Something

In Memory Of

John Carbaugh, 1951-2020

Loyal Blog Follower

And Good Friend

R.I.P.

November 14, 2020

Cathedral City, California 

     Something really terrible happened in this country last week.  No, not what you’re thinking—you all know me better than that.  What happened was this:  over 72 million people—the second largest number of presidential voters in the history of this country—CHOSE to vote for Donald Trump.  Of their own free will, well over one-third of all the eligible voters in the United States voted for an unapologetically immoral, undemocratic, semi-literate, immature, utterly self-absorbed pathological liar, who foments racial hatred and bizarre conspiracy theories, panders to absurd religious beliefs, and rejects science and normal human progress in a way that would make a shit-covered medieval peasant in a Monty Python movie look like Einstein by comparison.

     In so doing, were these 72 million plus people—more than one in every five humans who inhabit this country—voting to stop a Hitler from becoming president?  Were they voting to prevent the next Stalin, or Kim Jong-Un, or Idi Amin, or Genghis Khan from taking control of our land and ripping our constitution to shreds?  Were they trying to stave off the coming of the Antichrist or the naked evil of Satan himself?  No; quite the opposite.  They were, instead, voting against a man who has ably demonstrated that he is capable of occupying the office, and has never done much worse than to be rather repetitive and hokey, and at times (certainly in my book) a bit too bipartisan.  Oh, and he's had some hair transplants and cosmetic surgery.  They were voting to reject the standard-bearer for a political party whose platform calls for affordable health care, cheaper education, racial justice, fairer taxation of the wealthy, ecological responsibility, international cooperation and leadership, and a well-organized effort to end the worse pandemic to plague the earth in over one hundred years--all ideas that his opponent and his party either explicitly rejected or neglected to carry out.

     Probably not since the days prior to the Civil War has such a large chunk of the American electorate deliberately opted to reject human decency and enshrine the degradation of human life.  And that was at a time when neither African Americans, nor Asians, nor Indians, nor women of any race or color could vote.  Just white men.  You'd think, given that fact, that the onus for the recent display of horrible bad judgment on the part of this very large segment of the American people would fall primarily and directly on the heads of the descendants of those same white males.  And you'd be mostly right, to be sure.  If you took out all the white men who voted for Trump, you'd be left with a much smaller number, and a more lopsided victory for Biden.  But a hell of a lot of white women voted for Trump, too.  And they didn't do it while holding their noses.  No sir.  They did it with the full-throated enthusiasm of drunken Harley mommas.

     The operative word in the analysis in the above paragraph, however, isn't "men," or "women," it's "WHITE."  Already, due to a delay in vote counting and tabulation in several states, the news media are falling all over themselves to come up with new filler in the form of obscure demographic factoids and statistics meant to alarm us and challenge what, for most thinking people, should be a simple application of logic in the light of history.  In part they are doing this in order to cover up for the fact that, for the second straight presidential election, they were substantially wrong in their predictions of the outcomes of the election.  Oh sure, they backed the right horse, but they picked him to win by half a furlong, not by a length.  And that, again, is because they were looking in all the wrong places for the answers--the keys, so to speak, to the situation.   For instance, we're being treated right now to articles about how the Black vote isn't monolithic, and how a "surprisingly" large number of Black men, in particular, voted for Trump.  But when you burrow into the numbers you find that the size of the majority of Black people, male and female, who voted for Biden was enormous--80-90 percent or more--far larger than the percentage of Latins or whites or Asians who voted for him.  And, as John Oliver put it so well in his last show, these Black people weren't doing so in order to give the stamp of approval, a ringing endorsement, to the elderly white guy at the top of the Biden-Harris ticket.  They were doing so for the best of all possible reasons, namely, pragmatism:  given the choice between two old white guys (which, let's face it, is almost always the choice), they voted for the one less likely to deliberately fuck them over.  Same with the Indians.  And same, to a lesser extent, with Latins (about whom more in a later posting).

     But quibbling about whether or not Black men, or Latins, or Asians, voted for Trump more than people might have expected them to is a big waste of time.  And by the same token, quibbling about what might have motivated the overwhelming majority of those 72 million voters to vote for Trump is also a fool's errand, when the answer is so simple.  Economics?  Hell no.  Trump didn't do jack shit for them economically, unless they were Wall Street sharks.  Health and safety?  Are you shitting me?  They're dropping like flies from a disease that loves to eat the old, the fat, and the dissolute.  No.  The reason almost all those people, male and female, voted for Trump is that they are scared shitless of Black people, and angry at their attempts to assert their equality with white people.  Trump voters voted for Trump because he validated their racism, their sense of white entitlement and supremacy, or, if they weren't quite white, their sense of entitlement to something more than Black people have ever had.  

     Assuming the transition of government goes as it should, people will soon be writing books, op-ed pieces, and high-toned magazine articles about what happened, and why.  And they'll be coming up with some weird-ass theories.  This is particularly ironic, because the only people literate enough or interested enough to read such things are the folks who voted for Biden, and they should already know the answer to why people voted for Trump.  HATRED OF BLACK PEOPLE.  Sorry, I don't think I can make it any more explicit.  

     Hillary Clinton put it best a few years ago when she was running for president--the people who favor Trump are a "basket of deplorables."  She caught hell for that, because, folks said, it cost her the election in key states where such deplorables might have been more likely to vote for her if they hadn't been insulted.  Well, first of all I don't believe that.  And second of all, fuck whether they were insulted.  Deplorables are deplorables.  They proved it in 2016 and they proved it in 2020.  For that matter, they proved it in the 1860s, and many other times along the way.  These people are irredeemable.  If you're thinking that we're going to "bind up the nation's wounds," and all that, think again.  We might harass the organized far-right using the FBI.  That would be good.  And we might bring about some tiny measure of police reform.  And we might teach ourselves more nuanced ways to look at the subjects of institutional and individual racism.  That, also, would be good, but it won't reach the people who voted for Trump.  We will never change their minds.  The only end to their beliefs is the grave.

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