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    • It might feel good to demonize Trump voters, but to what end?
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    It might feel good to demonize Trump voters, but to what end?

    Umito Posted on

    Between Trump supporters and Harris supporters, is there a middle ground that we can all embrace without compromising our core values?

    John Gurda
    | Special to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

    Someone was going to cry eventually. Given the frenetic pace and feverish rhetoric of the two presidential campaigns, it was inevitable that the one who lost it was going to be hard. It turned out that nearly 70 million Americans voted for Kamala Harris. Many of us woke up on November 6 feeling like strangers in our own country, and we have spent the days since lick our wounds and scratch our heads. What happened?

    As with every election, autopsies abound. Experts blame Joe Biden for withdrawing too late, Kamala Harris for being too cautious or the Democrats for misreading their base. I think the 2024 results have much deeper roots. Dr. Bill Nye (not the scientist), a New York psychologist, summed up the situation in one sentence: “Donald Trump has unleashed the American ID.”

    Our president-elect has blown the lid off a Pandora’s box of resentments, fears and hatreds that now saturate the air we breathe. These dark instincts have existed for decades, perhaps much longer, but they lay dormant, kept in check by social controls and common courtesy, until Trump came along.

    Trump expresses disenchantment with the status quo

    In an era of growing disenchantment with the status quo, he gave voice to these negative impulses through the unfiltered megaphone of social media and attracted a legion of followers who found his attitude refreshing, even liberating. No matter how crude or mean-spirited he was, Trump said in public what his supporters might have thought only in private. He became their walking middle finger, a fire bug with a handful of matches.

    Despite his own life of gilded privilege, Trump has made it permissible, even fashionable, to insult entire classes of other Americans and call for revenge on them for every grievance, real or imagined. His followers responded by giving him the keys to the Republic in 2016, and they did it again in 2024.

    Trump triumphed despite the obvious lack of any discernible ideology or coherent agenda. This former Democrat’s agenda begins and ends with his own insatiable ego, and its mode of origin is total shamelessness. It was columnist Mark Shields who observed that Trump was born without the “embarrassment gene.” Consider that a man who is now the leader of the free world looked down on “shithole countries.”

    Our commander in chief openly suggests putting political rivals in front of a firing squad. The reigning American model is a serial adulterer who has publicly bragged about his crotch exploits. Trump appealed to the vilest angels of our nature, and on November 5, they prevailed.

    History will consider Trump the most corrosive figure in American history

    Despite his status as a world-class vulgarian, Trump proclaims his return to power as “the greatest political movement of all time,” a crusade intended to produce “America’s Golden Age.” Borrowing his own habit of hyperbole, I believe the future will instead judge Donald Trump as the most corrosive political figure in American history, and that is a group that includes such experienced demagogues as Joe McCarthy and Huey Long. Has Trump ever done anything other than sow doubt, stoke fear and fuel hatred? Has he ever spoken, even once, in the language of love rather than vitriol? And does he have any idea of ​​the difference between reality and fiction?

    Notice: Will Democrats practice what they preached about democracy after Trump’s victory?

    One of the saddest casualties of Trumpism is the truth. His success is built on a platform of outright lies, starting with the biggest – that he won the 2020 election – and continuing with blatant lies about the criminal tendencies of the population massing on our southern border, a a group motivated by precisely the same mix of hope and despair that brought our own immigrant ancestors to these shores. Trump has learned that even the most outrageous lies, if told often enough and loudly enough, take on an air of legitimacy.

    But the truth is not the only inevitability we need to worry about. With Trump in the White House and his allies in control of the Supreme Court, the Senate and probably the House of Representatives, even a partial catalog of what is currently at risk is mind-boggling. This includes Ukraine, NATO, Latinos, immigrants in general, vaccination, the environment and the Constitution. Apprentice tyrant during his first term, Trump threatens to become a real tyrant in 2025.

    Democrats must resist the moral arrogance of woke partisans

    Can we, the loyal opposition, find even a sliver of light in this dark scenario? There will be a traditional mid-term review in two years. Will voters be tired of Trump’s geriatric bluster by then? Will even his most ardent supporters realize that their so-called champion was really just another Wizard of Oz, a con artist busy spinning wheels and pulling levers to make himself appear bigger? Will his promise to “fix everything” ring tragically hollow when America emerges from its watch more broken than ever?

    These are all open questions that will take years to answer. What do we do in the meantime? The opposition’s first task is perhaps the most difficult: resisting the moral arrogance that afflicts the woke partisans among us. It might feel good to demonize Trump and dismiss his supporters as ignorant and deluded, but where does that leave us? Only more deeply divided than ever.

    Notice: I was gutted when Trump won in 2016. This time, I’m less distraught. Here’s why.

    Many MAGA Republicans would have been just as heartbroken by a Harris victory as we are dismayed by Trump’s comeback. How can we reconcile these passionately opposing reactions? Is there a happy medium that we can all embrace without compromising our core values? Classism can be as pervasive and unconscious as racism. Getting over it is the necessary first step to finding that sustainable American environment.

    There are some final truths worth pondering. The morning after the election, I sent my three adult children a message urging them to step back and persevere. I wrote that water still freezes at thirty-two degrees, that our planet still circles its star once every 365 days, and that the wind still blows primarily from the west at our latitude. Love abounds in our family and millions of others, and our children are blessed with the same great potential they had when they went to bed on November 6th. There is a wonderful constancy in our world, an innate balance that we must remember. and embrace even in a time where, for the moment, hatred trumps hope.

    Contact Milwaukee writer and historian John Gurda at [email protected]

    Umito
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