Five years ago, on June 17, 2015, I had an incredible day. It was the middle of my last summer in Clemson, South Carolina and one of the last days my friend Kenny would be in town before moving to Seattle. We drove to Atlanta to go to a Braves game, stopping beforehand at a spectacular Korean bbq place that had been on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.
The weather was great and the night was clear. The Braves were playing the Red Sox, and it was a tight game until the bottom of the 7th inning. The Braves put up 2 runs and didn’t look back, winning 5–2. …
After every election, as the winning party pops the champagne and gets the transition underway, there is a sort of harsh reflection that the losing party undergoes. We’ve seen it happen recently with Republicans in 2008 and 2012, when the party released official reports stating that in order to survive, they had to court Latino/a and queer votes. And we saw it with the Democrats in 2014, when President Obama decided his strategy of passive leadership was a political failure and he began taking executive action to enact his agenda.
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Democrats and liberals have, to put it gently, been cannibalizing one another. This election was supposed to be triumphant, the cementing of a popular Democratic President’s legacy and a rebuke of the politics of fear and obstruction that have defined the modern Republican Party. “The American people are better than Donald Trump,” Democrats told themselves. …
