I did not see Tuesday coming. When Donald Trump first ran in the Republican primaries, I dismissed him as a flash in the pan, someone too hateful and radical for anyone but fringe groups to take seriously. Then when he won the primaries, I thought the election was in the bag for Clinton. I have never been so wrong in my life. Needless to say, I am not happy about these results.
I am most acutely worried about what a Republican controlled congress can do with a Republican president. Health care reform is basically dead now. Obamacare may just be saved by a couple Republicans in the Senate deciding not to repeal it. But it is on life support, and the single payer system I would like to see the Affordable Care Act evolve into is only a mirage in the distance. Meanwhile, we’ll likely see more market deregulation. As much as Trump railed against the establishment, I don’t believe he would hesitate to sign in more laws deregulating Wall Street and potentially causing another great recession. And the new Congress will quickly nominate a conservative Supreme Court Justice, and that will affect their rulings for decades.
Meanwhile, the ideological victory disturbs me on a fundamental level. I don’t believe in nationalism, unless that nation can be extended to all of humanity. I am not particularly fond of the sort of us-versus-them attitude brought on by Trumpism, the proposed walls and bans. The problem isn’t Trump actually building a wall or banning Muslims. Certainly there will be more restrictions on immigration- as though Obama didn’t deport enough people already- but laws are still passed by Congress. They’re only willing to do so much. However, American nationalism is only the continuation of a trend seen on the European continent and in Britain. It breaks my heart to see a world that has been trending towards unity fall apart like this. If things get much worse, I may have to reconsider the very notion of globalism.
Ah, but I am still an optimist. What is there left for us?
First of all, this could get the Democrats to change. Perhaps they have learned that they can’t rig a primary to choose an establishment candidate- perhaps the embodiment of the establishment herself- in a year when the country was anti-establishment. I didn’t realize at the time how right I was to vote for Bernie Sanders. He would have made a perfect balance to Trump’s right-wing attack on the establishment. Given another option, how many people would have voted Democrat this year? Trumpism should not have been the only way to protest the status quo. Perhaps the Democrats have taken note.
And it seems now that our system is rigged but possible to work around. In a weird way Donald Trump has restored my faith in democracy. Yes, he lost the popular vote, but by such a small margin that he may as well have won outright, despite the establishment opposition. The point is that the common person’s desire to overturn the establishment has, at least for the moment, been heard and will be represented in the White House, and in the face of such opposition! The Republican party didn’t want Trump to win, but he managed to pull through in the primaries. Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of the establishment, couldn’t put together a convincing campaign message to win the disillusioned over.
I have no bitterness about Tuesday’s events anymore. I’m just kind of sad. Sad that nationalism has won, and that some of the progress we’ve had in the last eight years will be torn away. But some good will have to come out of all this. Democracy, even the weak form of it that exists under the Constitution, is a beautiful thing. Systemic issues have been revealed, and the odds that they will be fixed is growing. It is only the present.
