A majority of white women - again - voted to cling on to white supremacy though many of them will hem and haw about their actual reasons. In fact, some pollsters were surprised - again - that this happened probably because those white ladies lied as they emerged from voting.
An overwhelming majority of white men sought to maintain the status quo. But nobody was caught by surprise over that revelation.
The election autopsy is happening once more and nobody is calling to ask why I voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Shouldn’t someone want to know my grievances for why I felt so compelled to throw out the incumbent after only four years?
Should I be screaming about ‘reverse discrimination’? Doesn’t anyone care about why I would vote against my self interest? We dissected disaffected blue collar workers for four years!
Why doesn’t the mainstream media care why an educated white male like me would vote against - and I am going to let Ed Yong, staff writer at The Atlantic encapsulate why I couldn’t wait to cast my ballot - all of the below, and then some:
No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”
The easy answer, of course, is that anyone with a pulse combined with a single brain cell could tell you that in 2016 a bunch of authoritarian-loving Americans voted for the most incompetent, but popular and litigious-happy, wannabe tyrant available, and now those of us, who love our country innately and love our government when it deserves it, want to right a sinking ship.
We are just crossing the starting line.
I am not going to dip back in to history that I didn’t live but I am going to tell my younger readers - once again - what the Republican Party and their leader are doing is unprecedented in my living memory. By this I mean, only Republican senators Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski have congratulated the president-elect on his electoral and popular vote win.
The rest of them are inciting insurrection while coddling the man-child.
Yes there were the ‘hanging chads’ in Florida in 2000, but when the election was officially called by the Supreme Court because the GOP did not want to keep counting ballots (it was December, after all), Al Gore conceded.
As an educated white male with a pulse and, at least, one lone brain cell, I’d wager that, if anything, the Americans who voted for change were the ones who were robbed because Senate races that would have made a difference in how the country will be run over the next four years were likely altered due to suppression, disenfranchisement and a dozen other ways Jim Crow laws live on. (And, as an aside, I will say that don’t you think if Democrats were trying to steal an election they would have made damn sure politicians like McConnell, Graham and Collins would not have been reëlected?)
The race has just started.
We have the first woman ever elected to serve in the White House. Imagine what that means to little girls - as well as little boys - everywhere! Role modeling has taken a hit over the past four years and I can only express my condolences to parents throughout the country. The future looks brighter.
I just learned Kamala Harris is not the first person of color to serve in the White House, but she is the first Black woman and, I haven’t checked this, possibly the first person with Asian heritage. For the record, Herbert Hoover’s vice president, Charles Curtis, was a Native American of the Kaw Nation in Kansas.
We are all tired. Tired of the resisting. Tired of the pandemic. Tired of the navel gazing necessary to get through each day. Tired of politics. Tired of having to sift through garbage online. Tired of the pettiness of a man whose only mode is to attack and deny and prevaricate and shift the blame.
Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are not going to remake our world.
That’s going to be up to us.