It’s Time To Talk About What Happens After Election Day
Trump will be gone, but what about his millions of angry, possibly violent, potentially armed followers?
Barring some historically unprecedented electoral miracle, Donald J. Trump is going to lose the 2016 presidential election. Bigly. Then what? Well, assuming he is like everybody else who ever ran for president and lost, he will spend some time soul searching and salving his wounds, probably in his office in Trump Tower or maybe on the links down at Mar-a-Lago. Then, no doubt, he will get back in his limo and resume his extraordinary, everyday life of licensing his family name for profit, promoting his golf courses and hotels, disrespecting his wife by ogling and making offensive comments about — and at — women, all while screwing people who do business with him out of money. You know, “Business as Usual.” Meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton will begin making history as the country’s first-ever, woman President of the United States and those of us who voted for her will enjoy feelings of satisfaction and, frankly, relief that we averted a national disaster.
But what about all those people who voted for Trump? I don’t mean the people that voted for “not Hillary,” but the ones who were affirmatively, fervently, fanatically with Trump from the start: the rally-goers, the sign holders and tee shirt wearers, the confederate flag wavers. If the pollsters are right, there are a lot of those folks. They feel threatened by not only economic insecurity — who isn’t these days? — but also the country’s changing demographics and the upending of their belief in the traditional racial hierarchy by the election of Barrack Obama. And they are pissed as hell about it too. So can you imagine what’s going to happen when, on top of all that fear, frustration and anger, they are also made to feel as though their efforts to elect their champion, the Righter of All Wrongs, have been thwarted?
For nearly 150 years, since the election of 1868 following the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Americans have taken a measure of pride in the fact that our electoral processes, be they at the local, state, or national level, and the resulting transitions of power from one party to the other have been peaceful and accepted by the citizenry, in keeping with its respect for the nation’s institutions and the rule of law. Regardless of the intensity of passion with which each of the opposing sides pursued its campaign, the results were accepted as legitimate and the country eventually moved forward. I am writing to tell you that I have a strong and uneasy feeling that this unbroken streak could end on November 9, 2016.
According to the Pew Research Center, not since the American Civil War has the country been so divided, polarized along racial and political lines. Combine those divisions with the massive expansion of firearm ownership and the proliferation of “open carry” and “stand your ground” laws in the very places where most of Trump’s support lives and it adds up to a volatile and potentially lethal mixture. To ignite, all it will need is a spark. Like, perhaps, the election to the presidency of the United States of another challenge to their conception of the natural order of things: a woman. And not just any woman, a woman who they not only personally dislike, but who they view with deep suspicion, even hatred, and believe to be part of some massive, global conspiracy that threatens the very existence of the republic. What’s more, they will have been told, repeatedly, by their leader that the only way she would win would be if “they” stole the election from “us,” that it was “rigged.” They will have been told that there is a vast, global, corporate and media driven conspiracy to control the levers of government and the economy and stack the deck against them.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m being unnecessarily alarmist. I hope that I am. Maybe their ferocity will lose its steam in the aftermath of what will be a crushingly disappointing loss and they will go back to their quiet and secretively racist and hateful lives. But I’m guessing not. They’ve exposed themselves and now everybody knows who they are and where they stand. Blending back in is going to be hard, if not impossible. And they won’t care. What they will have come to believe is the misguided idea that the country is still rightfully theirs and that it has been stolen from them yet again. They might even want to direct their anger outwardly, physically, violently. It is going to be a long, hard road to reconciliation and national unity after this one, if we can ever get there.
But I don’t think that all hope is lost. Hillary Clinton said something during the second presidential debate that wasn’t featured in any of the post-debate analysis or soundbites that I saw, but that stuck with me. She said, “If you don’t vote for me, I still want to be your president. I want to be the best president I can be for everyone.” That kind of leadership is a great place to start. From the moment she is declared the winner, Mrs. Clinton needs to begin the process of healing a great many open wounds on both sides. Starting with her acceptance speech, in both her words and actions, she needs to continue to remind people that she will do what is best for all Americans, that she takes seriously the concerns even of those people who did not support her and will work just as hard to make their lives better. She needs to publicly reach out to Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives, in congress and in statehouses, who care about governance as much as they do politics, who want to lower the temperature of political rhetoric and remove the vitriol from our public discourse and work with them on messaging as well as policy to demonstrate the authenticity of her convictions. Those people are out there. They don’t make as much noise, so we don’t hear about them, but they are there, doing the work they were elected to do. The rest of us need to shine our spotlights (Twitter, Facebook, Medium, etc.) as brightly on their efforts as we do when we take to the internet to express our outrage when something bad is said or done by a public figure.
I am not naive. I know that there are people out there, a small, vocal, hateful minority — the so-called Alt-right and other white nationalists— who will have none of it. They will continue to nurture and spread their hatred and their paranoia. I’m not writing this article for them and neither do I expect them to change they way they think or act. I merely want the rest of us to crowd them out, to push them deeper into their little corner of the world and close the door on them.
One of the great things about Americans is that they have the ability to forget their differences and unite during times of national crisis. It is my hope that this time we will come together before the crisis, and by doing so prevent it.
