A few days ago, after reading yet another report of a Trump supporter spewing rage and fury in a public place—essentially having a tantrum—I tossed out what felt like a throwaway comment:
I have never seen such an angry bunch of sore winners in my life. Would they have been happier if they’d lost?
The truth of it didn’t hit me until later. Yes. YES. Trump’s supporters literally would have been happier if Clinton had won the election, because then they could get what they wanted: four to eight more years of bitching that THEIR guy would have fixed everything, but with no obligation to prove it.
Well, that’s not what they REALLY wanted. It’s just the best that they could have hoped for.
What they really wanted, THE DREAM, was for the brown people and women and gay people and non-Christians to be relegated to their deserved subhuman place in society, so magically we could return to … I dunno, it still hasn’t been explained to my satisfaction when this magical time was that we’re supposed to revisit. I am guessing the 50s, maybe? A time that was pretty great for even uneducated, unskilled white guys but remarkably shitty for most everyone else … a time of poodle skirts and easy rape, chocolate milkshakes and open racism, sock hops and burgeoning social unrest.
But here’s the deal: underpinned by today’s realities, the future will come (unless Trump nukes us into oblivion at the conclusion of a wee hours rage-filled tweetfest). To thrive in that future, we will have to adapt. The days of one low-skill job providing a decent middle-class life for a (white, natch) family are done. Those jobs haven’t been taken by Mexicans, who are mostly doing your gardening and installing drywall in your new house that you can’t really afford and, of course, doing the backbreaking work of picking the fruits and vegetables you eat. No, the jobs Americans used to do but that have disappeared have mostly been been taken by machines. Robots. Because they do it cheaper and better and any company would be stupid not to use them, and that’s not going to change. And the people getting the most “welfare” aren’t the powerless poor who are tantalizingly easy to blame and persecute. They’re the ultra-rich who are frustratingly unassailable. That is probably also not going to change.
I’m not saying anything Trump supporters don’t, in their heart of hearts, know. Oh sure, there are a few who really believe that in four years we will be better off, just as there are a relative handful of people who, despite all evidence to the contrary, believe the planet is flat.
But just as most people who say they believe in fate still buckle their seat belts and look both ways before crossing the street and get up and go to work every morning instead of expecting manna to fall from heaven and angels to pay their rent, most Trump supporters have an understanding of reality to which they simply refuse to admit. That is why they are so very angry. They’re living in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. Their candidate won, and in four years the world is, barring some kind of miracle, going to be all the worse for it. In their hearts, they know that.
That thought would bring more consolation if they weren’t dragging the rest of us right along with them, down the path they blazed with the flames of willful ignorance and blind stupidity.
