Two and a half weeks after the election, many of us are still trying to process Trump's victory. Here's my friend Dave B's dark but hard to avoid explanation. ~ Ilene
I'm with the most pessimistic interpreters of this vote. The 61 million votes for Trump are not about economic dislocation. It's about nationalism and ethnic/cultural resentment. In the Great Depression, neither American party chose anyone out of the political mainstream. During the Red Scares we still stuck with experienced leaders. Same in the turbulent 60s, except for the avowed racist Wallace. There's nothing going on in America today remotely close to the trauma of those periods. Yet the voters chose an unqualified, extremist candidate like the country was falling apart. Ask yourself what could make anyone think that? Because we're becoming too international, with too many non-white, non-Christian, non-straight, and non-male faces gaining prominence. This has very little to do with economics. It's xenophobic nationalism.
What I'm describing is nothing more than the American equivalent of Brexit and the rise of the National Front in France, and similar authoritarian parties in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere. It's not much about economics.
Of course, almost everyone who voted for Trump in the general election always vote Republican, so nothing noteworthy there. But how did he win the GOP nomination? And why didn't they find him too repugnant to vote for? In 1964, Goldwater was considered too extreme, so Republicans avoided him, and he lost in a landslide. This time Republican voters found Trump acceptable.
Another point to consider. How many times have you seen the claim that this was a vote to "end politics as usual" or "drain the swamp" in Washington? How can we reconcile either of those with the fact that almost every incumbent Republican Senator and Congressman was re-elected? No change there. Because they were already the face of xenophobic nationalism and ethnic resentment.
