Trump Won Because We Wanted Him To
I should clarify what I mean by we. I mean the United States as a society. I know we have micro-societies, and it’s hard to speak of a group of people so numerous and diverse as one society, but our national elections ask us to that, as does our foreign policy, and even our domestic policy, which operates at the federal level in many instances.
I certainly didn’t want Trump to win. I spent more time and money than I really had on HRC’s campaign. In the last few weeks of the campaign I staffed telephones and sent increasingly frantic sums of money into the campaign. I had a feeling we would lose. The parents of my white students at the mostly white community college I adjunct at told their kids Trump was our next president. They’re a pretty reliable barometer. We’re also about sixty miles from NYC and in a creative writing class all the kids stood up for gun ownership. I knew we were in trouble. At the college I teach at full-time that educates many minority, marginalized, and immigrant children the story was different.
By we I don’t mean the white supremacists, the uneducated gullible folks, or the rapacious 1%’ers who were always going to vote for Trump. I mean the people who ultimately voted for Hillary but made unpleasant noses about everything about her leading up to the election. The Bernie fans who put her under a microscope and looked at Bernie through thick a thick Vaseline haze that obscured all his flaws. They still are. They guys who high five each other over the “revolutionary fervor” they’ve kept since their student days even though they have tenured teaching positions or other secure jobs, take many trips abroad for pleasure and relaxation, retire, early, and jet around the country at whim. They are exploited by the 1%, and they are not going to take it anymore, they proclaim. Bernie is still the man. Leave aside that their simple Marxism failed every place it was tried, and if I started talking about Bernie’s personal flaws I would never get back to the subject at hand, these people preferred a Trump presidency at an unconscious level.
By we I mean the tepid Hillary supporters who wanted to be fair, who wanted to consider all points of view, those who didn’t like her voice, her clothes, her shoes, her relationship with her husband — things that presidential candidates are always judged by right? The faint-hearted folks who were swayed by every morsel of Cambridge Analytica planted propaganda, who needed to be convinced over and over again that the Clinton foundation was not robbing everyone blind, that she wasn’t a Wall Street shill, who forgot all her work for the Children’s Defense fund. One friend insisted that her father was a doctor. He wasn’t. Another insisted that it couldn’t be true that she worked in a factory in Alaska. She did. And so on. Yes, okay, Hillary, but …. was their attitude.
By we I mean the media. Yup. New York Times I mean you. The news outlets that gave Trump more space and fewer negative articles than they gave a former New York senator and hugely popular and successful secretary of state. The press who reported every raspy throat Hillary had, but looked at the Donald as a cash cow in terms of selling copy. What is the saying? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
By we I mean people like Comey who defied law and protocols to release the final email story that gave the election to someone unqualified, even though the laptop under consideration had nothing to do with HRC’s activities. Timing is all, and the timing hurt plenty.
By we I mean Joe Biden who seemed to side with Bernie and who publicly wondered aloud about HRC’s fitness and made it clear that he should have been given the nomination, even though he had never won a primary challenge. I mean Obama, too, who kept his knowledge of the Russia scandal a secret in a deal with Mitch McConnell.
I mean that Hillary lost because as a society our collective will was that she would. Why? You will feel fatigue if I say misogyny, but hear me out. As a women’s studies professor I know that patriarchy is a relatively new feature of human life, although most people consider it a constant social arrangement. Patriarchy grew up with the advent of agriculture that brought with it the discovery of paternity after roughly 90% of human life had already been lived. Agriculture also brought with it private property, so amassing land and wealth became a human pastime. In an agricultural economy children are assets as workers, so control over female sexuality to ensure ownership of workers arose.
Such huge cultural paradigms develop over time and wane over time. Agriculture is no longer the dominant occupation of most of the human race, and in most cases, children are an economic liability, not an economic asset. Therefore, patriarchy must wane and disappear eventually since the economic conditions that created and supported it no longer exist. That is, if the human race doesn’t destroy itself first. But right now, patriarchy is in its death-throes, particularly in the United States.
We wanted Hillary to lose because the devil you know seems better than the devil you don’t. Because we lacked the will as a society (that we see in some European societies) to accept the passing of a social organization and its supports, such as sexist passages in the Bible, the unconscious will of the society was to defeat a female candidate any cost. We see our continuing embrace of patriarchy in our absurd acceptance of guns and our adulation of violence in our art. Quite simply, we wanted HRC to lose because we will afraid to try anything else.
The shameful spectacle of children in cages represents the degradation of children as valuable commodities, but it also asserts the patriarchal entitlement to control the lives of all children. It cuts women’s maternal instincts to the quick and makes most women (and many, many men) suffer at the actions of their government. We see the waning of patriarchy in the abandonment of children and the cold, dead hands of patriarchy in the sufferings of children.
I am fortunate. I know men who were, and still are, full-throated supporters of HRC, unswayed by residual unconscious fears of loss of power. But increasingly I am parting company with former male friends who identify with patriarchy. They simple want to be the ones on top, which they don’t feel they are. They feel noble in their championship of the white, male, working class. One friend recently mourned the death of Anthony Bourdain but not Kate Spade, even though Bourdain was from an elite background and originally attended Vassar. His tough-guy talk appealed to them, and gourmet food did not strike them as frivolous in the way handbags did. Well, they’ve never been working women without pockets. We are seeing a resurgence in racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny that were all predicted and predictable, but this is a small, price to pay for the paradigm we’re used to. I miss these friends. I like male energy. But I can assure you. I didn’t want Trump to win and I resent those who did. I don’t want children in cages.