I believe the thought on everybody’s mind as they watched the world fall apart Tuesday night was: “We fucked up.”
Wrong. You reading this? You’re a college student. You did everything right. You made Facebook posts about Bernie Sanders and used hashtags and tried to get people to participate in their democracy, and then the country made fun of you for giving a shit.
The Democratic National Committee, the Clinton political machine—they’re the ones to blame. Contrary to all empirical evidence, they said: This election is free. It doesn’t matter that Hillary Clinton is the least-liked Democratic candidate in decades. We can’t lose.
Well, guess what. Here we are. And you know what? Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have catastrophically lost this election like Hillary Clinton just did.
Trump has appeal. Trump is an outsider. Trump is fun, he’s a change of pace, he’s a middle finger to the people his supporters hate. He’s a brick through the window; Hillary is a window.
From the very beginning, pundits called this election “The Year of the Outsider.” Yet in the Year of the Outsider, the DNC buried the Outsider, in favor of an Insider.
Never mind being undemocratic, immoral, illegal—they’re just plain stupid. They couldn’t figure out how to beat Donald Trump, the biggest buffoon ever nominated for President. They got handed a sword and spurned it for the penknife. The big, expert strategy for the most important presidential race in decades was to run rice porridge vs. the Big Mac and then talk about how bad the Big Mac is for your health. In the United States of America. What part of this makes sense?
No, this isn’t your fault. People are going to tell you it is. People are going to say: it’s the millennials’ fault. If the millennials had just sucked it up and voted for Hillary, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Except that argument is totally stupid. Let’s flip it: how about, it’s everyone else’s fault. It’s Gen X’s fault for not bending to Bernie Sanders.
Here’s what could have happened, supposing Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee for President. He had a platform that shared the best ideas of Jill Stein’s, and he had overwhelming support among Gary Johnson’s core demographic of white, millennial men. Bernie Sanders would have absorbed the massive third-party vote with ease.
Why couldn’t Hillary Clinton do that? I could talk about demographics or numbers, but in truth, the answer is simple: people hate Hillary Clinton. They didn’t like her; they didn’t want to vote for her; they found somebody else to vote for. That’s what happened Tuesday. It’s obvious, but all the people being paid to notice it, couldn’t.
Think about all the people who let this happen: The DNC, the campaign donors, the Super PACs. If their goal was to stop Trump, like they claim it was, like everybody is telling me they were, then they would have actually listened to the American people who were excited about voting. They would have looked at the numbers, actually thought about it for a minute and made the dispassionate, logical decision to support Bernie Sanders. But they didn’t do that.
And you know why? Because they wanted to protect their sorry asses. They stood to personally benefit from a Clinton presidency, and they fought for it, at the expense of the American people, and, by proxy, the entire rest of the world. (I believe the term is: corruption.) They wanted to keep their jobs; they wanted to keep their power.
Well, maybe they never deserved their jobs to begin with. Maybe they suck at their jobs, and I think they do, because Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States of America, so whatever the genius plan was that we were too stupid to figure out, it didn’t work. Not even close. We lost the House, and the Senate, and we let the Republicans obstruct President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination. Hillary’s campaign spent $500 million more than Trump’s and achieved zero percent of the result.
Nice one. Way to go.
The fact that I ever wrote an article, ever spoke a word to anybody actually trying to convince them to vote for the Democratic candidate for president is insane. I live in a super-bubble. Voting for Democrats is supposed to be a no-brainer for me, and for everyone I know.
But it wasn’t, not for anyone. In an ultimatum between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, between mitigated evil and absolute evil, the choice is clear. But if you ask an entire country of overworked, under-appreciated people to merely maintain the status quo instead of having it get much, much worse: they’re not going to do it. They’re going to stay at home, or they’re going to vote third party, or they’re going to write in Harambe.
That feeling you had in your stomach Wednesday morning probably felt something like: “everything is fucked.” I think your stomach is right.
Think about women, think about Latinos, think about Asians, Muslims, LGBT people. Think about the imminent Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice. Think about how many Americans are going to lose health insurance; think about how many Americans are literally going to die. Think about how many Syrians are going to die. Think about how few people will benefit off the backs of so many. And we, the greatest country in the world!
Again, this isn’t your fault. You were in the right, the whole time. You shook your signs and influenced your peers and actually went out and voted. You got excited about something bigger than yourself. You wanted to make a change. Then a voice from above crashed down on you and call you spoiled, lazy, coddled, weak, unimportant, unrealistic, and unviable.
That’s what you get. That’s what you get for trying to make a difference. This isn’t the America you wanted, this isn’t the America you fought for, but it’s the America you got. And you will suffer through it until things change.
