Today I will once again invoke my "Howard Cosell rule." That means today's post won't involve bicycles or bicycling.
By now, you know what happened last night. During the previous two Presidential elections, I admonished friends, co-workers and other people I knew not to be so confident that Donald Trump "didn't have a chance" to win. Ironically enough, I was, in my own way, pointing out exactly what the right-wing pundits and media accuse them of: not seeing anything outside of their liberal/New York/academic "bubble."
The first time, in 2016, I was accused of being "alarmist," "too sensitive" or even "paranoid" for expressing my fear of a Trump victory. Even in the 2020 contest, held during the worst of the COVID pandemic, I didn't think another Trump victory was beyond possibility: It seemed that his mistakes emboldened him, and his supporters, precisely because he seemed not to learn from them. Those same supporters believed Trump had a second term "stolen" from him and the Capitol riot was a "peaceful protest."
Some of my friends and co-workers who couldn't or wouldn't see the world (or, more precisely, the USA) beyond the Hudson simply didn't understand someone in a moribund small town or rural area who saw his (or, in rarer cases, her or their) place in this country threatened by immigrants or people of color. Or why they believed that they were losing their rights as women, racial minorities and LGBTQ people were gaining those same rights.
I could, because I was once one of those white males who believed I was being told to "shut up and pay your taxes" so that others could "sponge off" the system and, through "affirmative action," was being denied jobs that went to people who were less qualified than I was. And throughout my life I have remained in contact, partly through family ties, with people who believe people like me and others different from themselves are getting "special privileges" when they are simply afforded the same consideration for education, jobs and other things cisgender heterosexual Caucasian Christian men (and, to a lesser degree, women) could take for granted, even if they weren't wealthy.
My views have changed, in part because of affirming my gender identity (what some people still call "gender transition" or "gender change"). Donald Trump's hostility toward transgender people is obvious. Now that he is older and less inhibited than he was during his previous term, I fear that he will have less, if any, compunction about targeting us in ways that Ron de Santis and Vivek Ramaswamy couldn't envision--or, at least, couldn't execute because they don't have the governmental and other resources available to them that Trump will enjoy as President. He has talked about ending protections equality for us. And too many of his supporters simply hate us, whether for religious reasons or because of their views about "masculinity" and "femininity." Worst of all, as we saw in the Capitol riots, they feel emboldened by his rhetoric and personality to commit violence against us, and anyone else they see as a threat to their world-view.
The last clause in the previous sentence, unfortunately, illustrates the political and intellectual climate of this country. I am old enough to remember when if you were of one party and debated someone from the other, you could at least have a fairly civilized discussion of economics, foreign policy, social issues or even the arts. Now it is a fight over your right to simply exist. And that is what I fear most about the upcoming Trump term: For me, and others like me, it will be simply about staying alive, much less out of prison or a mental hospital (to which we could be committed involuntarily).
I also fear that too many of my fellow Harris supporters will understand why she lost this election even less than they could have fathomed a Clinton defeat/Trump victory in 2016. That is the biggest reason--not the "low information voters" or people who "vote against their interests"--why Trump won again last night and why his second term could be more ominous than his first.
