Opinion | How did this happen?

Fear and Power // Thomas Riley, Opinions Editor

I have not been shy about my distaste for Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. Every time she opened her mouth and downplayed Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, said we should “follow the law” when it came to transgender healthcare or played into Republicans’ push for harder border security, I was filled with an incredible rage that this was who I was going to be voting for on Election Day.

Before Nov. 5, I had planned to once again be very critical of Harris’ campaign in this column. She lost 10 million Biden 2020 voters, and while some of those were likely people who were unwilling to see a woman in office, many were also voters who were rightfully underwhelmed by Harris’ campaign.

But as I watched Georgia and North Carolina go to Trump, followed by Pennsylvania, followed by the rest of the so-called “blue wall,” my anger toward Harris shifted into a sadness that over 70 million people voted for Trump. It was hard to fathom how so many people could cast their vote for someone who I view as a genuinely evil person.

I believe Donald Trump ran his campaign on terribly bigoted policies and has done and said terribly bigoted things, but I cannot say with a straight face that half of our country are bigots for voting for him. I think half of our country is afraid, and a select few feed on that fear to grab for power.

People respond well to fear. They respond when they hear that immigrants are murdering their neighbors and eating their pets and that women are killing their babies for the heck of it. When people are afraid they will never be able to afford a home or groceries again, they will value consistency over truth. 

The ebbs and flows of international markets, the nuance of late-term abortions, the Bibles worth of contemporary gender theory, the impossibly long naturalization process, the intricacies of two overseas wars — these are all complicated topics that don’t lend themselves to one easy-to-understand truth. Because these answers are so difficult to find, it is incredibly easy to scare people away from even trying.

It’s much simpler to say, “No men in women’s sports,” “Close the border,” “Leave it to the states,” “Finish the job,” because these are consistent solutions a scared voter can grab onto. When something goes bump in the night, it feels safest to lock the door and swing your fists. 

Though Trump’s most avid and informed supporters are certainly racists or misogynists or transphobes, many of these 70 million voters are no more than victims of Trump himself — victims of every right-wing pundit willing to adopt bigoted rhetoric to keep the masses afraid and themselves in power. 

When I look ahead to our future elections, I hope for a national constituency who feel empowered by their candidate and whose decisions at the ballot box are not clouded by fear but rooted in their complicated search for truth.

Traitors // Livia LaMarca, Assistant Opinions Editor

Thomas and I spent most of the election night texting back and forth. We both started out decently hopeful, but quickly our messages got more and more frantic as we slowly watched Kamala Harris lose the election. 

At around 1 a.m. on Nov. 6, long after they had called North Carolina and Georgia for Trump and long after my glass of wine had been drained, I could no longer keep my eyes open. Maybe it was my body’s intuition telling me to get as much sleep as I could to brace for the terrible morning I was bound to have. I told Thomas right before I went to bed that I had about 1% of hope left. Somehow I went to bed thinking she could pull it off. She had to pull it off.

I woke up at 8 a.m. to a text from Thomas — “That’s it he won.”

After many tears and a genuine sense of dread that shook my whole body, I took to social media. I very quickly found a map of the US districts’ shift from their 2020 positions. It’s a sea of red across the Eastern part of the country.

Regardless of policy and party affiliation, it makes me sick to my stomach that so many people voted for a felon. Millions of people voted for a rapist. Millions of people voted for a racist.

I sit here right now wondering, “Why?” Why did this happen? I certainly did not feel completely confident that a Democratic win was a sure thing. I am not the biggest Kamala Harris fan, but even I felt cautiously optimistic going into the night. It is hard to wrap my head around what happened. It will take some time for policy experts, political scientists and data analysts to fully understand such a dramatic turn of events, but there is one thing that was made crystal clear on Election Day.

There is one thing that I do know — so many of those who voted for Trump are traitors.  

I could sit here and go on and on about how any single person who voted for Donald Trump is a traitor to American democracy and democratic ideals, but it is so much deeper than that. Women voted against their own rights. Against their sisters, mothers and daughters. Hispanics voted against their own liberties. Against their families and loved ones. 

News flash — voting for Trump doesn’t make you exempt from your “outsider” status. It doesn’t make you a better woman or a better Latinx. You won’t be skipped when Trump and the GOP’s policies come for you and your loved ones. Choosing Trump and aligning with the draconian GOP under the notion that it will elevate your position in this country actually does little to alter your reality as being an “other” or an “outsider” to the GOP’s white supremacy-laden beliefs. 

Policies aimed at exclusionary gains will not transform those who support them into insiders. All they do is harm the communities these supporters belong to under an illusion that they’ll one day “fit in.”

It’s an astounding case of false consciousness. The belief that aligning with an elite or exclusionary group will somehow benefit you, even when its policies and goals fundamentally oppose your best interests, is nothing short of insane. This illusion of eventual acceptance creates a false sense of security while fortifying agendas that harm not only the larger community, but the very same people who support it. 

Yet over 71 million people fell for it. Traitors, the lot of you.