Oh America. How you fell from grace. And how much. On Nov 8 2016 you took a plunge into that abyss of a new Dark Age.

The entire electoral season the polls had told a different story. I was smug enough to skim through the campaigns without subjecting myself to any degree of overexposure to them. I watched the three main debates, a few primaries, read the usual smattering and smearing from the GOP and DNC at each other, and followed the political commentary on and off. I couldn’t for one minute convince myself to think Donald Trump could actually make it. He was so abominable, so abhorrent, so completely over the top that it was hard to even take him seriously. A self anointed clown. What were the Republicans thinking? Couldn’t they do any better than this?

And so Nov 8 2016 hit me hard. I’m still not over it. And maybe neither are you.
How did we come to this? “Who ARE these people?” were my utterances at my office desk as the results started pouring in on Tuesday evening. By now the story is all too familiar. Donald Trump - a narcissist billionaire and a man who doesn’t hesitate to carry modern day racism, sexism, bigotry on his sleeve, doesn't disclose his tax returns, gun loving patriot, won against Hillary Clinton - a woman with far superior experience, ability and temperament and who despite all her flaws was clearly the saner choice by a sea wide margin. Trump’s supporters however harbored an intense mistrust of Hillary, calling her a liar till the lies rhetoric completely took over in a self sustained fashion. Her biggest transgression seems to have been the use of a private email server. Surely that must be considered as heinous a crime as assaulting women, openly talking odiously and disparagingly of immigrants and minorities and banning an entire religion (whatever that means)!
The narrative that has built itself now to explain this mess we are in is that white rural america was sick of the establishment. They hated her and they saw in him an outsider to Washington. The liberal elitism that the Clintons represented was rejected by the people who believed she would do nothing to change the status quo of our broken politics. Krystal Ball of the DNC tries to explain:

“They said they were facing an economic apocalypse, we offered “retraining” and complained about their white privilege. Is it any wonder we lost? One after another, the dispatches came back from the provinces. The coal mines are gone, the steel mills are closed, the drugs are rampant, the towns are decimated and everywhere you look depression, despair, fear. In the face of Trump’s willingness to boldly proclaim without facts or evidence that he would bring the good times back, we offered a tepid gallows logic. Well, those jobs are actually gone for good, we knowingly told them. And we offered a fantastical non-solution. We will retrain you for good jobs! Never mind that these “good jobs” didn’t exist in East Kentucky or Cleveland. And as a final insult, we lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug overdoses about their white privilege. Can you blame them for calling bullshit? All Trump could offer was white nationalism as protection against competing with black and brown people. It wasn’t a very compelling case, but it was vastly superior to a candidate who enthusiastically backed NAFTA, seems most at ease in a room of Goldman Sachs bankers and was almost certain to do nothing for these towns other than maybe setting up a local chapter of Rednecks Who Code.”

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But if on one hand Hillary supposedly assisted in the onslaught of globalization, on the other hand she had also spent her entire life advocating for the rights of families and children whereas Trump was busy building his billion dollar empire. If she worked within the system and had friends with the so-called “crooked elite”, he WAS the very embodiment of the “crooked elite”, the 1% of the 1% and a self-interested businessman. Yet, he connected to white middle class because he was able to capture their resentment with the system, voice it and project himself as the strongman who was powerful enough to tackle the establishment on his own terms.

I’ll be the first to admit I know nothing of rural America. I landed into this country into New York, an island of global diversity and multi ethnicity, and which was home for a good 6 years before I migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, liberal hotbed and land of technogurus, another cultural melting pot. Surely the idea that half of America bought into a lunatic buffoon’s vision must either be a misunderstanding or a reality that needs coming to terms with and countering, or a bit of both. The processing has taken time, the shock is real for those of us, the “coastal elites” living in our own bubbles and cocoons. As protests and anti-Trump rallies rock the nation for the fifth day in a row one wonders how this highly divided nation will come together to find a way to move forward as one.
But what’s really scary about Donald is we don’t have a clue of what he is really going to do. He probably doesn’t himself, but going by his volatile temperament nothing is off the charts. A total, or partial repeal of Obamacare, denying climate change (The Agony), banning Muslims entering into to the country. The list of possible uncertainties is endless.

