Let me start with a confession.
I averted my eyes from this recent election in the United States, for the same reason one might avert their eyes as the airplane one's family was onboard hurtled towards the ground with the engines on fire.
In the months running up to the election, starting about the time of the historic(ly horrendus) debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in which the latter was obviously suffering from severe cognative decline, I just couldn't watch any more. It was so awful watching the campaigns say horrible, nasty things to each other while the media gleefully egged them on and the general public appeared to be getting ready for a brawl.
I know some very serious people who thought there was a better than 50-50 chance that the election would be very close, and this would result in court battles and possibly civil unrest. I advised several friends and family members who live in large cities and even smaller cities to stock up on groceries and bottled water in case there were riots and they had to shelter in place and/or if their city was placed under martial law and lockdown.
But in the end, election day came and...none of the things I was worried about happened.
I think we should all be very grateful for that, and we should also take a look at the reasons why things went as smoothly as they did.
Obviously, a lot of people were praying about this election, and this is another reason to beleive that prayer works and is worthwhile.
The proximate reason the election went off without violence is that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States by a large margin. It wasn't even close, either in the Electoral College or the popular vote, and because of that, the losing side didn't have any legitimate reasons to contest the election, either in court or on the streets.
Even those who are angry, disappointed, fearful, etc. enough to try doing something like that know that they'd be fighting a hopeless battle, so there's no point even trying.
So what went right?
Why DID so many American voters vote for Donald Trump, including the largest percentages ever for a Republican candidate among minority communities like Latino men, black men and white women?
Judah has given us his answers in the previous blog, and I'm sure everything he said is correct. I have been living outside the United States for over two decades now and he's still there, pluggin' away and keeping his eyes and ears open.
Candidly, I was shocked while reading his blog, because I had no idea about how big of a deal some of the things he mentioned had gotten to be, especially "DEI madness." That was just beginning to be a thing when I left the US and by God's grace it has never really caught on over here in Israel. We have our fair share of Left wing (and Right wing) looney toonyness, but that's one mistake we've managed to avoid making.
But with all due respect to Judah's points, over the past couple of days since the election, I've been getting caught up as best I can and I have a couple of other points that I think are also relevent to this discussion.
My sense is that there's at least two things that the Democrats did, along with the media and Hollywood, that motivated so many Americans to vote for Trump and Republican candidates for Congress and state Governors in this election.
The two mistakes the American Left has made that led to this result can be summed up in two words. The first word is "contempt" and the second word is "deceit."
The smug, snarky, sense of self-evident moral and intellectual superiority that they just can't seem to stop themselves from expressing at every opportunity makes people not like them. The way they project contempt for "little people" who live in "flyover country" in the middle of the United States, between the East and West Coasts, and even more so over people who live in the Southern States, is really offensive and irritating.
But they also express contempt for the very people they always say they most care about, like Latino and African-American men who work in jobs that don't require a college degree, or "uneducated" white women who do the same. These people are assumed to be too weak-minded, stupid and generally unsophisticated to even know what's good for themselves, so the "elites" on the Left figure it's up to them to do their thinking for them.
The way the Left presents the issue of abortion is a good example of this mindset.
So-called "reproductive rights" is the only issue many on the Left believe ordinary working class women have any reason to be concerned with. If these women don't give their votes to Democrats, those Democrats sneer at them that they're too stupid to understand this principle, which they just assume is valid although they seldom bother to ask any actual working class women if they actually feel this way.
A fairy tale that many Democrats started telling themselves in this election is that most women would quietly vote for Harris while lying to their husbands that they intended to vote for Trump. Where they got this idea is unclear, but the numbers from the exit polls flatly repudiated it.
There are many other examples of this phenomenon whereby Democrats treat the American voting public, even including many of their own traditional base of voters, with contempt, earning the contempt those voters treat them with in return.
This is even more evident in the way we can see how celebrity endorsements of Vice President Harris didn't help her much. These celebrities take themselves very seriously, and it must be really baffling to them when no one else does.
On that note, if I have something to say to Bruce Springsteen, although I doubt he'll ever read this.
(ahem)
Bruce, I love your music and I listen to it all the time. But I couldn't care less who you think I should vote for, and I really don't understand why you think I should. You're a great artist and you've got loads of money, but otherwise there's nothing special about you. You're not smarter then me, or morally better then me, or anything else. You're a man just like me. You put your underwear on one leg at a time just like I do, and I'm glad you know who you want to vote for but I really don't care which candidate you chose. Candidly, it's none of my business, and it's also none of your business who I voted for.
Your pal,
Aaron
Moving on, the next issue of deceit, this is a huge problem not only among the American Left, but the global Left and it's also not absent among the global Right.
Almost two years ago I wrote a blog entitled The Crisis in Israeli Democracy (and Christian Zionism) which delved into this issue if anyone wants to go back and check it out.
It's a problem in American politics as well. Whether it was Vice President Harris taking credit for things that Trump had done in his first administration or the media amplifying things he said, knowingly taking them out of context in order to try and make him look bad, the deceit piled up fast and furious in this campaign. Trump also told some whoppers, but even there the response to these lies he told were out of all proportion to the offense, sometimes to a ludicrous degree.
If you're reading this, you can probably give a fairly long list of your own with all the lies and falsehoods that you saw and heard in this election cycle. The "post-truth world" that we're living in is toxic to everything and everybody, including those who try to make it work for them.
For example, when political parties and ideologies lie to the voters, it's yet another form of contempt. Many voters see right through the lies and they get resentful of those who tell them. It's purely anecdotal, but I know two people, one who lives in Texas and one who lives in Tennessee, who had not voted in decades but decided to vote in this election because they were so disgusted and angry at the way the Democrats were insulting their intelligence.
I wish I could tell my friends that this is unlikely to ever happen again. I wish I could tell them that the Democrats, the liberal media and Hollywood seem to have learned some lessons from this election and are doing some introspection and soul searching to try and do better next time.
But the exact opposite seems to be happening. Instead of looking at their own conduct to try and figure out what went wrong, they're blaming voters for being too stupid, uneducated, short sighted, evil, misogynistic, racist, etc. to make the obviously correct decision.
That's the most toxic form of deceit, lying to oneself.
The damage one does to others by lying to them can sometimes be fixed, but the damage one does by lying to oneself is much more difficult to fix.
So what is to be done?
Well, for starters, I think it's appropriate to give thanks to God that, as I said before, the worst fears we might have had about the election turning into a fiasco including court cases, civil unrest, riots and possibly worse didn't happen.
Once we've done that, the next step is to renew our own personal commitment to being truthful and honest in all circumstances, even when it will cause us some inconvenience and/or pain. The most important thing is to never lie to ourselves. You can sometimes fix the problems you create by lying to other people, and you might even be able to fix the problems you suffer from when you believe lies someone else tells you.
But if you believe the lies you tell yourself, it's really hard to fix the problems that causes.
In conclusion, I believe the results of this election have given the United States, and Western Civilization in general, a bit of a reprieve. But there's still plenty of really big problems. Most of them won't be solved by politicians or governments. The solutions must come from the grass roots, and that means you and me.
