I don’t have a lot of coherent thoughts about what happened on Tuesday, why it happened, what it means, or what comes next. I’m no political expert or pundit or journalist, I’m just a citizen who’s lived through half a century of American history and read quite a bit about the rest of it. The best I can offer are some fragments of what’s in my head, what I’ve told myself and what I’ve said out loud to others, as I grope toward clarity. I’ll probably turn a few of these thoughts into longer pieces over the coming weeks. Some of it may resonate for you, a lot of it may not, and that’s okay. We’re all in different places, processing this absolute bullshit timeline.
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Among the pundit class, and in the limited glimpses I allow myself of social media, I’m seeing a lot of statements that begin with something like, “One thing’s for sure.” But if the last several months have shown us anything, it’s that obvious certainties are neither obvious nor certain. Obviously, I will be offering no certainties here.
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On Wednesday morning, I scheduled an optional meeting at work so my team could have a safe space to vent. I asked them what kind of emotions they were feeling, and one person said, “Ashamed.” That hit the mark for me, how much of my response has been a sense of shame, the kind you feel in those moments when you realize you’ve been acting like an asshole, or you’ve betrayed someone, and you can’t take it back.
***
I feel differently than I did eight years ago. For one thing, I’m not freaking out. I may not be okay, but I’m, you know, okay. So far, what I wrote late Monday night is holding. I have occasional pulses of anxious nausea, but they feel more like trauma flashbacks.
I realize many people are freaking out, for real and valid reasons. It is very much an indicator of my privilege that I even have the option not to freak out.
What has made the difference for me? Honestly, therapy. Shout out to Heather, who helped me assemble some tools to stay grounded. It took me fifty-four years to follow the same advice I’ve doled out to many others: that thinking about my thinking—and about the biases, emotions, and physical side effects that ride shotgun to the thoughts—actually helps.
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I’m also mindful of the fact that we’ve been through a version of this rodeo before and survived it. Well. Not all of us survived it. That is a subject for a whole post on its own. But those of us who are right here, right now, we are survivors, and when I think about us that way, I have more of a feeling of being ready for what’s next. A high school friend commented on my last piece that this election has felt like final boss. I’m like, I know how to play this game. Ready player one.
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Part of me goes further. Part of me says, “This is how it’s gonna be? Fine. Fucking bring it, I will pwn you.” I suspect this is a semi-instinctive response to the call of Trump’s hypermasculinity schtick. Testosterone cut with cortisol is a powerful drug cocktail, and (as I’ve tried to tell my kids even though they don’t believe me) I am Very Male in many basic American gender normative ways. In normal times, I mask well as a sensitive beta. These are not normal times. If I’m at risk of overreacting to this moment, toxic masculinity will be the thing that pushes me over the line.
For example: when Trump says he will protect women whether they like it or not, I have two simultaneous reactions. The first is, “Fuck you, women don’t need anyone’s protection, least of all that of a sexual predator and criminal.” The second is, “Fuck you, I’m going to protect my family, where’s my baseball bat?” I suspect J. D. Vance would approve of the latter, and I don’t love what that says about me. Something else to talk about in therapy, I guess.
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(I know what the nuanced, thoughtful, progressive response is to all of the above. I’m just reflecting what my male lizard brain is saying. I hope this phase is fleeting. I’m not at my best right now.)
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For those of us who oppose and/or are threatened by everything Trump and the hard right represent, there are basically three options in front of us: (1) openly resist, (2) accommodate and survive; (3) leave the country. (These are not mutually exclusive options. A person could easily do all three.) In 2016-2017, a lot of us chose resistance right out of the gate. As Trump’s term progressed, many people including myself shifted into white-knuckling mode, at least until 2020 when there was a resurgence of activism, especially in response to the murder of George Floyd.
