NOTE: I originally posted the following to Facebook on November 10th. Moving forward I will be creating original content for this blog, but also posting older pieces that I have previous only shared with friends.
Okay, I’ve been mostly silent for a few days, owing partly to being under the weather, and owing partly to the fact that I have friends of every race, gender, sexual orientation, and political stripe, I actually respect them all, and I doubted that at least of half of you would be ready to talk sense until the dust settled.
So here I am, ready to speak up to all of you. There are several points I need to make, and I hope to hit them all, and in some kind of order, but I’ll start here. I have an advantage of many of you in that I never liked either candidate, and I have thus been preparing myself for months for the eventuality that one of them was going to be president. Since I was guaranteed not to be thrilled with the outcome, I had to do some soul-searching early on and make peace, preemptively, with whatever the outcome would be.
So here is my thought process. Remember first of all that we elect presidents in this country. Not emperors, not kings, not rulers. Presidents. A president has a lot of power, but his or her power also has limits. Our system was built with check and balances in place, and the reason for that is that the people who designed this system had just gotten out from under the rule of a king whom they felt was taking advantage of them as subjects. They wanted to make sure that the system they set up could not allow any one person to seize that kind of power.
Many of you who are terrified right now were the same people posting memes about how Trump seemed not to know what the limits of a president’s power are. Now, I know, I know that the system has changed some since it’s inception, and I know that it isn’t necessarily free from being exploited, but regardless of who or what Donald J. Trump might turn out to be, I have faith, not in him, but faith that the majority of the American people are not racists, misogynists, or homophobes. I have faith that the American government will not start mandating, or supporting, bigotry and hatred.
And if it did, I have faith that the majority of the American citizenry would not stand for it. Because I know I would not stand for it, and I am a pretty regular, dare I say unremarkable guy.
Consider the fact that you’re so well aware of, that Donald Trump didn’t win the popular vote. Not only that, but I read that only 24% of registered voters even voted for him. Knowing that he still won, and that even Hillary’s popular vote was a narrow margin, that tells you that voter turnout was absolute garbage this year, and that’s because a lot of people just did not like either option, felt that they had nothing for which to vote, and either voted for a third party candidate, or did not vote at all.
Next I would ask you to consider that we legitimately have no idea what Donald Trump stands for. None. He said a lot of offensive things on the campaign trail, and some old tapes surfaced of some other repugnant shit coming out of his mouth, but I have to point out a few things.
First, remember that Trump has historically been a democrat. I know that doesn’t mean he’s a bleeding heart, and I’m pretty certain that he isn’t, but it IS a good indicator that he may not be the racist bastard he has portrayed himself as. Many of you, over the course of his campaign, have pulled out the quote from the 90’s where he said if he would run that he would run as a Republican because it would be easy to dupe the base into voting for him — that’s a paraphrase, but the quote is out there and is easy to find. It’s not hard to see that this may be exactly what he did.
[Another note: I have since been reminded that the quote in question was a hoax, possibly perpetrated by one of the many fake news sites that plague Facebook.]
First of all, he took multiple stances on multiple issues, so you already know that most of what he said is outright false. What you don’t know is which part, if any of it, is true. Secondly, when you look at how Trump won, he went after the rural areas, the more traditional middle America, because he knew Clinton and her campaign would skip over those voters while focusing on black people, Latinos, the LGBTQ crowd, and the more urban centers where people tend to be more liberal.
Trump seems to have figured out the key to what the Republican party has been struggling with for the last decade. He figured out how to win an election against the Democrats, and he did it in a counter-intuitive way: he steered into the skid.
Look, this won’t be easy for some of you to hear, but you know how divisive the political climate has been for the last decade? Looking at it objectively, it’s easy to see why the Democrats have been winning for so long. It started actually a decade and a half ago, with George W. Bush’s administration invading Iraq. They misrepresented the facts when they asked for Congress’s permission to go to war, and they did it because their strategy in the war on terror was to try to establish a stronghold of democracy in the middle-east. They thought if they could stabilize the region and create prosperity, it would end terrorism, since it is poverty and desperation under a totalitarian regime, that breed terrorism in the first place.
But a lie in service of something good, is still a lie, as was the point of Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” The Bush administration did harm to our nation’s reputation, they gambled on being able to find something in Iraq that would justify their lie and it didn’t work out, and now everyone knows. Worse, we have to deal with ISIS, which is a direct result of that lie. It also damaged the Republican Party.
The war was polarizing enough, but the lie, and the results of that lie, have long-since obscured the basic lessons of September 11th, 2001, and drove the wedge between the two parties even deeper. To wit, Conservatives have long feared that Democrats are too weak on National Defense, and Liberals have long held — and here in the case of the Iraq invasion, could rightfully argue — that Republicans are willing to cross too many lines in the name of National Defense.
So there’s the wedge deepening. People called GWB “Satan” and all sorts of other things, which, as a Christian I think does a serious injustice to the threat level of Satan, but the point is taken and the vitriol, mostly earned. Meanwhile the Democratic Party has had a much sexier kind of message, as they talk about human rights, compassion, and inclusion. These are good things. But what it has meant is that while both parties have been vilifying one another, the Democratic Party has consistently been able to come out on top, with a louder and more vocal section of the populace taking their side and denouncing conservative values — which aren’t all bad.
The thing Republicans have struggled with is figuring out how to win an election in that environment. As a conservative I know that most Republicans actually DO care about human rights. They just have a different philosophy on what that means. Essentially, as republicans have been known to cross moral lines in the name of national security, democrats have crossed moral lines in the name of human rights. And that may sound like a self-contradictory statement, but the fact that I now live in a country where I can’t afford health insurance, but can be fined by the government for not buying any, says otherwise. It’s a different kind of violation, and much easier to overlook than wrongfully invading a foreign country, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also wrong.
