This week’s election makes me think of my Dad.
He loved this country, in spite of having been born abroad, and never having actually lived here.
His family was liberated by American troops entering Shanghai in 1945. He would tell us stories of hitching rides with them to school, having them attend his Bar Mitzvah (which, if memory serves, was held on an American ship). I grew up with stories of his love of America, and went on frequent visits to the country less than 50 miles to our south. It undoubtedly played a big role in my decision to move here, nearly three decades ago, a story I covered in this post back in 2016, on the eve of another monumentally surprising election involving a certain orange-faced fellow.
Like many sentimentally America fanboys of the past half-century (he always had far more affinity for the U.S as he did for Canada), my Dad probably fit into the camp of center-right folks, those Eisenhower Chamber of Commerce Republicans that are now considered an endangered species (hello, Liz Cheney). As I came into my own and did some intensive historical reading, I drifted away from my Dad’s worldview. But never entirely, for his was one that had some ability to see both sides. When he watched with me the Jon Stewart interview in 2010 on the 9/11 first responders struggling to afford healthcare, he was appalled, and said the thing that sticks in my mind to this day:
“This isn’t the country I fell in love with.”
My father died in 2012, years before that fateful election of eight years back. He’d known about Donald Trump, having taken me to the then newly-opened Trump Tower in New York City back in 1983. We were bedazzled by the gold, marble, and the leather shop in the lobby that made the place smell like money. I don’t know if he thought about Trump that much, other than as a New York real estate developer with a bit of an ego problem (even back then, his name was on everything).
Dreams from my father
My Dad was always lukewarm on Obama (something we did spar about) but I doubt, had he lived, that he’d have been happy to see what became of America’s conservative party in the aftermath. Like most moderate conservatives of the age, my Dad was pro-free trade; he delighted in the opportunities NAFTA granted North Americans, including a class of work visa that helped make possible my own entry into this country. Having lost relatives in the Nazi Holocaust, he was a front-and-center liberal internationalist who believed in the global pax americana world order.
Even his moderately socially conservative views—a product of the Mad Men era—shifted over the years; at first, it took him a bit to open up to the LGBTQ thing. Eventually, though, he came to embrace not only who I am, but went even further than that: he presided at the wedding of two of his closest friends, a queer couple of many decades.
For so long I identified “conservative” with “my father.” This may have been exacerbated growing up in liberal Montreal, Canada, where he often prided himself on being the Churchillian contrarian, terming himself “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.” It wasn’t until I worked in Middle America, at a financial firm founded by evangelical Christians, that I realized that, well, he wasn’t all that conservative after all.
Obviously, movements and ideas shift over the years—it’s hard to believe “conservative” once meant embracing the divine right of kings—but I doubt my Dad would find much to revere or admire about today’s latter-day brand of conservatism, variously dubbed Trumpism or ethno-nationalist populism. In fact, it would probably freak him the fuck out. Because, Nazis. I doubt even Trump’s apparent support of Israel would move him all that much. There’s just too many other specifics that would turn him off.
The morning after
Given that, so many of us in the progressive camp are left wondering:
What. The. Eff. Just. Happened.
Trump had long since lost those Chamber of Commerce conservatives. Both Liz Cheney and Cheney pére. Scores of his previous advisors from his first term in office. David Frum. Bret Stephens. He was painted, variously, as racist, incoherent, unhinged, fascistic. Given all that conservative intransigence, it was amazing that the race was even considered close; but given that, we were all bracing for days and days of delayed counts, recounts, legal challenges…basically 2020 all over again.
In the end, it was all moot. Because the orange man won in, what by American terms can only be described as a blowout. An unambiguous win in every swing state. A significant popular vote majority—the first for a Republican President in two decades (I was around the last time it happened, in a very sullen Boston the night of John Kerry’s loss). Most likely both houses of Congress. Plus an extant conservative Supreme Court majority, care of his last term, that led to the downfall of Roe v. Wade and nationally legal abortions in this country. Heck, he’s begun winning over the very minorities he’s been known to denigrate.
Pundits way above my pay grade are already poring over the specifics: Kamala wasn’t as strong a candidate as was needed against the charismatic Trump (say what you want about him, he has a certain Eric Cartman energy about him); the economy weighed on voters more than was given credit; the Dems were feckless, shortsighted, and far too obsessed with the woke mind virus to care about issues affecting everyday people. The list goes on.
