Trump, George Wallace, and Deplorables

"No matter how left out or left behind you feel, voting for Trump is nothing short of a moral failure."

Jesse Berney, Rolling Stone

I posted the second half of that quote and a link to the article on Facebook a day or two before the election. Now that a bit less than half of the voters have chosen Trump, I see no reason to feel any different about it.

At the time, I thought that there were just so many reasons to disqualify Trump from office, any office. The accusations of groping. Bragging about sexual assault. Allegations of rape. The amazing breadth and depth of his lack of knowledge. The stupid, pathetic, groundless, and incessant claims that everything now is terrible, and that he would make everything so great. The boorish behavior. The many, many ugly comments about many women. The Trump University fraud. Multiple instances of stealing from subcontractors. The never-ending stream of lies. The idiotic conspiracy theories. The lack of self-control. The statements in favor of torture.

Actually, looking at that list -- a list that does not even mention the Khan family -- if you voted for Trump, you're an idiot. Sorry, but you are. What the hell were you thinking?

But moving on, now that I have had a couple of weeks to think about it, I think that one issue stands out: Donald Trump is a racist. He is a racist who appealed openly to racists, not just once or twice, but starting years ago with the overtly racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in this country, based on no other evidence than that he is African-American. And the racism continued throughout Trump's campaign. He began the campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers and promising to build a wall to keep them out. At the end, he was claiming that refugees would bring generations of terror to this country. In between, he said that we should ban and/or register all Muslims, and it came out that he had called a Spanish-speaking Miss Universe "Miss Housekeeping." You know, because what else are Hispanic women good for?

You can support someone who wants to legalize marijuana even if you do not agree with that particular issue. You can support someone who is anti-choice even if you are pro-choice. Most of us do not make voting decisions based on a single issue.

But racism is a different matter. If someone runs on a racist platform and directly appeals to racist voters, you cannot vote for them and then claim that you did not support their racism. It is just too important a matter to sweep under the rug and say it was not the reason for your vote. You hated Hillary, you felt left out, you were tired of Barack Obama? Sorry, those are reasons to vote for someone other than Hillary Clinton, but they are not reasons to justify voting for a racist. If you voted for the racist, it is because you saw that Donald Trump, along with his most ardent supporters, is a racist who favors racist policies, and you were OK with that. Or maybe better than OK.

People complained that Donald Trump got a lot of free publicity from the press, and he did. But not all of it was positive publicity. Everyone knew that Trump used racism and sexism to get his base fired up. Everyone knew who he was.

So I come to the conclusion that we are essentially at war in this country, not with Donald Trump, not with the Republican Party, but with the 62 million voters who chose to support the idea that white men are more important than all women and all non-white people. We have a moral obligation to condemn them individually and collectively, and we have to fight them. They won the latest battle, and it was shocking to see the true nature of who we are as a country, but we have to win the war; we cannot let this poisonous philosophy rule over the country that we and our children and friends live in. We have to stamp them out, crush them completely. I am not sure that we can, but we have to try.