All throughout this nation, Democrats of all ages are releasing sighs of disbelief and disappointment. How...how did the rude, loudmouth, controversial Donald Trump ever win over the experienced, collected, no-nonsense Hillary Clinton? A life-long Dem, I was in shock myself. It's no secret that I don't like the Donald. I've written several articles on here denouncing him and his supporters. That's the problem, though, I insulted those who honestly felt like he was a better pick than Hillary. I discredited thousands of people, the working-class Whites who never got the same shot in life that I did. I was a classist, elitist snob...but so was the Democratic Party as a whole this election season.

That's why we lost: we strutted around with a cavalier attitude and called people "deplorable" for not agreeing with us. Yes, we had the right to be concerned about the bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism that was rife within the crowds of people supporting Trump. But not everyone was a racist or a homophobe or a sexist. This was about economics and wanting to smash a system that, frankly, doesn't work. The Average Joe is tired of career politicians, and Hillary is the poster child of career politicians. She had way too much baggage as well. The Democratic Party should NEVER have cheated and given Bernie Sanders (God bless him) the boot. Had he been our candidate, we would have probably won.

It was Hillary and our attitudes that lost us this election. We chose a woman who has been involved in countless scandals. I, for one, like to think that one is innocent until proven guilty. We have no evidence, really, that Clinton did the things most Republicans accuse her of (whereas we know for a fact that Trump committed fraud and made comments about getting away with sexual assault). Yet the suspicion that she did something was just as weighty as if she had actually done something. Independents did not trust Clinton, and even people within the Democratic Party (myself included) were rubbed the wrong way by her.

Yes, we chose the wrong candidate to rally behind, but we also did the very thing we accused Trump supporters of doing: we were hateful. Many of us are still expressing hateful, butthurt rage regarding the results. I, myself, lost my composure and said some pretty nasty things that I never would have said had I not been so frightened of the Donald. Fear is a funny thing. It took root within both parties, and it turned us all against each other. The Republicans were afraid of terrorists and illegal immigrants, so they began to say hateful things about them. The Democrats were afraid of what some of the Republicans' hatred would lead to, and we reacted by saying hateful things about them. Either way, it was a negative vibe all around.

For many years, I could never figure out why my fellow Southerners voted Republican. I thought they were a bunch of uneducated yokels just because they didn't agree with me. But having taken some Serenity time with some deep meditation and a Ram Dass book, I was able to cool down and realize that these people can't all be generalized as stupid and backwoods. By calling them all "stupid" and "backwoods," we Democrats are alienating the South and turning them against us. We need to be truly tolerant, in deed, not just in what we call ourselves. We've spent years saying we are "the party of the working class," but this election, we did nothing but deride them. We became the party of snooty liberal arts graduates. We claimed diversity, but left a huge, oppressed group out. No wonder they voted for Trump. Hillary lost the election when she called them all "deplorable." Many Trump supporters are definitely deplorable, don't get me wrong. But not all of them.

That's the thing, we've all become a bunch of no-good assumers. We assume every Republican is a bible-thumping, gay-hating, peckerwood with an IQ of 74, and they assume we are a bunch of snotty, whiny hippies with trust funds who haven't worked a day in their life. We need to stop the labels and the stereotypes and polarizations and come together now. I'm scared for the future, but I am so tired of the fighting going on.

So, there's my theory on why the Democrats lost the election. We really need to reaccess our values and demeanor. We need to clean up the bureaucracy and corruption going on in our party so that we won't ever be a turn off to the undecided like we were this year. As much as this feels like the end, it's really only the beginning of a new Democratic Party.