Chaos Reigns: How Everyone Was Wrong and How Donald J. Trump Took The Heartland
Chaos Reigns: How Everyone Was Wrong and How Donald J. Trump Took The Heartland
by Matthew Erman
This is a hefty undertaking, one I’m not technically qualified to do — I did not go to school for political science or polling or navigating through political trenches, which in many ways is an apt metaphor for this entire season; wandering blindly through tight corridors with weapons drawn, hoping if you run into an enemy you inflict a big enough wound you never have to deal with them again. I choose the painting above, Francisco Goya’s Fight with Cudgels to illustrate this piece because it looks how it currently feels. Two people, beating each other with cudgels in a swamp over an already dead horse. That’s how it has felt the past three months, let alone the past year. A volatile, and for everyone involved, terrifying and hopeless ordeal — wondering who was going to run the world for the next four years.
A misogynistic “madman” or a machiavellian “criminal.”
Unpacking what happened last night, is not for me to do — I don’t have the skillset to parse through numbers and data to determine exactly when and where Trump’s rhetoric became ideology and now, a real revolution — and also I don’t think that is helpful or interesting. It happened and it happened because a huge portion (the hugest actually) felt disenfranchised, put out and angry so much so that they wanted to destroy the system as we felt we knew it. I say that because at the end of the day and barring some unforeseen ‘thing’ the system remains in place — we’ve just swapped the sides of the disenfranchised.
And that’s the savage truth of it all, in my opinion at least — not much will change for a vast swath of the American people, because not much has changed for the otherside. Social progress sure, but now it comes at a cost or even scarier to some, a rollback.
We’ve taken the problems of women, the LGBT community, the black, hispanic and immigrant populations of this country and put the problems of rural and working class America ahead of theirs, their struggles with perceived economic disaster and joblessness have ‘trumped’ the social issues of women’s rights, LGBT rights and the plight of our minority populations. This is not a new thing though, we’ve done this since this country’s inception.
I don’t know if this was the “right” thing to do — or even if it was the best course of action and neither do the people that voted for this outcome, the farmers and the union workers, the women of all socioeconomic backgrounds, every inconceivable marginalized group that doesn’t fit the “normal” definition of “marginalized group” put their faith in Donald Trump to do…well, no one is sure. Perhaps, that is the scariest part of all this — the uncertainty. It’s a large part why he won — it is chaos.
In his victory speech this morning — Trump said, “Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of divisions. It is time for us to come together as one united people.”
I think everyone agrees with this sentiment but — it is not a real sentiment. It is very far from the reality of things, which sees this country far more divided than it has been in a very long time. Longer than I have been alive. We are living in two countries at odds with each other. Two growing bodies inside a smaller mass. Two sects of people with vastly different ideologies and opinions and in a time gone by — this would be healthy. This would lead to discourse and thoughtful debate but instead we have both sides with their ears plugged and eyes gouged out screaming and wishing for the sky to fall.
And the sky is falling, at least for the moment. This process was such an upheaval of the political norms that the Dow Futures nosedived 800 points at the time of Donald taking key states. For reference, six days after the World Trade Center fell the Dow Jones had dropped 684 points and the day after the Dow Futures dropped 670. Last night was seen in the eyes of the world economy as a similar disaster to 9/11. That’s not hyperbole either.
[editor’s note] As of right now, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has surged 300 points in the wake of Donald’s election. The Dow Futures have taken the brunt of the fall, dropping 800 points overnight. Percentage wise, it is not close to the drop in 9/11.
Trump won because rural and suburban America do not share or have the same problems as inner city America. He took Ohio with a difference of nearly half one million votes. These votes came from normally Democratic areas like Ashtabula and Lorain. Trump won 83 out of 88 Ohio counties and it is because a great pain exists everywhere, across the board that is indescribable, unimaginable and in my honest words — unrepairable. We focus on which wound bleeds more and that limb is wrapped in bandages while our other wounds fester and fall into ruin.
This is our country — a shambling corpse of painful lesions only ever having enough resources to save the most important parts of itself, neglecting the others. We are all to blame because in our victory laps all the social progress this country has made in the past eight years, we’ve left rural America in the dark.
The polling was wrong, the predictions were wrong, the media was wrong and ultimately we were wrong and the most frustrating part is that in the end, we may never know the answer.
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