I am feeling slightly less dire about America this morning. washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost…
SLIGHTLY.
There are individual democrats about whom I'm enthusiastic: @RepJayapal and @TeresaCMosqueda, for example, but by and large I view the Democratic party as a thing you stuff into seats to keep out Republicans.
Which is to say: I mostly vote Democrat because I'll take useless over malicious every time. I'm a pragmatist.
And I tend to assume that the main difference between me and a Republican is how we view *Republicans,* not how we view Democrats: I think Republicans are malicious and they think they're virtuous. I assume we both think most Dems are spineless and useless.
So what was despair-inducing for me in the presidential election was mostly that I think Trump DOES differ from your average Republican in that there's not even a fig leaf of virtue there. Even if you're evangelical, even if you're a fiscal conservative, etc.
Like, the only way you could view this walking cloud of ego-piqued malice as "good" is if you're consciously and enthusiastically white supremacist and misogynist. But he won. He won with evangelicals, despite shitting on them. He won despite being a financial disaster.
So Trump raised the specter of Maybe There Is No Bottom. Maybe we actually are so bigoted as a society that there's nothing a politician can say that will disqualify them from office.
And this election, which reads as a slap to the Trump administration, argues mildly to the contrary. Maybe there is a bottom to how much open hate we'll tolerate in a leader. MAYBE.
Of course, the one virtue to the last year has been that it's dragged a lot of ugly stuff into the open for privileged people (like me) who knew it was there but didn't see how interwoven with every strand of society it is.
That's the problem with having a bottom limit to who you'll elect, with having there be things a politician Just Can't Say and still get elected: it's part of hiding the problem. It allows us to believe it's not there because we won't SAY it.
So unless that bottom limit gets raised A LOT--into not only can you not SAY certain things, but you must actively work to end the attitudes that make people THINK them--it's a screen of civility that still lets people get disadvantaged and even killed.
I think the fact that so many of the Democrats elected were people of color and LGBT people is a positive step against that--it's not just a bunch of white cis men and women who are going to publicly clutch their pearls about racism and homophobia and sexism in our government.
But while it IS a good thing that the elections delivered a slap to Trump--okay, dude, actual open fascism IS a step too far--and yes, THANK HEAVEN that voters are wiling to say it's too far, I feel like my sense of relief is indication of how out of whack the Overton Window is.
