by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Today, I have been reminded twice there are two Americas right now and they hate each other. There is The Resistance, which is found largely on Twitter and moves at light speed when it comes to observing the latest Trump catastrophe and Trumplandia.
Trumplandia is a mythical, surreal land closed off from any rational thought and the electoral victory of Donald Trump is constantly relitigated and rehashed.
Being an ardent member of The Resistance, I sometimes find myself making some conclusions about other people that obviously I shouldn’t be making. Two events today reminded me that the United States is in deep trouble politically and things aren’t going to get any better any time soon.
For instance, I put out a call for writers on Craig’s List on a lark hoping I might find someone, somewhere who would be willing to work for free — at least for the time being — to help me build this site. My lone response so far, is this:
I will help you write about Hilary Clinton in a snarky manner.
I know Trump is an unpolished goof but I will take him to the alternative.
If you want insight into how grave things are in America, look at that quoted text. The entire post World War II global liberal order is quickly becoming a dumpster fire and the only critisim of Trump I can get out of this guy is Trump’s an “unpolished goof.” I find this staggering. This just blows my ever living fucking mind.
And, yet, I have to reflect on this mind set. I can’t just rage about it. I have to at least attempt to engage in some sort of understanding of the mindset that would cause such a comment. This bring me to the other interesting thing that happened today. I shoot out all the posts I write here to Twitter. In one of today’s headlines I asked why everyone hates liberals. Someone on Twitter saw this and wrote, “They’re losers and anti-American.”
Whoa buddy.
So, when we write the obituary of the America Republic, we’re going to have to address how it is that not only is the misogyny against Hillary Clinton such that people were totally blinded to her obvious experience, skill and ability, but also that the FOX News echo chamber made Trumplandia so apoplectic in its rage that people had reached the point where they hated liberals without any rational. They hated them because they hated them.
I am not a huge Hillary Clinton fan. I thought she was a weak candidate and probably should have been indicted because no person is above the law. But she wasn’t and when given the opportunity between what I saw as the potential of her steady hand and that of, um, a “unpolished goof” I had no qualms about voting for her. But she lost. And now we have to deal with the consquences.
But the weird thing about Trumplandia is they totally don’t realize they won. They don’t realize that when you’re in power anything that goes wrong is your fault. It all kind of blows my mind. What is the origin of their hatred for modern norms? How is it that they would see the person I see as a racist, bigoted, misogynist demagogue as simply an “unpolished goof.” How can the residents of Trumplandia be seeing what I see and come up with such dramatically different conclusions?
That is the crux of the crisis we’re currently in. And it’s not going anywhere.
If The Resistance is going to make any headway in the coming years, we’re going to have to understand exactly why Hillary Clinton lost. The process of doing that will probably rip the Democratic Party in two for at least one major election cycle as the progressives and the business friendly Wall Street liberals duke it out to see if Bernie or Hillary’s vision of the Democratic Party will be implemented. It is very likely that the Democratic Party will see the loss of Hillary Clinton as a sign that it should nominate a progressive like Sen. Al Franken in 2020.
Yet, at least in my opinion, a large part of Clinton’s defeat can be laid at the feat of misogyny. I think America choked. We had had the first African American president and the center-Right is still racist as fuck and they turned around and saw the prospect of a woman president and they just couldn’t handle it. That doesn’t even begin to address the general hatred of the Clinton family that, in itself, was a large factor in how passionate the Republican base was in 2016.
Meanwhile, much of that surreal world view comes from a general hatred of liberals. That one, too, kind of eludes me. It is obvious that eight years of “No Drama Obama” along with the rise of bubble inducing things like FOX News and Twitter caused the liberals to think there was some sort of assumption of slow, steady progress when in fact there far from that in some quarters.
This is what the Russians were able to so skillfully take advantage of during the 2016 election. The Republican Party had become so full of rage against the liberal mindset that they would rather vote for a quisling than vote for someone who was of the opposing party. And that doesn’t even begin to address what exactly the hold Trump had over primary voters was. That one still leaves me puzzled.
So where does this all leave us?
As I keep saying, if you’re not a member of Trumplandia, if you still care about America in the traditional sense, you’re going to have to put your outrage aside and engage instead. This is really tough. I don’t mean you have to give up what you believe. Far from it. But instead of just randomly being angry all the time, see this as an opportunity to engaged, to be excited and energized
See it as a chance to use your rights as a citizen in an effective manner. Trumplandia in all its delusional, surreal love of Donald Trump can take a lot away from us through gross malfeasance and gradual attacks on our liberties, but they can’t take the American spirit away from us.
Americans aren’t Russians. We’ve got spunk. We can do this. At least, that’s my hope. That’s all I got right now, is hope.
Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.
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