Hard Questions
So many of us have assumed that the key to our political system was improvement. That things would keep getting “better” with time. That the extension of rights, privileges and political power to more groups was not only sustainable, but inevitable.
Those of us who have historically been on the margins — women, Indigenous peoples, people of colour, LGBTQ people, religious minorities, people with disabilities, etc. — have waited patiently, stocking up our victories small and large, secure in the knowledge that no matter how bad things are now, that eventually we would be fully accepted into the body politic. We have been orphans awaiting a fairy tale adoption into a family that by rights, should already be ours.
But it has become increasingly clear that this end-goal is not a given. Power is not easily turned over, and this increase in equality has caused a resounding backlash among those who have grown accustomed to holding all the cards. There is a feeling within this group that they have lost too much — that what many of us call equity and fairness for all is merely a disguised desire for tyranny.
This feeling is not new. 235 years ago Thomas Jefferson expressed this same terror, regarding African-Americans:
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!
This fear is born of a knowledge deep in the gut, far beyond intellect or theory, that human relationship is so often a zero sum game. That the ability to win some, lose some, and compromise is not intrinsic to our nature. That love, more often than not, doesn’t win.
The fear of the misogynist is that women, given the chance, will treat him as a subhuman stepping stone as he has treated them. The fear of the white supremacist is that people of colour — whether they be the original inhabitants of this land, the descendants of slaves or those who grew up in the reality of the so-called developed world’s craven, loathsome, imperial foreign policy — want to inflict upon him what he has inflicted on them. The fear of the homophobe is that people in the queer community seek to subject them to the same cruelty they have been subjected to for so long.
The exit polling also shows that as much as we would like to be able to explain this all away by citing some panacea like class, education or the progressive instincts of younger generations, we cannot. The amount of men of colour who voted Trump, while small overall, is immensely statistically significant when compared to usual voting patterns. White people and particularly white men overwhelmingly voted for the candidate of shameless misogyny and the Ku Klux Klan. They all made this decision in large numbers, regardless of class or education level.
This corrosive fear, which has lay stewing beneath the surface for so long, has finally burst into the light of day across the West’s democracies. Consider Britain’s Brexit, the rise of Marine Le Pen’s far right in France or the Harper years in Canada leading to the recent advent of Kellie Leitch. We now find ourselves presented with a difficult question, made all the more excruciating because for many years we took for granted that the answer was a resounding yes.
Is a pluralistic liberal democracy possible to sustain long-term?
No matter what corner of the world we inhabit, is it possible to live in a country where all manner of identities abound and where people at all of these intersections are still truly equal and truly free? Free to conduct their lives without harassment and violence? Free to worship? Free to love? Free to pursue prosperity — not as one pursues a Lotto jackpot but as an athlete pursues her personal best? Free, to simply and unapologetically be?
These are the questions I ask myself this morning, knowing full well that I do not possess the means to answer them with any kind of certainty. What I will say is that based on what we’ve seen thus far from white people, from men, from Christian Evangelicals, and other “mainstream” groups in America, the prognosis is looking bleak.
