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dragonlady7via http://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/152942778519:
I don’t know where to start to move on from how upset and frightened I am. This is the backlash from white supremacist America over eight years of having a black President, and it’s worse than I thought. Misogyny definitely (literally) trumps national security.
Trump himself is an actor, albeit not a good one– he’s not clear on what’s his persona and what’s his actual self, which I think is sort of the important thing with people who live the kind of life he does. So he’s pretty unstable, and it’s impossible to predict what he’ll do.
But the Republicans taking both houses is devastating. We’ll certainly have a very conservative Supreme Court justice now; there’s no way they’ll approve Obama’s suggestion to replace Scalia. So that’s strike one right off the bat; we won’t recover quickly and easily from this backlash.
The main ideological conflict between Right and Left is that the Right wants control– to enforce cultural-norm values, to punish dissidence, to “uphold values”, etc.– while the Left mostly wants protection– to protect less powerful groups from more powerful by legislation. (I saw a really mealy-mouthed namby-pamby analysis by a right-wing pundit theorizing that while the right wants security, the left wants– i don’t even know. But you can’t talk to me about security when you just basically elected Putin president.)
I don’t know where to start. But I know we have to protect each other. Yelling at third-party voters isn’t really going to help when the problem is that so many people voted for Trump that it mattered. That’s really what it boils down to. If it wasn’t a close race, third-party votes wouldn’t have mattered. If third-party votes were that crucial, it was because the race was too close. And most of Johnson’s voters were Republicans anyway.
The problem is that the gutted Voting Rights Act stripped away so many left-wing voters from the rolls. The Republicans suppressed the opposition vote. That’s not on third-party voters and yelling at them won’t help. I know they’re an infuriating statistic, but that’s not who we need to come for first. Don’t be mad at the casual misogynist who voted for Johnson; be mad at the dedicated racist who voted for Trump. Really.
The stock market is crashing and our economy’s going to seriously tank. The Republicans haven’t made good choices for our economy since, well, in my lifetime (we’re still crumbling away from the changes Reagan made when I was an infant, that drastically accelerated the wealth inequality that’s strangling our economy now). So we have to figure out how not to starve.
I have been furious since 2001 at the things that have been done in my name as an American, and now I can see that’s not going to get any better in the forseeable future. But I guess we’ll have to figure out what to do about it. Trusting in the system and trying to effect change through doing our civic duties isn’t going to cut it, clearly.
I mean. I’m going to get my pistol permit, buy some guns, and take up hunting, and actually prepare to become a subsistence forager for when the system inevitably collapses. But I don’t know what I’ll do about the rest in the meantime. I’m not an organizer and I’m not an ideas person. I don’t have a vision for how to proceed.
If the system will not allow us to protect less-powerful groups by legislation, then we’ll have to come up with a different way of doing it. I don’t know how, but I’m here, and I’m with all of you.
I don’t know where to start to move on from how upset and frightened I am. This is the backlash from white supremacist America over eight years of having a black President, and it’s worse than I thought. Misogyny definitely (literally) trumps national security.
Trump himself is an actor, albeit not a good one– he’s not clear on what’s his persona and what’s his actual self, which I think is sort of the important thing with people who live the kind of life he does. So he’s pretty unstable, and it’s impossible to predict what he’ll do.
But the Republicans taking both houses is devastating. We’ll certainly have a very conservative Supreme Court justice now; there’s no way they’ll approve Obama’s suggestion to replace Scalia. So that’s strike one right off the bat; we won’t recover quickly and easily from this backlash.
The main ideological conflict between Right and Left is that the Right wants control– to enforce cultural-norm values, to punish dissidence, to “uphold values”, etc.– while the Left mostly wants protection– to protect less powerful groups from more powerful by legislation. (I saw a really mealy-mouthed namby-pamby analysis by a right-wing pundit theorizing that while the right wants security, the left wants– i don’t even know. But you can’t talk to me about security when you just basically elected Putin president.)
I don’t know where to start. But I know we have to protect each other. Yelling at third-party voters isn’t really going to help when the problem is that so many people voted for Trump that it mattered. That’s really what it boils down to. If it wasn’t a close race, third-party votes wouldn’t have mattered. If third-party votes were that crucial, it was because the race was too close. And most of Johnson’s voters were Republicans anyway.
The problem is that the gutted Voting Rights Act stripped away so many left-wing voters from the rolls. The Republicans suppressed the opposition vote. That’s not on third-party voters and yelling at them won’t help. I know they’re an infuriating statistic, but that’s not who we need to come for first. Don’t be mad at the casual misogynist who voted for Johnson; be mad at the dedicated racist who voted for Trump. Really.
The stock market is crashing and our economy’s going to seriously tank. The Republicans haven’t made good choices for our economy since, well, in my lifetime (we’re still crumbling away from the changes Reagan made when I was an infant, that drastically accelerated the wealth inequality that’s strangling our economy now). So we have to figure out how not to starve.
I have been furious since 2001 at the things that have been done in my name as an American, and now I can see that’s not going to get any better in the forseeable future. But I guess we’ll have to figure out what to do about it. Trusting in the system and trying to effect change through doing our civic duties isn’t going to cut it, clearly.
I mean. I’m going to get my pistol permit, buy some guns, and take up hunting, and actually prepare to become a subsistence forager for when the system inevitably collapses. But I don’t know what I’ll do about the rest in the meantime. I’m not an organizer and I’m not an ideas person. I don’t have a vision for how to proceed.
If the system will not allow us to protect less-powerful groups by legislation, then we’ll have to come up with a different way of doing it. I don’t know how, but I’m here, and I’m with all of you.