Its easier now to do a postmortem analysis of the election and declare that we should’ve seen this was coming. Trump gained leads in the polls every time a debate was scheduled but because of his poor speaking skills usually walked away by lower points after each of the three debates, while Hillary won in clean sweeps. But it also appears as though there were some real gains he made in conveying his message about jobs, free trade restrictions and overall directly channeling citizen anger through his own bullying hotheaded temperament, especially directed at those who represented the establishment. And in hindsight Hillary’s appointment as the Democratic nominee now comes across as a result of a lack of imagination in the DNC to fire up their supporters.

Party lines and class trumped gender in this election. While it was smug to assume more women would have voted for Clinton, it appears that many rural white women did not. But that is not to undermine that sexism was a part of what we saw here. When Trump openly called out that Clinton did not have the “stamina” to become president, you couldn’t miss the condescension in that statement (To which she befittingly replied "Well, as soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease-fire, a release of dissidents, an opening of new opportunities in nations around the world, or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina"). While his supporters may think “he tells it like it is” - and he sure does when he does his “locker room talk” - he takes misogyny to another level of low. And for a moment imagine Trump as a woman - would he be able to get anywhere close to where he is now? Or if Hillary was a man would she be placed in the kind of scrutiny she was or be mansplained and interrupted by him the way she was in every debate (even though she handled him well)? We totally lost the message of breaking that glass ceiling for whatever it meant or represented to young women around the country. Instead we elected a man who repeatedly objectifies women (Real quotes about women from Donald Trump). The first lady will now be a plastic glam model. Far from breaking free of the images of reducing women to their bodies fed to us by the glossy media, this couldn’t do more to reinforce the traditional patriarchy and stereotype of male domination and power that have been thrust on to us for centuries. There is nothing inspiring about this. Even if they say - try selling feminism to a family in the midwest for whom their survival has become a matter of paycheck to paycheck - hell no, this stuff matters.

Could Bernie have won against Trump? I doubt it. Conservative ideology when failed rarely turns towards libertarian socialism , instead the invitation to demagogues is almost always ripe to take advantage to their end. Clinton may have been too mashed up with corporate neoliberals, but she had been persuaded more to the left of center already and was increasingly being convinced to do so even more. Unfortunately we’ll never find out the “what if” scenario was realized here either with Bernie or her.

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Just to keep things somewhat in perspective, its also important to take into account how close this election was. The independents who were mad about Bernie or the people who never voted as they were disillusioned by Hillary could’ve turned this around with very little push, or even if the FBI didn’t spin the email issue a week before the election. But in a winner takes all system you either win or lose, and this doesn’t bode very well when the polarizations are so intense and the people so bitterly divided. Finally, she won the popular vote but the Electoral college win determines who gets to be president, so there we have it - an electorate that’s even more wounded by the undesirable outcome that could've been averted with a little more effort.

Is this the best we could’ve done America? A self-obsessed showbiz mogul who belongs more in tabloid sleaze than on Capitol Hill; a rube sounding narcissist with a limited vocabulary that comprises of a repetitive mangling of the words “wonderful”, “beautiful”, “lovely”; and someone who cannot fathom the difference between an abortion and a c-section in a presidential debate on pro-life/choice matters; someone who is supposed to be a representation of the humanity of a nation but chooses instead to reduce them to “good people” vs “bad people”; a deeply flawed person of irredeemable temperament - is going to be at the pinnacle of power in this country and as a consequence one of the most powerful men in the world. Surely we could’ve held higher standards than THIS when we elected to the highest office. Maybe we got it all wrong and white rural America with its anger really wanted this, even if all it meant was to deliver a middle finger to all that is wrong with this country. But this cannot end very well, even for the people who voted for him. The tone is going to be set and its going to be a very different one from what we have become accustomed to hearing. Well we asked for it. So buckle up your seatbelt and get ready for a 4 year ride in the opposite direction from where we started at best, and an apocalypse at worst.