That
Is Who We Are
November
6, 2024
This is who we are. What sort of person Donald Trump is was
no secret. He has even boasted of some of his worst personal characteristics.
The destructive nature of the policies and procedures he wants to impose on us
was no secret. They’re all laid out in Project 2025. He was president for four
years, though I won’t say he served as president because the only people
he served were himself, his family, his uber-rich backers, and deranged people
calling themselves Christians who want to subject women to control by men. We
saw what kind of president he was. He told us to drink bleach to deal with COVID-19
and otherwise handled the pandemic about as badly as it would be possible to
handle it. The Russians put him in power in 2016,[1]
and he took the word of the Russian fascist dictator Vladimir Putin over that
of our country’s intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the that
presidential election. He made no secret of his admiration of murderous
dictators like Putin, someone he clearly wants to imitate.
He instituted utterly inhumane policies at our southern
border and spoke of immigrants in purely fascist terms. He put incompetent
right-wing judges like Eileen Cannon on the federal bench. He put far right-wing
justices on the Supreme Court, who overturned Roe v. Wade. He called
white supremacists “fine people” and told gangs of thugs to “stand back and
stand by.” He incited a seditious mob to attack the US Capitol to stop congressional
certification of his loss of the 2020 election. He still spouts the big lie
that he actually won that election. High ranking military officers who served
in his administration have called him fascist, which indeed he is. We knew that
he is inherently incapable of telling the truth and that indeed truth doesn’t
matter to him. On November 5, 2024, we knew exactly what Donald Trump is, and
we reelected him anyway.[2]
We even gave him a majority of the popular vote, something we didn’t do when he
became president in 2016.
And I can hear many of our people saying: “Well, that’s not
really who we are. We aren’t like Donald Trump.” And I have to say: “Hell yes,
that is who we are! Hell yes, we are like Donald Trump!” We would not possibly
have reelected him if that weren’t who we are, if we weren’t like Donald Trump.
In reelecting Donald Trump, the American people expressed the dark side of the
American character. They tied themselves to and continued the dark side of
American history. Perhaps most Americans will not acknowledge that our national
character and our history have a dark side, but there simply is no doubt that
they do.
What is that dark side? It has many facets, but it is at
least a history of racism and genocide; and it is the refusal of most Americans
to acknowledge that we are racist and that we have committed genocide. It is a
history of enslavement of Black people followed by violent suppression of them
as human beings and denial of their civil rights. It is a history of patriarchy
and the oppression of women. It is a history of military violence. We stole
much of the western part of our country from Mexico through an imperialistic war.
We waged an imperialistic war against Spain in 1898 then made someone who
boasted of his participation in that war a hero and president. We carried on a
immoral, utterly useless war in Vietnam for many years. We started an illegal,
unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq in 2023. We have created the world’s
largest military by far, and we have enough nuclear weapons to end all life on
earth. We are and have been one of the most militaristic nations on earth.
We are mostly a nation of immigrants and the descendants of
immigrants, but we have a history of hatred and oppression of every new wave of
immigrants that has come to us. Most of us may not know about our history of
hatred of Jewish, Irish, Italian, and Chinese people, for example, but that hatred is
part of our history and part of our character.
At least since 1980 we have had a federal government that,
with a few exceptions like the Affordable Care Act, has worked for the benefit
of the wealthy not of the people. That government has done nothing truly
significant to address the global climate crisis. The dark side of American
history is at least as determinative of American character as is our supposed
advocacy of freedom and democracy, something has always been more words than
reality.
Our reelection of Donald Trump as president is both an
expression and a continuation of all of those dark aspects of our country.
There is absolutely nothing good about the man or about what he wants to do to
our country. Yet we put him in position to do immeasurable harm. He will make
the federal judiciary fascist for decades to come, continuing something he
started quite successfully the last time he was president. He will dismantle
all federal regulatory agencies as much as he can, thereby leading to the
destruction of, among other things, worker protection and the environment. If
he gets control of the House, he will impose a nationwide abortion ban, something
most Americans by far don’t want. Such a ban would make oppression of women
national and not just regional policy. It would inflict immense harm on an
untold number of women and the people who love them. On November 5, 2024, we
either knew all of these things about him or had knowledge of them readily
available to us. We reelected him anyway.
The only thing that made our doing so possible was the
concordance of his character and ours. We reelected him because we are who he
is. We reelected him because we fell for his pandering to our worst instincts
and our worst fears. We reelected him because our professed commitment to “liberty
and justice for all” is and always has been a farce. We reelected him because
we have always been prone to fall for demagogues. We reelected him because so
many of us are frightened by the changes taking place in our country and around
the world. Perhaps most of all, we reelected him because we are as racist as he
is. Because we are as sexist as he is. Because we are as mentally unstable as
he is.
So no. Don’t believe the people who say “This is not who we
are.” The hell it isn’t! It is precisely who we are. Yes, there are a great
many good people among us, but there aren’t enough. We will never be better
than we are until we admit that it is who we are and commit ourselves to doing
something about it. I’m 78 years old. I don’t expect to live to see us doing
that, if indeed we ever do. The dark side of our history and of our national
character has us in its grasp. Donald Trump personifies that dark side. Yes,
tragically, this is who we are.
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