![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/560\/2016\/02\/trump.png\")
I do not mean to in any way minimize the fact that Trump is going to pursue awful policies. Putting aside for the moment the usual GOP awfulness about the environment and economy, those policies will almost certainly include attacks on fundamental civil liberties \u2014 as have the policies of Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and so on.<\/p>\n
One of the most concerning aspects of the situation is the way in which so many in the Blue Tribe happily handed surveillance power and control of an army of killer robot drones over to the Obama administration. The problem with authoritarianism, even with the goal of progress or security, is that authority changes hands. If we are fortunate, Obama and those Republicans in Congress with concerns about Trump may work together in the coming weeks to reign in some of the powers of the imperial Presidency before the keys are handed over in January.<\/p>\n
But if members of the Blue Tribe are fearfully huddling in their rooms waiting for an attack from the Red Tribe, we \u2014 Blue and Red and Purple and Green and F-sharp<\/a>, all of us \u2014 are not going to be able to do much to resist those bad policies. Because effectively working for progress means making connections.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re still convinced that Trump voters are all white supremacists with whom you have nothing in common and so there\u2019s no chance of connecting, think on this: Iowa<\/a> and Ohio<\/a> both went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but for Trump in 2016. That\u2019s because there are a significant number of rural voters<\/a> who went from voting for the first African-American President to voting for Trump.<\/p>\n Assuming they are all white supremacists is not consistent with the facts. To understand their voting pattern you\u2019re going to have to allow that their motives are more complex.<\/p>\n You\u2019re going to have to listen to them.<\/p>\n Indeed it seems that the \u2014 perceived or actual \u2014 failure of Blue Tribe to listen to Red Tribe was a major driver of the Trump phenomenon. If you want to understand what put Trump in the White House, go read David Wong\u2019s beautiful and terrible piece \u201cHow Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. \u201cTheir ways are strange.\u201d<\/p>\n And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.<\/p>\n Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes \u2014 either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing that happens outside the city matters!\u201d they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you\u2019d barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.<\/p>\n But who cares about those people, right? What\u2019s newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.<\/p>\n To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. \u201cAre you assholes listening now?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Martin Luther King famously said that a riot is the language of the unheard. In many ways, the election of Trump is a riot: the frustrations of people unheard by the power structure boil over, harming the innocent, harming the rioters themselves.<\/p>\n As Wong notes, even making such a comparison invites the charge of \u201cracist white privilege\u201d. That charge is an excellent way of not listening.<\/p>\n So the question before you, Blue Tribe (I\u2019m assuming few Red Tribe folks are going to read a Pagan blog, so this missive is directed at you), is, what now? Will you go for the paralysis of fear? Will you assume the worst of all members of Red Tribe and condemn them and try to build power structures to subjugate them? Will you just wait around for demographics to make white people a minority and assume that identity politics will overwhelm everything else in a few years if you can just hold out until then? (I\u2019m telling you, the GOP is going to wise up eventually, tone down the immigration rhetoric, and pick up a lot of socially conservative Latino Catholics for Red Tribe \u2014 that would have been the narrative this year if Rubio won the nomination.)<\/p>\n Or will you do the hard work of listening to the frustrations that led to this electoral outcome? Might you even find some (gasp!) Trump voters with whom you have some common ground, with whom you could work with on some of the issues?<\/p>\n With Trump in the White House, we\u2019re not going to be able to rely on the state to solve our problems. (We never could, but that\u2019s a rant for another time.) We\u2019re going to have to take community action. That means connecting with people. And you cannot connect with another human being if you start with the belief that because their calculus of which Presidential candidate was least awful differed from yours, that person is therefore awful.<\/p>\n You can keep up with \u201cThe Zen Pagan\u201d by subscribing via RSS<\/a> or e-mail<\/a>.<\/p>\n What Does It Mean For The Gods To Exist? and other essays<\/a><\/i> is now available as a free e-book! It collects my run on the Patheos Agora blog<\/a> plus a few bonus pieces.<\/p>\n If you do Facebook, you might choose to join a group on \u201cZen Paganism\u201d<\/a> I\u2019ve set up there. And don\u2019t forget to \u201clike\u201d Patheos Pagan<\/a> and\/or The Zen Pagan<\/a> over there, too.<\/p>\n And you cannot connect with another human being if you start with the belief that because their calculus of which Presidential candidate was least awful differed from yours, that person is therefore awful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1860,"featured_media":666,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[645,728,642,641],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-religion-politics","tag-election-2016","tag-partisanship","tag-politics","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"