Not yet knowing how the 2024 election would unfold, I ended last month’s column by recommending kindness, humor, and dogs. Still good, I think, now that we know the results. Many of my friends were shocked by those results but having been Bustered, I wasn’t.
I was six when I got Buster, a smallish, stout, pink and white, stuffed bear. We bonded at once and soon Buster was keeping me company as I waited out measles in my darkened room. When I recovered, the doctor recommended that my parents trash my bedding. Buster, being soft and fuzzy, counted as bedding. Knowing how this would upset me, my mother told me Buster was being dry cleaned as per medical orders and would return in a day or two. When she shopped for a replacement, she couldn’t’t find a duplicate but, almost miraculously, Buster returned as scheduled. He just looked different. His pink parts were brown, he was taller and leaner, and his head was smaller. Mommy assured me that this was indeed Buster; dry- cleaning bears she said, requires a major makeover. Having seen clothing remain unchanged by dry-cleaning, I challenged her. “It’s different for bears,” she declared, and I let it drop. I wanted Buster back badly, so why wouldn’t’I accept her comforting lie? Deep down, I knew I was loving an ersatz Buster, but in that moment, I believed what I needed to believe to get through the night.
Many of my liberal friends are having Buster moments. They want explanations for their election loss, but they also want to believe they can turn things around in 2026 and 2028 without changing their beliefs about our country or themselves: Harris lost they say, because she campaigned with Liz Cheney, didn’t embrace Gaza, wouldn’t distance herself from Biden. She wasn’t sufficiently policy oriented, was overly/insufficiently liberal, picked the wrong running mate. The country isn’t ready for a Black female POTUS. In short, we lost for tactical reasons, and we can change our tactics, but we don’t need to change anything about ourselves. My friends want Buster back badly enough to overlook the obvious.
Conservatism, isolationism, individualism, and exploiting labor are founding values in America. Already dominating the Supreme Court since 2020, people favoring these values showed their current power by winning control of both houses, the popular vote, and the electoral college, demolishing the Blue Wall, and improving their 2020 numbers with virtually every demographic. Moreover, they did this with a presidential candidate so personally flawed that many freely admit disliking him but voting for him anyway, because they consider him less odious than the alternative. That alternative is, of course, liberalism, or perhaps the caricature that liberalism has become.
Too many liberals believe in disrespectful stereotypes. Trump voters, they think, have more faith in their lsubjective experiences than in scientific evidence. Immediate economic well-being matters more to them than anything. They are comfortable with a white-male dominated country and fear, racial, ethnic, economic, and gender diversity. They resent government pushing liberal values into their lives but freely push conservative values into others’ lives. They like working with their hands, and stubbornly refuse to join the information economy. They are still dreaming an American Dream that has become almost impossible to realize in present-day Corporate America. But stereotypes never yield understanding, never reveal anything of practical value, and say more about those doing the stereotyping than about its victims. (To be fair, conservatives also stereotype liberals.) Seeking truth more intellectually and morally demanding than stereotyping.
Fundamental socio-economic fault lines dividing Trump voters from liberals can be traced to 17th century England. They survived colonial America and its revolution, were written into our constitution, and persisted through our Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. Too many voters on both sides seemingly can’t grasp, much less respect these value differences, choosing instead to dehumanize their political opponents with stereotypes while clinging to their own views as the only ones decent people could possibly embrace. Witness Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment. In the 8 years since, the left has not owned and apologized for that insult, nor moderated its elitist attitude.
We didn’t lose this election only because our tactics were ineffective. We lost because we preached inclusiveness without practicing it. We rightfully tried including all races, religions, nationalities, and gender expressions, while cluelessly excluding and denigrating the conservative half of our country. Some liberals are still kidding themselves selves about that while most of the rest think Trump voters really are too deplorable to include. To repair our body-politic we have to bridge the gap between ourselves and that other half but, to do that we’ll first we’ll have to close the gap between what we are pretending to be and what we are being. Ultimately, we’ll need to understand, respect and work with people whose values are different from ours. If we don’t, we won’t win coming elections, and we won’t deserve to. Buster isn’t being dry-cleaned. He’s in the landfill.
Mature Content is a monthly feature from Age-Friendly Carbondale.