One thing’s clear: America’s not like a parliamentary democracy. The ones where snap elections can happen anytime, last for six weeks, and frequently involve voters picking the none-too-charismatic leader they dislike the least. I’ve often noted that for Americans, voting for a President is a bit like appointing a monarch. There needs to be more there there than simple political know-how. I maintain that both Hillary and Kamala would have made legendary, kick-ass Prime Ministers…but that’s not the job they were up for.
The road ahead
Maybe because it’s the second time it’s happened, but the feeling this time around seems a bit less shock-and-awe and a bit more sorrowful resignation. The world feels a lot more fractious than it did in 2016, when Brexit was still fresh and Facebook still revered. In reaction to the last Trump term, progressives reacted assertively, though some now think they overcorrected.
I take their point, but do not fully concede it. As a young (misguided) conservative, I, too, was banged around a bit by what was then called the Politically Correct, in college back in the 1990s. Even though I’ve come around to many of their views, I recognize a certain smug, snarky, shrill stridency in progressive circles that is off-putting to many. Double that up with the fact that the once affordable-ish big cities where liberals make their homes have now become Gilded Age monuments to wealth inequality.
It must be easy to lump all of it together—establishment conservatives; woke libs; hardcore urbanists denigrating the suburbs; students looking at the Israel/Gaza war like it’s some post-colonial flavor of Black Lives Matter (it’s not); people you knew as sweet little boys now pierced, tattooed, and asking to be called they/them—and say “fuckit; the orange guy’s a better choice.”
Personally, I feel exhausted. It feels like almost every election in this country since 2000—practically the whole time I’ve been here—is trumpeted with the melodramatics of the Rebel assault on the Death Star. Every one is the most consequential of our lives. Every one foments wary triumph or terrified soul-searching. Comparisons are often made between our times and Europe in the 1930s. Except the 1930s ended—albeit with the greatest global conflagration in history, one whose aspects even today read like fiction: city-sized factories for extermination; firebombing whole metropolises to rubble; atomic-powered doomsday weapons. But even romantics of World War II like my Dad knew that kind of war, even if we somehow perversely wanted it again, can never again be fought. With the nuclear genie out of the bottle, it almost feels like we’re living in an eternal time loop where it’s always 1930s Europe—or 1850s America, for that matter.
How to convince the unconvinceable
We can’t give up on what we believe in, abandon the notion of trying. That goes double for us progressives, for whom the belief in a better world is literally the animating factor behind our belief system. It’s why we’ll never adopt the conservative belief that things can never get better—except for your little tribe building walls around everything. Or that we must stand athwart history yelling “stop.” We understand the world only spins forward. While populists like Trump promise to make things Great Again, they never really do. Beneath all the drain-the-swamp bluster is a lot of elitism-as-usual politics, and temporarily-inconvenienced-millionaire rhetoric; aggrieved Americans might believe it’s working for them, but really little of substance gets done.
The biggest homework for progressives, I think, is to learn the lessons of the past three decades and properly apply them. Presidential candidates need to be incandescent, charismatic as well as wonkishly smart. New ideas about gender and love need to connect with people who only know old ideas. One early gay writer I once read said that prejudice against LGBTQs will dissipate once everyone knows someone who’s queer. It took decades—that was written in 1994—but it seems to have more or less come to pass. Economic ideas and programs need to be expertly marketed, with provable causality on how they improve people’s lives. There are homes nowadays that, between real-estate hyperinflation during the pandemic and interest-rate hyperinflation since, cost triple in monthly payments in 2024 than they did in 2020. For folks looking at that, and blaming the current administration (however unfairly), blandishments about “the economy” mean almost nothing.
It’s a monumental task, I know: convincing so many who voted MAGA this time around (and there were millions of them) that the woke side’s ideas are on the right side of history. That progressive ideas can—tangibly and truly—help everyone build better lives. That the Woke Mind Virus is nothing to be afraid of, just guidelines for not being a dick toward anybody who doesn’t look, talk, or love like you. If there’s one silver lining to all this MAGA-mania, it’s that, unlike so many truly fascistic movements of the past, it’s an incoherent mishmash of poorly thought-out ideas that have little chance of succeeding.
Their anger at the unfairness of the system is real. Our job now is to convince them there’s a better way. It’s what my Dad would’ve done for the country that he loved.