Since yesterday, I’ve been unable to eat or sleep, and I’ve been fielding angry, shocked texts from my friends across the country and my female relatives. I’m in Beckett mode here, as I’m sure many of us are: I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
Yesterday’s presidential election sucked for a lot of the people you know, in ways you may not even begin to be able to grasp, particularly if you are a straight white dude. Last night, as I watched a lifelong dream come crashing down in realtime, an orange know-nothing charlatan defeating an accomplished civil servant he had no business defeating, I was once again reminded of how much our country hates women and girls—and how that hatred was enabled electorally by the selfish act of protest-voting and insidious left-wing misogyny. If you cast a vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, I hope you’re happy knowing your symbolic act helped elect Trump, and that women, people of color, and LGBT folks will be paying the price. It’s telling that when I spoke out about this on Twitter, I was instantly harassed by a local noted misogynist, proving my point in the dumbest way possible.
So yeah, it was a shitty night.
It felt as bad as the 2000 and 2004 elections, but worse, because so many of us were anticipating the election of the first woman president, and because what we got instead was validation that America’s racism and sexism are alive and well.
What happened in this election shouldn’t have happened. But even as it did, I remembered the cover of our sister paper, The Stranger, that came out following the 2004 election. It’s a cover (and an accompanying story) that’s stayed with me, because just reading it gave me a great amount of solace during a horrible time. I remember seeing it after I’d spent election night crying in a room full of unhappy Democrats at the downtown Westin while we watched the returns come in as George W. Bush was winning reelection and the gubernatorial campaign I’d volunteered for was too close to call, a night not unlike yesterday (just swap the Convention Center and the candidates).
Here’s the text of the cover:
I was 17. I couldn’t vote yet but I had spent my summer working on two campaigns, phonebanking and quietly freaking out whenever I saw US Senator Patty Murray in person. The day before the election, I’d been making GOTV calls and waving signs for John Kerry above I-5 in Seattle. I’d had faith in the democratic process, and I was heartbroken when it failed us.
2016 is not 2004. George W. Bush didn’t even vote for Donald Trump. The threats we’re facing—to reproductive rights, to immigrants, to people of color, to the LGBT community and the makeup of the Supreme Court—are real, and they are immense. Trump is poised to do incalculable damage to our country and our democracy.
We are facing a much more difficult road than we planned for. So hug your friends, drink your drinks, and do whatever you need to do to get through the next few days. Take care of each other.
And remember that you live in Oregon. You live in the state that last night officially elected the nation’s first openly LGBT governor. You live in a state that values reproductive rights. You live in a state with marriage equality and legal weed. And we live in a country where Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, where she said in today’s concession speech, “To the little girls who are watching, never doubt that you are valuable… and deserving of every chance in the world to pursue your dreams.”
We can’t go on. We’ll go on.
Do not despair.
You stated that Hillary is an accomplished civil servant. Please tell me what, if any, good thing she has accomplished.
Thank you for this. It is much needed and appreciated.
It is really easy to forget that Hillary has flip flopped on LGBTQ issues here whole life. Not to mention her being in bed with big business, special interests, being a war hawk, etc. etc. Take a deep breath and let’s see how this plays out. Based on his past views (he was basically a moderate Democrat his entire life), I think we will be presently surprised by Trump. Yes, he had to run to the far right to win the primary, but there was no other way to do it in our current two party system and with the GOP having its contingent of tea party lunatics.
Just keep blaming everyone but the Democratic party.
“I think we will be presently surprised by Trump.”
1. Pleasantly
2. So says the dude who has consistently said that he didn’t support Trump and would not be voting for him.
3. Do you think there are any Trump supporters that would say “I think we will be PLEASANTLY surprised by Hillary” if she won the election?
4. You’ve taken cowardice to an all new level JTR. I mean really, who’s afraid to anonymously admit who they’re really voting for on the internet?
As a leftist I was hoping the only good thing to come out of Trump winning would be Hillary supporting Democrats (like Megan Burbank) would see the need to move the party away from neoliberals like Hillary to more progressive candidates who would be much more effective in addressing the growing economic anxiety in this country.
Was I wrong.
Not only did Megan Burbank not get it, she managed to to pull out the dumbest fucking reason why Hillary lost, that it was third parties that caused Hillary to lose.
Fortunately this argument falls apart immediately, if you consider that:
-If you gave Hillary every vote Jill Stein got, Hillary still would have lost the Electoral College.
-Turnout for Democrats was incredibly low. If she couldn’t get her own party to vote for her, how would she have gotten Greens and Libertarians (who already hate her)?
-Independent voters hated her too.
-If there were no 3rd parties most of those same people wouldn’t have voted or probably voted for Trump.
-How do you expect people who idolize Ayn Rand and complain about big government to vote for someone like Hillary who is the de facto face of the political establishment? That makes no sense. Hillary would have never gotten all or even half of Gary Johnson’s supporters if he didn’t run.
-Finally and most importantly, none of those votes are owed to Hillary. You don’t get to claim them. They were for candidates with much different platforms than Hillary and the fact that you think they belong to your candidate speaks volumes to just how much of a privileged white woman you are.
You know who lost the election for Hillary? Hillary. She was the one on the ticket. It was Hillary’s job to make her argument to be President, not Jill Stein’s or Gary Johnson’s job to do it for her. She was a weak candidate who had a history of being cozy with Wall Street, supporting trade deals that helped big business at the expense of labor, sitting on the board at Wall Mart and doing nothing about their bad labor practices, and flip flopping on every important issue of the past two decades. She was an establishment candidate in an anti-establishment election. She is the one to blame for Trump winning, not anyone else.
You’re better than this Merc. If you truly are a left leaning paper, start by not publishing articles like this. The election results were caused by economic anxiety and establishment politicians ignoring working class voters who have suffered from globalization, job automatization and declining union membership, not “protest-voting and insidious left-wing misogyny.”