The morning after . . .

Today is a day for mourning.  Tomorrow is a day for organizing to protect institutions and the vulnerable.  A friend shared the following quote:

“They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”

However, before organizing, it’s worth thinking about how this happened.  I typed some thoughts in a group chat.  I don’t know if anyone is in a suitable mood to read them, and if you are not in the right emotional space for this right now, please feel free to stop reading here. It helped me though to put my thoughts down in writing. 

For anyone who is still reading, here are my thoughts about where responsibility for this result lies:

Mitch McConnell, who was too cowardly to vote convict Trump in his second impeachment trial and just hoped that Trump would fade away.

Merrick Garland, who sat on his hands for two years and did not move to investigate the conspiracy behind the insurrection and attempted coup until he was shamed into doing it by the January 6 committee and therefore gave Trump the time he needed to run out the clock on accountability.

Joe Biden, who recognized that we still faced an emergency before the midterms in 2022 but got complacent after the midterms and decided to run again. The person I’m not going to blame is Kamala Harris, who ran an excellent campaign. Unfortunately, incumbents have been losing everywhere worldwide, and she couldn’t get away from being the incumbent. Joe Biden did not have to groom a successor. What he needed to do was not run and allow a full primary to take place. The Democratic bench was strong, and most likely, one of the strong governors like Newsom, Whitmer, or Shapiro would have become the nominee.  As a Governor running from outside of Washington, any one of them would have had a better chance of overcoming the stigma of incumbency in an anti-incumbent cycle.

The mainstream media, who have turned an essential function for the functioning of a healthy republic into entertainment and consistently normalize Trump’s extremism and sanewash his self-evident instability.  I keep saying that the New York Times is a cancer on our democracy.  No, it doesn’t determine the outcome of the election on its own, but it sets the tone for how the mainstream media as a whole reports news.

The far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like “Defund the Police” or “From the River to the Sea”, “Latinx” and policing people’s use of pronouns.

The traditional Get Out The Vote model that Democrats rely on of knocking on doors and making calls. This doesn’t work when people screen calls and send them to voicemail and have smart bells on their front doors so that they can screen out people who come to their homes to canvass them.  A more sophisticated model of organizing is needed based on relationships within communities.

The American people who have largely tuned out from consuming national news (apart from people on the right who are tuned into the right-wing propaganda outlets) and prefer watching clips of people performing dance routines in their living rooms rather than undertstanding the world around them.  A functioning Republic requires an informed citizenry.  The educational system has helped by deciding to stop teaching civics in schools so we now have an electorate who do not understand how our system of government works or their responsibilities as citizens in this republic.

Congress and the Biden administration for not moving sooner to do something about TikTok.  Huge numbers of young Americans obtain their news, such as it is from TikTok. What they see is controlled by an algorithm under the control of a hostile foreign adversary.  People have been trying to work out why, despite all the good economic news, the electorate thinks things are going badly. The sentiment of users of TikTok should not be a surprise.

Thank you to all of them.