An Election Post Mortem: Talking Past and Down

Like so many Americans (59,794,937, to be exact), I’ve spent much of the last 12 hours trying to figure out what went wrong. How could the polls have been so wrong? Worse, how could 59,588,437 other Americans mark a ballot to send Donald Trump to the White House?

I spent the morning in my echo chamber, listening to the pundits on NPR and MSNBC talk about voter turnout, demographics, media bias, and ground games. I watched post after Facebook post double over from the gut punch that was losing this election. If you voted for Trump, unfriend me now, they said. Try to explain your vote to a woman or Muslim or LGBTQ person, they posted in very big angry type. He’s not my president many more than a few proclaimed. The most “compassionate” posts asserted that Trump voters are know-nothing rednecks who need to be educated (presumably by right-minded progressives).

I watched Hillary Clinton give the most gracious of concession speeches and listened as President Obama reminded us of our duty to come together. As the progressive elder in a family of Pennsylvania conservatives, I fielded text messages from my Millennial nieces and nephew wondering how to pick themselves up after the body blow that was this election outcome.

In short, I wanted to gather my tribe into a giant hug, say that some-unimaginable-how it would be okay. We will go on to fight another day.

But hadn’t we fought hard? And to get this outcome? A full half of America opted for this heinous individual; how can we fight that?

And there, into the abyss again.

Scrolling through my Facebook feed (because, frankly, I had no spirit for any other work this morning), I found myself is a comment thread with long-ago and well-respected colleagues. The media blew it, they argued, talking to the wrong people and giving Trump a pass for his “buffoonery.”

As I reasoned through the arguments, it all became very clear to me: we on the left had completely missed the points being made on the right. We made this a referendum on Trump. While progressives couldn’t wrap their heads around voting for a misogynist, racist xenophobe, all Trump supporters cared about was that he’d go to Washington and break things. Sure, there may be a ”basket of deplorables” backing Trump, but the vast majority of Trump voters cast their ballots despite his behavior rather than because of it.

Progressives, on the other hand, focused on the bad acts and missed the message. Push past the coarse discourse and you realize that this election was a referendum on politics as usual that have left a giant hole in the working and middle classes. “Washington,” they might as well have said, “doesn’t work for outsiders and the little guys. It doesn’t work for us.”

In response, the campaign touted the resume of a career public servant and politician — exactly the political class the Trump supporters blamed for all their woes. Hillary Clinton is unquestionably the most experienced and qualified candidate to ever run for high office. And that (with a heavy dose of sexism) was exactly why she was rejected by Trump’s voters.

Love trumps hate is a nice slogan, and it is true. But it is no response to someone who wants to shake up Washington. It’s not even the same discussion.

As I searched this afternoon for explanation, if not solace, I was referred to a TED talk by the social scientist Alexander Betts who tries to make sense of the Brexit. The referendum, he contends, drew a hard line — what he calls a “fault line” — between those who embrace globalization and those who reject it.

At the core of the rejectionists, he contends, is the “desire to take back control of their own lives and the feeling that they are unrepresented by politicians. Those ideas signify fear and alienation, a retreat back toward nationalism and borders.”

Sound familiar?

Bretts goes on to say that we “don’t know our own countries and societies nearly as well as we’d like to believe.”

Indeed, we coast liberals often refer with derision to the broad — and spreading — patch of red as the “fly over states.” We know so little about the people and places that fill the country between the Rockies and the Alleghenies, even as we assume we do. We judge them and know what’s best for them and often contend that they are too stupid to know what’s best for themselves. In this campaign, we talked past and down to people who want real and dramatic change.

Trump stinks. Many of us can surely agree on that. But it’s the stench of Washington that turned half of all voters off. No matter the racist, sexist, xenophobic shit pile that is Donald Trump, at least he didn’t smell like Washington.

And we missed it. If progressives, the media, and the social echo chamber are to learn anything from this upsetting upset, it is to listen for what’s not being said. That, it turns out, is the loudest and most important message of all.