Like many of you I imagine, I have been struggling with my emotions and frustrations in the wake of Tuesday’s electoral debacle.  I find that I vacillate from exasperation to resignation and from fury to moral exhaustion.  I’m hurting this week, and I know that many of you are as well.  So if my confusion, my alternating justifications and rage, and my ping-ponging emotions and thoughts can somehow prove cathartic for you, I’m glad.  And if you can somehow find solace in the maelstrom of my emotional confusion, then I offer the following running internal dialogue (Author’s Note: My more rational side is represented in normal text while my more passionate, perhaps more irrational side is represented in bold):

What in the actual fuck just happened?  How did we managed to lose to the dumbest, most racist, most misogynistic, least coherent presidential candidate a major party has ever nominated?

Well, statistically speaking we lost Latino men for the first time in recent memory and actually managed to lose white women as well.  To Trump, a proven sex offender.  We have better, more popular policies, we just aren’t communicating them as effectively as we should be.  We’re not picking our most charismatic, eloquent messengers to make our case at the top of the ticket.  So it’s not surprising that we would lose to a historically-charismatic candidate, albeit one with little substance and titanic flaws.  Also, elections don’t really focus on policy these days, they seem to be more about cultural issues and vibes.

By vibes do you mean idiot incels who think that when President Trump is in power, they’ll magically start getting laid for a change?  The Andrew Tate/Joe Rogan-listening troglodytes who feel that they’ve been ignored by the Democrats, tremble at the thought of trans people in the same bathroom, and somehow feel discriminated against by DEI when actually it’s just their thorough mediocrity and lack of saleable skills, talent, and abilities that condemn them to shit jobs?  Those idiots?

The Democrats, and left-leaning democratic parties worldwide, actually do have a massive male problem.  It’s not just our election that has seen this demographic chasm open up between the political leanings of women versus men.  Young men are shifting drastically to the right while young women are moving substantially to the left.  It’s a troubling phenomenon that liberal parties in numerous democracies have to tackle head-on.  How do they maintain firm stances on gender equality and equal rights and have a progressive platform while still appealing to men and providing a modern definition of masculinity?  You can’t ignore half of the electorate and hope to sustain popular electoral victories.  Diversity, equity, and inclusion are all important bedrock principles upon which we can agree but shoving it down people’s throats and packaging it in a way that makes sense is going to be critical to bringing back the moderate, independent voters that we somehow lost in this election.

If you look at the statistics, women are doing better than men in general.  They’re graduating high school and college at higher rates and living longer, healthier lives.  Rates of young male suicides are way up as part of the broader opioid crisis and the jobs they used to have, the ones that Trump promises to bring back with his disastrous, hare-brained tariff schemes, play right into their hands.  In the age of automation with its associated decrease in physical labor and all the changes that are coming in our digital economy, women appear better equipped to adapt, and we have to find solutions for men or risk leaving behind an embittered, frustrated segment of society—who then vote for right-wing populists who provide facile solutions and assure them it isn’t their fault.

Sure, I understand that we have to appeal to men, but do we have to pander to these neanderthals?  I’m not advocating for extreme political purity but to what extent do we water down our policies to cater to a bunch of whining nincompoops who can’t keep up in the modern world.  Try harder assholes.  Take a coding class.  Maybe lay off the seventh Bud Light (oh wait, that’s a trans beer!) and study for a fucking change.  Or develop 21stcentury skills you goddamn Luddites!

I’m not sure that’s a helpful characterization. And writing off a large part of the electorate as idiots may actually be part of the problem. But let’s move beyond the issue of men, because we as Democrats do need to find a way to better appeal to Latino and Black voters in general and men in particular.  I think we as a party just took it for granted for the past decade that these groups would be reliably Democratic voters because we were more pro-immigrant and didn’t embrace openly hostile or racist policies toward them. But it turns out that Latinos are a much more diverse and less monolithic group than we blithely assumed.  Some of them, it seems many of them, are more socially conservative than we knew and might align more with Republicans in this regard.  And there is a certain machisto strain of male Latin culture that Trump tapped into that values image, appearance, and bluster.  So we have to have an economic message that resonates if our social policies aren’t necessarily as desirable.  And, for Black voters, we have to make real progress on issues that matter to them.  We can’t just take the Black vote for granted.  Black women are our strongest constituency, but even they won’t just blindly side with us unless we can make tangible progress on voters’ rights issues and policing reform, among other issues.

