The Divided States of Trumpistan

For years, I joked about it in my Intro Psych classes. “In Trump’s America, anything is possible,” I said in my best impression of a gravelly voice of doom, and it nearly always got a few smatterings of cheap laughter, the currency of community college instructors everywhere. But the more I would run through the content, from discussions of intrapersonal intelligence to an examination of motivational needs such as the need for power, the validity of Trump the President started to, well, trump the validity of Trump the Reality TV Star or Trump the Ill-Suited Billionaire. Just last week, I told one of my night classes to get used to the words “President Donald Trump,” poorly straddling the expanse of my conscious denial of the possibility with a deeper evidence-based understanding of what was about to happen.

And now, here we are.

It’s really the uncertainty that gnaws. Not so much for the nearly 47% of Americans (shades of Mitt ’12) that didn’t vote at all, caught at that grim intersection of low skills and low challenge that drives apathy, about which one can never be more certain. Instead, it’s the questions for nearly everyone that this uncertainty brings.

Are the 50+ million Americans who voted for Trump all racist and sexist? I don’t believe that for an instant. But are some of them? In the words of a future Trump cabinet member, you betcha. And this shabby avatar of beliefs that I doubt even he fully believes has already enabled the worst of us to be emboldened and empowered, like a white sheet suddenly pulled off one’s head. Or, in some cases, suddenly placed on one’s head. There’s no uncertainty there.

What I am also certain of is that the battle for the future has already been won. It was the kids who wanted to stay in the European Union, but it was the adults, scared and angry and too unable to articulate those feelings into anything but a retreat into a simulacra and simulation of a 20^th Century Britain that never existed in the first place, who voted to leave. And it was the Kids in America (WHOA WHOA!) who overwhelmingly rejected the politics of hate and division, while their white parents and grandparents rejected the most qualified candidate in American history for a bullshit artist. While it was a victory deferred, everyone knows what’s coming. We only have to look to California to see what the rest of the country will look like in a generation, when those kids will be a bit older and those adults will be a bit deader.

But in the meantime, it’s gonna hurt. It will hurt those with the privilege to not be drastically impacted but the empathy to feel for those that will. It will hurt those already marginalized, and swell their numbers further. It will be Reaganomics and the Bush Doctrine combined, but without the intellectual heft behind either. It’s all the stuff we can imagine as well as the Rumsfeldian turn of phrase “unknown unknowns.” And while it’s true that the kids are coming, it’s certain that the adults might not leave them with much of a world.

At least we on the wrong side of this vote are certain what to do next: Produce for the kids what they need to win the future. Get the numbers and the ideas and the products and policies into the current political system and framework, flawed as it may be, for the next go-round. And on the day-to-day front, provide succor and support to individuals and institutions who help empower the powerless. The pendulum may swing back sooner than we think, but we must be careful not to lose our heads in the process. Even if it wasn’t as inspirational as hoped, it’s true that we are stronger together, and together we can put the dream into action.