With a stunning lack of foresight, I suggested this prompt to the Medium publication The Challenged.
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I ought to own my November 6 prompt: how do you feel the day after America’s National Elections?
Besides, it will give me a chance to start mourning.
Later today, I’m meeting with a group of Lifelong Learners who took my seminar on the 2024 American election in September. Several asked if we could meet the day after the election.
I’m 75, and the 35 students’ ages ranged from 50 to 91.
I think there were a few Republicans in the class, but most were, like me, liberal Democrats. I don’t think anyone supported Donald Trump.
In our first session in September, I asked the class whether they thought this Presidential election was the most important of their lifetimes. Ninety-one-year-old Will, a retired Religion and Classics Professor, raised his hand and said, “I was born in 1931. I think Roosevelt vs. Hoover in 1932 was the most important. This one is second.”
I taught American politics to college students for forty years, retiring in 2018. My courses included a quadrennial course on the American Presidential election. Since retirement, I’ve continued that penance in my former college’s Lifelong program. I always tried to keep my politics out of my classrooms, and that’s how I taught the September class.
Last week, I took my act on the road and gave a few talks on the American election at the University of West in Timișoara, Romania. This January, I plan to do a post-election session in another Lifelong Learning program at The Art Institute in San Miguel, Mexico.
This is my third morning after a referendum on Donald Trump. And the second mourning. As I write this story, it appears he will again capture the American presidency. In 2016, like many others, I was not mentally or psychologically prepared for a Trump victory.
Yesterday, I was confident of a Kamala Harris victory. After receiving President Biden’s baton, she ran a flawless campaign. Her campaign had money, a solid ground game in the swing states, and, most importantly, the moment’s zeitgeist.
I thought her twin arguments about freedom and abortion and Trump’s unfitness for office would carry the day. They didn’t.
It’s too early for prognostication, and at this moment, I don’t have the heart for it.
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The title of my talk on the American election in Romania was “American Democracy in Crisis.” During one session, the Dean of West University — a Shakespearean scholar someone told me later — said something I now think more about. She said a crisis can offer opportunity. It can force us to look at what we don’t want to look at.
I’m asking myself now, in the privacy of my office, what has led America once again to choose this damaged man? Donald Trump ran the darkest presidential campaign in American history.
What should we look at about America that can begin to explain this?
As I expressed in a story I link below, in 2016, I was shocked by the Trump victory because I assumed two Barack Obama victories proved America had loosened itself forever from its history of bigotry, misogyny, and intolerance that the forces of backlash were less powerful than the forces of progress.
In 2020, just before the January 6 riot that attempted to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, former President Obama said
AMERICA IS THE FIRST REAL EXPERIMENT IN BUILDING A LARGE, MULTIETHNIC, MULTICULTURAL DEMOCRACY, AND WE DON’T KNOW IF IT CAN HOLD.
I’m not sure it can — not as sure as I would have been with a Harris victory.
For now, I’ve got to think about what I will say to my Lifelong Learners later today if anyone shows up.
Misery loves company. It may need company.
Sometimes, depression is precisely the right feeling.
It won’t last; it can’t last.
There will be another election in four years.
We aren’t going back.
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