Six days later

The purpose of this thread is to allow people to talk about where they are six days after the catastrophe of last Tuesday. First a quick update: It appears the GOP will end up with something like a six to eight seat majority in the House, and a 53-47 Senate. The House majority is small enough that they’re almost certain to lose it in the midterms based on historical trends. OTOH who knows if there will even be an election two years from now? (Yes I’m being hysterical, like Connie at the end of The Godfather).

A few random thoughts:

(1) I’m very unclear in my own mind of the extent to which the 77 million or so votes that Trump will end up with are products of, respectively, ignorance, stupidity, and evil, especially since these three things are all so intimately related to each other. I do think that it’s difficult to overestimate the importance of the first two factors. Most people are generally quite ignorant outside of their very narrow range of interests and passions, which very much do not include politics, history, or abstract ideas of any sort. Most people are not good at thinking outside of that very narrow range of interests, or just thinking in general. A lot of people do have horrible beliefs, so I’m not giving short shrift to the evil component, but those beliefs themselves are to a great extent products of all the ignorance tangled up with the poor cognitive skills. (Consider the incredible damage that fundamentalist religion does in this country and elsewhere in keeping people ignorant and stupid). So my class quarter full belief/hope is that ignorance and stupidity are much rampant than pure evil from the 8th dimension.

(2) I get that it it’s a terrible environment for incumbents all over the world, but I still can’t help thinking that the impossible to fully describe unfitness in every conceivable way for office of Donald Trump shouldn’t have made more of a difference. If Nikki Haley or even an evil toad like DeSantis had been the GOP candidate and the results had been the same I would be much more inclined to shrug my shoulders about the former situation. But Donald Trump? After everything that’s happened? I realize that this point directly contradicts (1) but I contain multitudes and they’re giving me heartburn of the soul.

(3) I still can’t believe what has happened to this country, which I realize is simply a failure of emotional imagination, especially since I saw this coming nine and a half years ago.