Safety experts have a model of how tragic accidents happen. It’s called the “cheese model.” Even after long periods of safe operation, maybe especially after a long period of safe operation, the post-mortem of accidents often show that, one slice at a time, various forces have taken away the measures and processes previously introduced to prevent such accidents.
Perhaps I will wake up tomorrow to find that enough provisional ballots in the remaining states mean that Clinton won after all. But I am now reading diaries attributing the loss to this and that and those and them and all the who’s and whatsis in litanies of shame and blame.
Of course, as always, there will be plenty of blame to go around. Shame too. And there’s the list of woulda, shoulda, couldas...
But before we engage in intramural samurai attacks on one another, I’d like to say that in just 5 minutes or so, I can point to at least many slices of the cheese of a Democratic victory that disappeared, one after another.
But for me, here’s the biggie: We needed to attend to Howard Dean’s message in 2004. Remember? The 50-state strategy?
But we didn’t do that. So right there, some of the first slices of the cheese block gradually slipped away, beginning all those years ago. Oh, yes — we let the small cities, towns, and villages slip away into the hands of the Rs. We let the counties go. We let the states go. And now we reap the whirlwind of that neglect.
We delivered on health care, but we screwed up the rollout and let the R’s (with help from the media) distort the message of the real relief the ACA brought. We didn’t deliver on non-urban jobs. We didn’t deliver on trade-related job retraining. Hell, we haven’t even delivered affordable cable and Internet to rural areas.
We thought we could Uber around the big city, sipping our lattes in wi-fied air, checking out our cool online sites, thinking great thoughts and dreaming great dreams about how to make the world a better place. Nothing wrong with that — but it’s a luxury lots of people in our country don’t have. But we wouldn’t know that, because we aren’t there. As political actors, we aren’t there to listen, to hear, and to help.
And because we didn’t stay in touch, we didn’t really know what was going on. Neither did our statisticians, who were asking questions written by people with relatively high-paying jobs in the Information and Gig Economy.
So we didn’t really know that the country folks were fed up. They picked up their pitchforks and aimed them right at us. And...ouch!
Cities are the Democratic strongholds. Well, people, they aren’t going to be enough. A lot of us D’s (myself included) don’t know a lot about rural and ex-urban America. Most places are not all that cool and I sure don’t want to spend a lot of time there. (There’s only so much nature that will make up for the casual xenophobia, sexism, and racism, to say nothing of the shitload of suffering there. The film, “Hell or High Water,” is instructive in this regard, as it captures much of the depression that affects areas outside of the urban centers.)
So the post-mortem can and should begin. To the extent that we are still alive and kicking, it will probably hurt. But try to think of it as a good hurt — because we’ve got to get up tomorrow. Assuming the miracle of a Clinton win isn’t going to happen, we’re going to have to learn to listen, hear, and respond.
In that process, I believe we will learn how we can help and how we can win. And I think it’s our only hope for being able to lead.