By Dan Krotz – Dictionary maker Merriam Webster has named “surreal” as 2016’s Word of the Year because it was the most looked-up word in the last 12 months; “post-truth” and “xenophobia” ran second and third.
“Surreal” doesn’t mean “awesome” or “amazing” (and please resolve to stop using the words “awesome” and “amazing” in 2017), but it connotes a similar heightened condition or emotion: disbelief that a fantastic and irrational thing or event could be real.
America’s public intellectuals – columnists, pollsters, party professionals – found and still find Donald Trump’s election to be a precise definition of surreal. And truth be known, even the President-elect couldn’t believe his lying eyes. So what happened?
What happened is that people living in discreet units of government voted to Make America Great Again in a landslide. Yes, Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump carried 3,084 counties to Clinton’s 57. Top to bottom, Democrats not only lost, but got slaughtered, banished, and humiliated nearly everywhere. No political party has seen a defeat of this magnitude since FDR bushwhacked Alf Landon in 1936.
What may be surreal is that the Democratic Party looks a lot like the Republican Party of 1955: folks with good jobs, good educations, and lifestyles that may not include church going but which certainly evokes the “work, save, and deny the flesh” conventions of the Protestant Ethic. Meanwhile, the GOP runneth over with billionaires superintending the hopes and dreams of a populist multitude who believes that if it wasn’t for bad luck they’d have no luck at all.
We’ll find out in 2017 how that works out.
Please note that this electronic version of the column has an error which has been corrected in the print version. Trump carried 2,607 counties while Clinton won 435.