It will be interesting to see what resistance looks like this time around. The immediate response seems a lot more mixed. On Election Day, novelist Junot Diaz had a great take on what Octavia Butler had to say about the “accommodate and survive” strategy. Because Trump won this time with a clear majority of voters and a mandate to do what he’s promised, and because it seems feasible, even likely, that his reelection marks a real shift in the course of American history, Butler’s perspective is an important one to consider. We’re in for a long slog, so it feels important to understand that just doing what’s necessary to live another day is a valid and often necessary resistance strategy.
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Sometimes survival means leaving. This is a thing we’re wrestling with in our household. My wife was able to get her Irish double citizenship and passport because her grandmother was an Irish immigrant, so in theory we have an escape hatch. When the male protector part of me isn’t reaching for a baseball bat, it’s wanting to gather up the members of my family whose rights and protections are under threat and whisk them away to the fair green pastures of the old country.
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I’ll say it straight up: I don’t want to leave. I love living in Oregon, one of the great places of the world. Drive no more than a couple of hours from our suburban home in any direction and you might wind up on a public ocean beach, or halfway up the side of a (hopefully extinct) volcano, or in a fairyland gorge filled with moss and giant trees and waterfalls, or in fossil beds in the high desert. The people here are mostly kind, always interesting, and fiercely their own weird selves. They take community seriously. The best book store in the world is here, and some of the world’s best wine and beer, and Portland has a restaurant scene and a music scene that rival cities ten times its size. We’ve been here more than sixteen years; our kids grew up here. It fits our family like a well-worn flannel shirt. I don’t want to leave. But if I have to, I will.
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I’ve seen some folks saying things like, “This is not my country any more.” I don’t buy it. To be honest, it ticks me off. If I were to say that, it could only be a lie. The country today is the same one I was living in yesterday, and last week, and ten years ago in the Obama era, and fifty years ago when I was a kid. Bigotry and misogyny and caste and authoritarianism run deep in our national bones; so much of our history is bloody and bleak. Those things are in the bones of this place, and this place has shaped everything I am and everything I believe. Trump’s country is my country, it always was, and it always will be even if we decide to leave.
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And: I would prefer to resist, openly and proudly. Nothing we are seeing here is new. But none of it is inevitable.
***
The thought I’ve saved for last is one I’m not sure how to articulate without running the risk of being seriously misunderstood. It’s about the state of the planet and climate change, and Junot Diaz’s observation that “Revolutionary struggles are longitudinal, intergenerational luchas,” contrasted with the stark fact that we do not have time to engage in an intergenerational wrestling match over the climate problem because the problem is here and now, and how appealing it is sometimes to imagine a certain type of leader, a strongman or strongwoman, an enlightened despot type, who declares, “I’m going to protect this world for you and your children whether you like it or not,” and then follows through, and how a lot of people who aren’t Trump voters might be watching what he does with interest and wondering if a different kind of government might be better for addressing big, urgent, intractable problems.
To be clear, I’m a small-d democrat. I want ranked-choice voting, multiple parties beyond the binary choice we have today, extensive use of ballot measures on a quarterly or even monthly basis, a long slate of Constitutional amendments—in other words, ambitious and even radical democracy reform. But I get it. Imagine a charismatic leader, AOC for example, whose heart and head and policies are in the right place, ruling by decree to advance climate policy, social justice, reparations, gun control, and opportunity for all. It’s a fantasy, but how many of us, faced with the prospect, would find ways to rationalize away the end of democracy and the beginning of something else? How many of us would look at that choice and say what the hell, it couldn’t be worse than what we’ve got now? Would I vote to sell out American democracy for the sake of a higher principle?
Right now, I don’t know. And in not knowing, I wonder if I’m closer to understanding why Trump won.
Yeah, I think making room in your head for those scenarios is probably good exercise. Like, when I was pregnant, an archeologist friend told me that I would have dreams where I had to fight off predators. That this was somewhere in our ancient monkey brains.
I did. I did dream of predators, but they were like auditors and secret police. Much more present a threat than crocs, I reckon.