I weep for my country. I fear for our future.

After a fitful night’s sleep, I woke up to find that we have chosen to put a serial liar, convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, treasonous thief, racist, and lifetime con man back in the office of the president. Unbelievable.

I clearly do not know my country, or at least I have chosen to believe the best about us when the facts state otherwise. Take the reality that too many Americans would not vote for a woman, no matter how accomplished, smart, and qualified she may be. Writing in today’s New York Times, Elizabeth Spiers notes:

“Mr. Trump offered a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright. That this appealed in particular to white men was not a coincidence—it intersects with other types of entitlement, including the idea that white people are superior to other races and more qualified to hold positions of power, and that any success that women and minorities have has been unfairly conferred to them by D.E.I. programs, affirmative action and government set-asides. For men unhappy with their status, this view offers a group of people to blame, which feels more tangible than blaming systemic problems like rising economic inequality and the difficulty of adapting to technological and cultural changes.”

Before yesterday, I had felt that when the minority over-reaches, as they are doing now, the majority will fight back. Historians remind us that “just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back” in these times. However, the large portion of those who chose to participate in this election—perhaps comprising even a majority of the popular vote—would suggest that they are a minority no longer. A narrative of grievance has shifted the country from one that cares about our fellow humans to one that looks out only for ourselves.

“There’s an irony to this [continues Spiers], in that actual systems of advantage—inherited wealth, legacy admissions to elite colleges, nepotistic professional advancement—were all designed to benefit white men. Perhaps no one embodies this unearned privilege better than Mr. Trump, but the ideological framework he operates in does not allow for acknowledging it. Instead, its beneficiaries insist that the rest of the world contort itself into a reactionary power structure.”

The oligarchs, the racists, the authoritarians, the Christian nationalists, and the politicians who benefit from minority rule will all cling to power in any way possible. Their money and political ties have shifted us towards an “every man for himself” mentality. Historians have written of how the oligarchs in America, beginning with John C. Calhoun and working forward to Charles Koch, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others, have made the case throughout history that they should be the ones with the power to decide where the government spends what little money they agree to provide in taxes for the maintenance of order and the public defense.

We’ve seen this all before.

• The elite enslavers who lost the Civil War subsequently won Reconstruction and instituted almost 100 years of Jim Crow segregation.
• The robber barons changed the Republican Party from its original focus on helping the ordinary American to a focus on building more wealth for the wealthy.
• Those with money who hated the New Deal used a series of malignant myths in support of an ideological “stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and the national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation,” as documented by historian Nancy MacLean.
• 1980 brought the ascension of an anti-regulatory, anti-civil rights, anti-union, anti-voting rights, pro-corporate Republican party and the election of Ronald Reagan, supported by the conservative Supreme Courts of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and especially Chief Justice John Roberts. Regulations on business were slashed, taxes were cut, protections for the working class were weakened, access to the polls for people who did not vote Republican was limited, and income inequality soared.

We are now in our third period of oligarchy, this time led by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, multinational business interests, and a corporate media. But we have also seen that a growing, multi-racial democracy can prevail, even though it did not in this election.

These times are forcing me to rethink what I know.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (2021) by Adam Grant makes the strong case that to have real intelligence, we need to rethink and unlearn what we believe and assume. Because we favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, we cling to old beliefs. But in everyday life, and certainly in politics, we need to let go of knowledge and opinions that “are no longer serving us well” and anchor our sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency.

Grant makes the case that instead of “preaching” to the other side in politics—something I’ve done on occasion—“people are actually more inclined to think again if we present these topics through the many lenses of a prism. To borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, it takes a multitude of views to help people realize that they too contain multitudes.”

These are complex issues that we need to discuss together, recognizing that we can find more common ground than the binary “us vs. them” favored by the political press and the President-elect allows. So don’t expect the media to help. Perhaps what those of us who feel we no longer know our country need is more “influential listening” where we ask “truly curious questions that don’t have a hidden agenda.”

Grant asserts that “if knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.” We’re going to need a great deal of wisdom in the weeks, months, and years ahead if we are going to rebuild a pro-democracy coalition that operates on possibility instead of grievance.

At a time when Trump and so many in our political world will work overtime to try to push us further apart, we need to turn to hope and the work that hope demands. Every age has its difficulties. We need to keep lifting one another up.

I’ll end with a paragraph I use to sign off from my monthly newsletters, in part because I really need to hear it this morning.

As you travel life’s highways be open to love; thirst for wonder; undertake some mindful, transformative walking every day. Recognize the incredible privilege that most of us have and think about how to put that privilege to use for good. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, and others can feel especially vulnerable . . . because they are. Work hard for justice and democracy as the fight never ends.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of storm clouds by Drew Hays on Unsplash