the needs and preferences of the vast American electorate.
Would Kamala have won if she had felt free to spend as much time in middle America as she did in so-called swing states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina? Would she have been a better sell to all Americans if she hadn’t been forced to do so much stumping in Wisconsin or Michigan? Would she have hit the wall at all if California and New York carried the electoral heft that their populations warrant? These very questions tell us how slippery our ideal concept of America has become.
Till we find the answers, dial me up in my bunker.