Still, because it’s easier to overlook — because it’s a more seemingly innocuous wrong in the service of something good — people still defend it. It’s a sexier message. So Republicans lose again and again; first it was that Bush was the devil and that everything from hangnails to inclement weather was somehow his fault, then it was John McCain was a racist, or Mitt Romney was a Fascist (as if Mitt Romney was ever anything other than a vanilla-scented Yankee Candle). And I know, Republicans did it too — birthers, cries of communist at every leftist politician (for the record, Barack Obama was born in the USA, but Democrats DO like a little Karl Marx in their economic strategies). Democrats have always been able to steer into the skid. Look at Bernie, who describes himself a socialist. He does that because he knows it can’t be an insult if he proudly wears the t-shirt and the secret decoder ring.
Meanwhile, the media and the entertainment industry have always leaned left, so the liberal message reaches ears more readily and slides down like a good craft beer when preached by great songwriters and the beautiful people in Hollywood. But that’s nothing new . What IS relatively new is social media, and the way that changes the national conversation. It creates a liberal echo chamber where, yes, there are conservative voices, but they are often lost in the sea of memes from websites like “Occupy Democrats” and the “Dank Meme Stash” of the week. Speaking as a conservative, I can tell you I am constantly choosing my words carefully out of a desire not to offend any of my friends, and I frankly believe that is something that most liberals have never worried about in the current climate.
In the last decade, Republicans have consistently lost and Democrats have consistently won — with conservatives being shamed and told they were racists and bigots. While I think it’s fair to say that there’s a measure of truth in it, I would also say that speaking as a straight male conservative who respects women, whose best friend since childhood is a black man, who has crushed on more than one Hispanic lady (and a couple of black ones too), and who respects the rights of his gay friends, I know that not all conservatives are bigots. Not by a mile. It’s just that the ones who ARE bigots don’t worry about offending anybody, so you hear their voices first, and you get mad at them because they’re being awful, and you have civil conversations with guys like me and tell me you wish all conservatives were like me, while missing the fact that most of them ARE.
I think what Donald Trump did, is he found a strategy. He knew that running as a Republican was going to get him accused of being a lot of terrible things, and I think what defines Donald Trump’s victory, is that he decided to take it on the chin. He wasn’t afraid to be the bad guy. Hell, in a lot of ways he IS a bad guy. After the Billy Bush tape came out, when the first woman accused Trump of groping her and his response was, “have you seen her? I don’t think so. I don’t think so,” I knew right then that he had won. Because if that didn’t stop him, nothing would. No shame, you know? Like Bernie’s socialist decoder ring, Donald Trump put on the pimp coat and kept on campaigning. I think he assumed that being vilified would create sympathy for him among conservatives. I think to some degree it did.
But that’s the thing. Given the inconsistencies in what he has said (to the degree that he has said ANYTHING substantive on the issues) it is impossible to discern just what, if any of it, was true. We know he’s a pig, he likes a certain type of women, he likes them within a certain age range, and he said nasty things on tape with Billy Bush. The thing is, none of that makes him a rapist. Doesn’t make him NOT a rapist, but it doesn’t make him one, either. What he said to Billy Bush wasn’t a confession, it was a hypothetical, and while it is, and ought to be, troubling, it doesn’t prove anything other than that he is a pig. Which was already common knowledge. But he’ll hardly be the first pig in the white house, will he, William Jefferson Clinton?
Now, on to a few other things… yep, Trump has described hypothetically committing war crimes as president, he has talked about building a border wall, and he has talked about mass deportations. Among other things. And these are all things that I think we can, by and large, agree that we don’t want. I don’t know if he actually wants to do them or not, but he won’t be able to. Because we are a nation of laws, and nobody, not even the president, is above the law. Isn’t that right, Richard Milhous Nixon?
That brings me back to my original point. We didn’t elect an emperor. We didn’t elect a king. And after all the stuff he’s said, you know we will all be watching Donald Trump very closely. It’s actually quite unlikely that he’ll be able to do anything like the stuff that he has described.
Look, back when President Obama was campaigning for his own presidency, much of what he promised centered on bringing all the troops home and closing Guantanamo Bay. Back when he made those promises I kept telling people, “he’ll never be able to do those things.” It’s easy to speak in hypotheticals, but presidential decisions aren’t made in a vacuum, and when the Candidate becomes the President, he or she goes in there and has the meetings and sees behind the curtain, and all the machinery is revealed, and the reason why things exist becomes apparent. Moreover, what your actual options are for changing them also become apparent. President Obama has made a point of being seen to try closing Gitmo, being seen to at least change the nature of the conflict in the middle east, but he was never going to be able to just wave a magic wand and make those things happen. He is a smart man and I believe he knew that long before he ever set foot in the Oval Office. But this is politics, and this is how it works.
Likewise, President-Elect Donald Trump will not be able to do most of the things he talked about on the campaign trail, whether he means to or not. And for that reason, dear friends, I am asking you to take a deep breath. Remain vigilant, but be calm.
Yes I’m a conservative, but I believe in harmony, and I am socially rather liberal — my conservatism is mostly in the region of economics. This is why I do not identify myself as a Republican. Some of my favorite presidents have been Republicans. Some of them haven’t. I believe that each side holds part of the answers, and I’m really more of a Libertarian at heart. If you love your country, then weep not, for it needs you. Regardless of your race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation — your country needs you. And it doesn’t need you melting down, but standing strong.
So regardless of which side you’re on, stop with the hate, stop with the fear, and for God’s sake stop setting shit on fire.
