Our America: Are We Really Surprised?
- By Doug Anderson
I was: I had bought the rhetoric that said Hillary Clinton would win, that she would have all the electoral votes in addition to the popular vote, that we could not possibly elect someone who grabbed women’s vaginas without their permission and was appealing to racists and homophobes at every turn. Women could not possibly vote for him and women were half the country. But in retrospect I was sleeping.
In all the years since Bill Clinton, the Republicans, who are unified around the single goal of dismantling the New Deal and taking all the money, have been winning at the local level all over the country. They have become the mayors, the governors, the librarians, the school board, as well has winning the Congress and the Senate. They took the Supreme Court, and with the help of even Clarence Uncle Thomas Brotherfucker were able to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. That they have the governorships made it so much easier to gerrymander and restructure the voting districts, dismantling the work of the Civil Rights movement. Like a certain German, they were able to convince working class people that liberals, and not the multinational corporations who were sending their jobs overseas, were responsible for their financial precariousness and this was proven by the basic degenerate nature of liberals and their support of abortion-loving women, welfare queens, homosexuals, Muslims, Mexican "illegals," and lazy black people. So doing, they were able to work the reptile brains of ignorant people into a base that was impenetrable by facts and reason.
Where is the left? Is it the academic who from behind the comfort of his desk glibly pronounces that Donald Trump is merely the last twitch of late capitalism? What left? Who’s left? What real left there is, is fragmented. Who impresses me? The Sisters of Mercy in Hartford, Connecticut, who transition trafficked women off the street. The lone social workers who day after day walk the ghetto streets and knock on doors. How lonely they must feel. They are out there, but they are lost in the corporate soup. In retrospect, Democrats have shown little unity. And did not President Clinton, with his reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act and other regulations, prepare the way for the ascendancy of corporations and enable a lopsided Supreme Court to deem these undying and undead monsters “people?”
How powerful it would have been for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to stop the Pipeline and revive the treaties with Native Peoples. How powerful it would have been to arrest corporate criminals who destroyed the country’s economy under Bush. Is there even a ten-year-old who doesn’t know it’s wrong to create credit card accounts for people without their knowledge and then charge them for things they didn’t buy? In retrospect, I find it astonishing that we did not see it coming. And I confess, I did not. Where was I? I was sleeping, with the rest of the people who call themselves Democrats, call themselves champions of the people. As one woman mentioned to me Sunday, the Republicans played the long game and won. It is up to us to play the long game and win back the losses. Long game indeed. I hope I live to see the transformation.
Doug Anderson is the author of the memoir Keep Your Head Down, as well as several collections of poetry, including The Moon Reflected Fire.
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