Tennessean | In a nutshell, Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was obscene, but almost as obscene to me was the WikiLeaks revelation that Clinton Foundation money had helped pay for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and living expenses for a decade.
More
broadly, the Democratic Party has become, like Bill Maher says, a
“boutique” party, a party of flashiness and glitz with its Lady Gagas
and Katy Perrys and Beyonces, and with its non-stop debates on race,
gender and sexuality. These issues are important, but they came at the
expense of talking about bread-and-butter issues, which is why the Rust
Belt voters bolted.
Liberals and the Democratic Party have some
serious work to do. Among them: Don’t condescend to rural voters, the
non-college-educated, and conservative Christians, and don’t paint them
in a single dimension. At the very least, extend them the same courtesy
you do to immigrants, Muslims, gay people. And don’t judge their groups
by their worst members, the thing you – we – say about Muslims.
Further,the
Democratic Party’s identity politics makes it hard for Americans to
talk honestly about Islamic extremism, undocumented immigration, and
many other issues.
Most of all, I mourn that the Democratic Party
(and millions of Democratic voters) that prides itself on being an
evidence-based party has lost its way and ignored the evidence that
their candidate was deeply flawed.
In the
Electoral-College-versus-popular-vote, my take is that Trump’s Electoral
College victory is a more representative victory nationwide than
Clinton’s popular vote victory. If we went by only popular vote tallies,
in the future, populous states like California, New York and Texas may
decide elections. I know this isn’t a perfect argument, though.
I’m
not happy Trump won, but I’m glad Clintonism lost. The Democratic Party
deserved to lose for many reasons, but especially because it had gotten
annoyingly complacent about its demographic “coalition,” and smug in
its convictions of its moral superiority.
