The post-mortem blame game has already started, here as well as elsewhere: Harris did this, or didn’t do that, or Biden should have, shouldn’t have, whatever. Bull. This wasn’t Harris’s fault. She ran a campaign based on reality, while Trump, and the GOP in general, did a con job on America. And America bought it, because too many of us couldn’t face reality and didn’t want to remember history. The GOP victory was a triumph of illusion.
There was the illusion that the economy was better under Trump and worse under Biden. There was the illusion that immigrants were a plague on “real” Americans. There was the illusion of White male superiority. There was the illusion that we were once a Christian nation and need to be one again. There was the illusion that there are simple answers to complex problems. There was the illusion that our sexuality is fixed and binary (and that hyper-masculine incels are somehow God’s gift to women). There was the illusion that Trump didn’t mean all those things he was promising to do.
Then there is reality. The reality is that this is a complex world, both technologically and sociologically, and we are not engineered to cope with it. The reality is that the US is rapidly becoming a majority-minority country, and the White Christian male subset that has largely ruled from the beginning does not want to share power. The reality is that our strength comes from our diversity, and this is unacceptable to those who subscribe to the notion that their way (whatever it is) is the only right way.
There is the reality that wealth imbalance has gotten so out of hand that billionaires who inherited their wealth or stole it now believe, and have convinced others to believe, that their wealth gives them special insight, special knowledge, of what is best for all of us. There is the reality that science has, however clumsily and inefficiently, made our lives better, even if it came with the cost of demolishing long-cherished beliefs.
There is the reality of global climate change. There is the reality of abortion. There is the reality that Putin wants to rule as much of the world as he can. There is the reality that the world is overpopulated and cannot long sustain this drain on its resources. There is the reality that human sexuality is complicated.
None of that mattered. This is who we are now: slaves to our illusions, and ultimately victims of our illusions. Reality always wins in the end, and the harder the world resists and denies reality, the worse it will be when reality finally hits home.
