The America We Want vs. the America We Have

This is us.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I am embarrassed to say that I’m stunned.

Of course I knew Trump could win. For most of this election cycle, I’ve even been resigned to the idea that he would win. But over the past few weeks, hope crept in. Kamala Harris ran such a great campaign. There was such unexpected energy around her. I was initially skeptical of anointing her to the role, but it felt so frictionless and unifying that I quickly segued into the “actually that was great” camp. And then she did everything right. She campaigned hard and in the right places. She said all the right things. She was smart and empathetic and funny. She was so clearly such a superior candidate to the brooding, angry, rambling autocrat on the other side.

And she lost.

In the coming days and weeks, you’ll read a lot about what Harris did wrong. And it’s true that no campaign or candidate is perfect. Some of those critiques will (rightly) extend out to the broader Democratic Party, and we should be asking why Dems are seeing such a significant voter backlash. The party has hemorrhaged working class voters. It has lost the confidence of even dedicated liberals. There is a party problem; I am just not convinced it’s a Kamala problem.

But we should also be asking why so many Americans were willing — even enthusiastic — to again vote for Donald Trump. This election isn’t an indictment of Kamala Harris; it’s an indictment of our nation.

America is not just one place. It’s a huge and diverse nation, and it’s frankly kind of unbelievable we’ve been able to hang it together for this long. Sometimes, this country does the incredible. And sometimes, it does the inconceivable. We’re a nation founded on slavery, that excluded the majority of the population from political participation and still called ourselves a democracy. And we’re a nation that has fomented movements for women’s rights, for racial justice, for LGBT equality. We’re a nation where a Black and South Asian woman, the daughter of immigrants, had a real shot at the presidency. And we’re a nation where she lost to a racist reality TV star.

We are a place in constant flux, and often in forward motion — and also a place that seems to return, again and again, to the darkest corners of our past.

I don’t have much encouragement today. I’m sad and angry and demoralized, and I’m not going to write out a bunch of platitudes about how we need to fight on, even though of course we do (maybe those will come tomorrow). Mostly I feel a deep sense of betrayal and displacement. I’m trying to remind myself that America’s best moments are us, too. But so are its worst. A country led, again, by President Donald Trump: This is us. This is America.

I’m giving myself (and you) permission to wallow a little bit, to look squarely at what just happened and say: This is awful, and it is going to have awful consequences, the scale of which we cannot yet even conceive. Maybe tomorrow I’ll pick myself back up, or at least remember that America is also what we make it. What we’ve made so far, well — the reviews are decidedly mixed. But maybe we can make something else.

xx Jill