Democratic Doldrums

 

 

            This is the last thing I intend to write about the aftermath of our American presidential election for a while, but so far, so good.  I am referring here to the public reaction to its outcome.  The outcome has left millions disappointed, hundreds of thousands deeply distressed, and probably some tens of thousands in something approaching actual medical trauma.  I speak literally.  On Sunday our parish priest, speaking carefully but with obvious sincerity, spoke of the pastoral imperative of negotiating profound distress among communities united by a common faith yet divided by strongly held political disagreements.  The infliction of psychic pain on such a large swath of our national population is no laughing matter, yet so far as I know there has not been any significant civil disturbance of the sort I was anticipating.  ( I had been anticipating that Vice-President Harris was going to win the election, and that indeed some of her opponent’s most extreme partisans might well misbehave.)

 

            Let me be clear, as the losing contender in the recent election repeatedly said by way of preface to some opacity or other.  I need to make clear my sincere belief that the world would be ever so much better a place if everybody thought exactly as I do.  It is inexplicable to me that any sensible person might not think that way already.  But it turns out that there actually are these other people who do not share my views.  Lots of them.  Who knew?

 

            I read that among the “losers” of the election we must include the “legacy” press.  I must come clear and admit that I don’t actually know just exactly what the “legacy press" is, either from the point of view of legators or legatees, but I deduce that in practical terms it means the New York Times, the Washington Post, and perhaps the Los Angeles Times. While one might have thought that a hotly contested national presidential election would provide sufficient external or objective matter for any journal to try to deal with, the latter two of these papers made themselves the story by deciding not to publish an official institutional endorsement of either of the candidates from our two major political parties.

 

            A person who has loomed large in our political thinking for the past several months is a man named Robert Hubbell, who was brought to our attention by one of our old friends with whom we joined, along with another couple of close friends, in a monthly “Dinner for Six”, the main extra-gastronomic purpose of which was to review the political news, which consisted mainly in our exhaustive exploration of the latest enormities of Donald J. Trump.  Robert Hubbell is (I think) a retired lawyer living in the Los Angeles area.  He is energetic, industrious, highly intelligent.  He is a strong writer and a persuasive speaker, the indefatigable producer of his own political newsletter.  Mr. Hubbell issues a near daily political memorandum (the “Hubbell Report”), which is available on the Internet.  He is a strong supporter of the Democratic party, “up and down the ballot” as he often says.  He has particular expertise in legal matters.

 

            I presume Mr. Hubbell, in his clearly expressed unhappiness with the results of the election, probably represents in unusually articulate form, the attitudes of many other.  In one recent post he spent a certain amount of time adjudicating the linguistic distinction between the nouns resistance and opposition.  Which of the two is the right one to describe the proper stance that must now be adopted by right thinking people with regard to President Trump and his policies?  He is inclined to the former, and why not?  But in my opinion Mr. Hubbell has somewhat lost the plot.  He is insistent that the election was a very close thing.  I won’t enter a dispute as to what it takes to be a blowout.  But Trump won by a margin of eighty-six electoral votes and several million individual votes.  Harris won perhaps five states that don’t have seacoasts.  (Remember the term “coastal elites”?)  She lost every so-called “battleground” state.   Both campaigns spent an unconscionable amount of money in the pursuit of victory, but the “war chest” of the loser—more than a billion dollars—was truly obscene.  Thus she was essentially creamed by an out-spent, foul-mouthed, mendacious, and often incoherent convicted felon vociferously opposed by nearly all the elite cultural arbiters of the nation.  How, one might ask, could this happen? And one might well answer that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves, otherwise known as the demos, the people, who exercise their awkward rule by the awkward system called democracy (rule by the demos.).