Editor,
As we progressives try to deal with the fact that Donald Trump will be our next president, we ask ourselves and others “what in the world happened?”
There are many factors the pundits say: the Obama Coalition did not hold; African-Americans and Hispanics did not vote in large enough numbers; white, working-class men voted overwhelmingly for Trump; suburban white women also voted for Trump as did folks over 65; too many women doubted that a woman could function as a president; Hillary herself made several errors in campaigning such as using a private server for her emails; and the Trumpites continued the unproven rumors about her dishonesty and corruption endlessly.
I think an important factor in Trump’s victory is racism. The U.S. is gradually changing from a white, male-dominated culture into multiculturalism and this frightens white people.
As I remember, no TV commentator risked calling out racism except a very few African-American scholars. A board-certified psychiatrist and NASA flight surgeon called this behavior denial.
White people who have lost their jobs, lost their homes or been displaced by automation believe that people of color and immigrants are taking away their jobs and getting unfair advantages from the government. These angry workers blame Obama and people of color for their hardships. Their worldview is that the changes Obama made were not good and did not include them.
The psychiatrist says: “Those individuals, groups and nations who live in the world of deep denial are practically untouchable by reality or rational argument… all events will simply be reinterpreted to fit their belief system of their world no matter how ridiculous, how distorted, hysterical or how psychotic that belief system appears to others.”
So, instead of offering worker retraining programs, creating businesses that help develop a clean future, doing away with polluting oil industries, supporting renewable resources, and getting ready for the 21st century, we elect a president who is ignorant, racist, double-dealing and sexist.
Denial is not a river in Egypt. It is a dangerous defense mechanism.
If you voted for Hillary as one of 378,729 in Arkansas, you can be in denial about your vote counting. It does not. Or, as Mr. Trump said in 2012, “The phoney [sic] electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation… We should have a revolution in this nation.”
He has since deleted this quote.
The Electoral College was created because our founding fathers did not trust the electorate’s education and judgment. Also, rural areas wanted to be counted equally with more populous urban areas, i.e., cows should count more than people.
Yale constitutional law professor Reed wrote in The Constitution Today that the Electoral College was created for slavery, i.e., because at that time only white, property holding men could vote and the South wanted to count its slaves. In 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, the Three-Fifths Compromise was created between the northern states with more population and the southern states with more political power. A slave was counted as 3/5ths of a human being for the purposes of taxation and of representation.
The Electoral College is an anachronism created when women and African-Americans could not vote. We need a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate this barrier to democracy. That is no denial.
Trella Laughlin