Throughout this election I\u2019ve been saying that it seemed like much of the country wanted to give Washington D.C. a punch in the face. Donald Trump was the fist. Hillary Clinton was the face. In the aftermath, I\u2019m not totally sure that\u2019s true. I think the punch in the face is meant for a wider swath than just the politicians. The punch was meant for the urban elites, the liberal intelligentsia, the smug and arrogant ruling class, the people John Jeremiah Sullivan calls\u00a0soft white liberal upper-middle-class college types. Ouch.<\/p>\n
I am a bit of a hick by birth, born and bred in small-town Kansas where the two-party system consisted of Conservative Republicans and Moderate Republicans. But I am a post-liberal by training, which means that I was taught to consider liberals and conservatives to be two sides of the same corrupt coin and to cooly pass judgment on them both. All this to say I think perhaps I am part of the problem.<\/p>\n
This election was unlike any in our lifetime. It was ugly and has left the country reeling and divided. For centuries white men have been\u00a0able to control nearly everything through racism, misogyny, discrimination, and violence. I na\u00efvely thought those things were on the wane. Trump used those things to get elected president. Regardless of\u00a0your politics\u00a0I think we should all be angry about that, but that only tells one side of the story. John Jeremiah Sullivan, one of my favorite writers, describes the other:<\/p>\n
Most interesting in the gate area was to watch folks watching one another. It was clear from people\u2019s expressions and from something in the furtiveness of their glances that a lot of us were thinking, \u201cAre you one of them? Did you do this to us?\u201d And the Trump people, or the ones I profiled as Trump\u2019s, were maybe thinking, \u201cAre you giving me a look because you think I voted for him? Up yours! This is America. You can\u2019t guilt me for voting my conscience.\u201d I can\u2019t prove that they were thinking those things, but I wasn\u2019t wrong. I found myself looking at two men in particular. They had on camouflage baseball caps, one\u2019s arms were covered in aged tattoos, and they were whispering to each other, making each other laugh. They were the kind of guys I typically look at fondly, when I see them in public, with thoughts along the lines of, \u201cHa \u2026 if my New York friends were here, they\u2019d be looking at these guys and thinking they\u2019re such rednecks and stupid and whatnot, but I\u2019ve known people like that all my life, and they have a magical way of turning into funny, weird, compassionate individuals when you talk with them.\u201d It\u2019s one of my most strongly held beliefs and has been for my whole adult life, that we don\u2019t really see each other when we observe from a distance, that you have to get close to know anything at all and even then often don\u2019t know.\u00a0This morning I looked at them with hatred. I can\u2019t believe I\u2019ve written the word, but there\u2019s no other for the feeling. That was the only moment my vision went swimmy. I have no desire to be that person, who lets politics affect him so deeply he forgets the higher truths. We\u2019re all confused and error-prone. If we weren\u2019t, we wouldn\u2019t need politics. We have to fight fiercely to respect one another. If we don\u2019t, it\u2019s not even that we\u2019re lost, it\u2019s that there was never a point to any of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Who is to blame for this state of affairs? We are, if anyone. The left. I am. Let\u2019s confess it in all transparency. We were stupid. We forgot about a huge part of this country. We forgot about \u201cregular folks.\u201d We forgot about middle-class and working-class white people who don\u2019t like the same things we do. It began a long time ago, this forgetting. They weren\u2019t sexy. And anyway, enough of them were usually on our side that it didn\u2019t matter. That was not just stupid but criminally negligent. We were also repeating a mistake that is older than our nation and that may doom us: the inability to understand who it is with whom we truly have common cause. It goes back to Bacon\u2019s Rebellion. For the colonial elites to win, they first have to convince the \u201cregular folks\u201d not to side with the blacks and Indians. Best yet is if you can get both groups not to trust each other. Don\u2019t fall prey to it. Greater polarization serves the other side. We just learned that. We have to reach out to the Trump voters. We have to present them with a vision of liberalism inspiring and coherent enough that those among them who can be swayed will be swayed. The margins are razor thin and can be moved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Acting smug and superior is almost never the thing to do. I can simultaneously reject\u00a0racism, misogyny, discrimination and violence, and refuse to hate those who voted for a man who embraced them to win an election, even\u00a0the man himself. As Sullivan\u00a0says, \u201cI have no desire to be that person, who lets politics affect him so deeply he forgets the higher truths. We\u2019re all confused and error-prone. If we weren\u2019t, we wouldn\u2019t need politics. We have to fight fiercely to respect one another.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re interested in reading the rest of Sullivan\u2019s article, you can read it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have no desire to be that person, who lets politics affect him so deeply he forgets the higher truths. We\u2019re all confused and error-prone. If we weren\u2019t, we wouldn\u2019t need politics. We have to fight fiercely to respect one another. \u2013 John Jeremiah Sullivan Throughout this election I\u2019ve been saying that it seemed like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1118,"featured_media":5259,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>I have no desire to be that person, who lets politics affect him so deeply he forgets the higher truths. We\u2019re all confused and error-prone. If we weren\u2019t, we wouldn\u2019t need politics. We have to fight fiercely to respect one another. \u2013 John Jeremiah Sullivan<\/em><\/p>\n