A confession

Okay, one last thing about the election and then I’ll get back to writing about Thomas Merton and running and stuff.

I have a confession to make.  I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

Of course I didn’t vote for Donald Trump.  I didn’t vote at all.  I can offer excuses.  Getting an absentee ballot from overseas is kind of a hassle.  I vote in Massachusetts, as reliable a blue state as they come, so my vote wasn’t going to change anything.  I was lulled into complacency by the pre-election polls, all of which characterized a Clinton victory as a metaphysical certainty.  I also have to admit that the Democratic nominee was not exactly the most compelling candidate ever, for various reasons which aren’t worth exploring here, but I think you know what I mean.  I suspect that many people of my political persuasion didn’t bother voting either.  We all know what happened after that.

My hope was that 2020 would be different.  Chastened by 2016 and four subsequent years of incompetence and nastiness, Democrats would turn out in far greater numbers. Perhaps even some of those who voted for Trump in 2016 as a kind of protest would come to their senses and vote for his opponent, or at least sit this one out.  This year, I dutifully emailed my absentee ballot to the Scituate Town Clerk in September.  And everything worked out like I hoped.

Sort of.

Let’s be honest: I am not shouting the DNC platform from the rooftops, and I hold no deep passion for Joe Biden (though I do admit he has grown on me over the past couple of months).  My vote, and probably yours, was cast primarily out of disgust at the current occupant of the White House.  Running as the antithesis of a vulgar con artist was an effective strategy for the Democratic party in 2016, but it’s not going to be so useful in the long term.

And while Proud Boys and the QAnon crowd make for good television and enable us to feel all glib and superior, it should be clear by now that Trump’s supporters are not the lunatic fringe.  57% of white Americans (and 55% of white women) voted for Donald Trump last week.  So did 26% of nonwhite people, 28% of GLBT people, and 42% of college graduates. 

The Democratic party has some serious reckoning to do.  For starters, they need to find a way to skillfully incorporate the left wing of their party.  Long before anyone had called PA, the media (from Fox News to the NYTimes) was already trying to drive a wedge between so-called “centrist” Democrats and "The Squad” (see also Biden's bizarre “I am the Democratic party” line in the first debate).  Bernie Sanders may or may not be your cup of tea, but the issues that he is hollering about – the disastrous state of the US healthcare system, the climate crisis, the collapse of American manufacturing – are not going to solve themselves.  They’re certainly not going to be solved by a return to the good old days of neo-liberalism with some BLM-friendly branding tacked on.  Let’s not kid ourselves: if these issues are left unaddressed, the US could very easily find itself right back at the brink of fascism, or worse, in the not-to-distant future.  So, fellow "progressive," I ask you: what are we willing to do, and to sacrifice, to prevent that from happening?