You’re right, we do need to show Latino and Black voters that we can make real progress happen for them.  But when the other side is calling Puerto Rico a trash island and talking shit about how many babies Latinos have, why do many Latino men not seem to care?  Where is this ballyhooed machismo and pride there?  Why is Marco fucking Rubio not threatening to fight Trump and sock him in his oh-so-punchable face?  When he makes openly antisemitic remarks, why do Jews still support him, as if he wouldn’t throw them overboard or abandon them if he thought it might benefit him.  Just because he supports Israel unequivocally, doesn’t mean he supports you.  He’s already threatened to put immigrants in detention camps.  To call the National Guard on protestors and jail them.  Who’s next?  What kind of blinders are these people wearing that they don’t see how little he thinks of them and how quickly he would fuck them over if he thought it was in his interest?  How do all of his followers not see that Trump is only ever out for Trump?  No one else, just himself.  All the time.  It’s his one fucking motive: self-benefit.  Not theirs.  Not ours.  Just his.  Fucking narcissistic, piece-of-shit, self-centered asshole!

There are numerous interesting questions here: why do poor people routinely support a rich billionaire who trumpets tax cuts for the rich and big corporations?  Why do women support a convicted sex offender?  Why do Christians support a philanderer who slept with a porn star while his wife was pregnant?  Why do honest, hard-working people support a convicted felon who cheats on his taxes, overvalues his properties, and routinely stiffs contractors who have done work for him?  We do have to figure out why people have tied themselves into moral and logical knots to support him.  He does have a certain charisma and appeal, so in addition to nominating presidential candidates of substance, we also have to nominate candidates with broad personal appeal.  For all of her competence, intelligence, and experience, for a lot of people, Harris didn’t move the needle in terms of charisma.

Trump has convinced people that he was a successful businessman (even though he isn’t) and that this success will rub off on them and the country writ large (even though it didn’t).  He has somehow convinced people that the economy was better under him (even though it wasn’t)—we all witnessed how he exacerbated an already bad situation with his incompetent pandemic response, though there seems to be mass amnesia among a certain contingent of the population in this regard.  And he has convinced people that he will fight for them (even though he won’t)—we’ve seen that he only ever fights for himself.  So we have a tough row to hoe to win people back.

So what the hell do we do in the meantime?  Lie down and take it?  I’m fucking furious and want to go protest yesterday.  We need to take action!  We need to make our voices heard!  We need to show the rest of the world that even though that orange buffoon might have hoodwinked the dumber half of the population, that there are still plenty of us who will fight him, tooth and nail, with every damn fiber of our being!

I think on this, of all things, we can agree.  We do need to fight.  We do need to organize.  Protest.  Advocate for our causes.  Support local and state efforts to protect civil liberties against the barrage of assaults that are coming for vulnerable communities.  We need to protect legal immigrants to ensure their rights.  We need to assure the dignity and fundamental human rights of illegal immigrants.  We need to stand up for women’s rights in states blue and red.  We need to enshrine voting rights locally and at the state level since this government will try to stay in power by subverting democratic norms about who can vote and how they can do so.  We need to oppose the slow-moving coup that will try to take over the bureaucracy and remove qualified workers and insert craven loyalists in their stead.  Fight, impede, block at every turn.  We know what we did four years ago, so we know how to do it.  But they’ve learned too, so we have to be hyper-vigilant and double our efforts, frustrating and maddening though it may be.  I know that we’re all exhausted, physically, morally, and emotionally.  But we have to gear up for the big fight that’s coming.

Agreed.  Time to dust off my anti-Trump merch, get out the bullhorns, the markers, and the poster boards, and head back to the streets. Get the numbers of my representatives on speed dial. And sharpen my quill.  Let’s fucking do this.