As more and more reports come in of people feeling emboldened to insult, threaten, and otherwise harass people who they perceive as not belonging in the US, it is good for us to think abut what we might do if we encounter a situation where we see this happening to someone else.
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During elections, the word ‘bellwether’ often crops up and is assigned to a state or county or other region or to this or that indicator as people decide where to focus their attentions on. Given the many factors at play, people try to identify things that have in the past been good indicators of the larger mood. Most people know the meaning of this word as signifying a leader or indicator of trends. But where does this strange word come from?
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Donald Trump and the other contenders in the Republican primaries (especially Ben Carson) insisted that ‘political correctness’ was a huge problem in the US and that we needed to be able to speak our minds openly. Of course, they could always do that. What they were really objecting to was being criticized for saying awful things. So they were not calling for the end of censorship but asking for their critics to be censored or to self-censor.
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Now that the election is over, there are plenty of analyses of why the results were so unexpected. It is the task of the party that loses to do serious soul-searching about their performance. The temptation will be to look for scapegoats, some external factors over which they had no control to blame and, if none of them are sufficiently plausible, to blame the voters for their ignorance, since such a conclusion lets them off the hook.
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Well, that was a long night. The surprise of the result has still not worn off for me and I am still trying to digest the news and the future implications. One issue that will be of interest is why the polls were so wrong, with the one exception of the Los Angeles Times that was the only one that predicted a Donald Trump lead in the final days. Another topic of discussion will be how Trump ignored much of the conventional wisdom of campaigning and won anyway. But those are issues of interest mostly to academics and the media. The questions that concern me are what drove the Trump win and where the country goes now.
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The US media have made an agreement in the last few decades to not broadcast the votes for each state until the polls close for that state in order to not influence voters who have not as yet gone to the polls. But this year State magazine has said to hell with that agreement, they are going to report running totals, because they say that news organizations have a duty to report the news as they get it and not conceal it.
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So I voted today at my usual polling place, a former elementary school that is now a pre-school center. The precinct had a small but steady stream of people going in at out but there were no lines at all to get a booth for voting. This was less activity than I was used to in the past but I cannot really compare because in former elections I would go at about 7:30am before I went to work and that was the busy time. Today, as a retired old geezer, I went in at 11:00am.
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I will be going to the polls in a couple of hours and will post my impressions after I return. I am taking advantage of my retired status to vote in the middle of the day and avoid the lines that may exist in the early morning and late evening hours. As this dreadful campaign winds down to its long awaited end, the New York Times has managed to get access to Donald Trump’s campaign to see what the mood is like.
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Heather Digby Parton writes that whatever happens tomorrow, the GOP is staring into the abyss because the Donald Trump campaign has stripped away the bark of respectability that the Republican intellectual class and ruling elites had erected around its policies and revealed the rancid reality underneath.
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