More than half the electorate has suffered greatly in the aftermath of the recent election. They don’t mourn the loss of a contest as much as what they perceive as the loss of their country. This is a first for our nation: We’ve never elected a flagrant demagogue, a liar, a man whose inclinations toward the abuse of power were graphically conveyed by his own bragging comments about how he can get away with kissing women and grabbing pussy because he’s a star. And we now know that almost half the voters gave an indulging nod, if not genuflection, to his behavior.
Some of us are less scared of Republican control than we are of the populace that voted for change without foreseeing that their interests would become as insignificant to this narcissist as yesterday’s tweets. It’s not likely that Donald Trump will make America great again, but he’s certainly made it less safe by threatening civil war if he didn’t win, which must have looked like the proper response for those who saw that indeed he didn’t win but still claimed the presidency.
The system is indeed rigged, and we do indeed have violence in the streets.
But America regularly shifts between peace and violence; it seems to be in our DNA, as a country that has repeatedly accommodated the diversity of humanity. Granted, we don’t do it graciously, and there are many times when we have failed—by not welcoming more Jews during Hitler’s reign and by not receiving our share of Syrian refugees, as just two examples. Diversity breeds discontent. In a world where humans are afraid of others who do not look like them (the simple definition of xenophobia), it’s a wonder we’ve enjoyed as much peace as we have.
But pressure builds, and in this country, it too often finds its resolution through conflict and bloodshed. When the violence finally becomes intolerable, Americans have demonstrated a willingness to compromise by expanding the body politic to accommodate the “other.”
Just over 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln thought the Civil War was all about holding the union together. It was only after his beloved son Willie died of typhoid fever that Lincoln read the minister’s non-ideological eulogy and started to question his own agnostic beliefs. He wrote, in a one-page exploration meant for his eyes only, that something had changed within the conflict. He wondered at the will of God and determined that the real issue in the war had not been whether the union would remain undivided but rather that the issue of slavery must be resolved in favor of justice. He came to an insight: that God may have willed the conflict and would allow it to last until slavery came to a decisive end.
So the war raged on, but eventually the South lost—the war, their slaves, and their way of life. When they voted to secede from the Union, they voted for change—and change they got.
That war set the nation back, maybe a generation or more, but the country recovered and found a new normal in which white people were slightly more tolerant of African Americans, though racism still prevailed across the country. The institutionalized racism of Jim Crow was enacted in the South to keep African Americans separate, disempowered, and afraid. Those who had been kidnapped from another continent and brought here so whites could steal their lifelong labor had yet to enjoy equality or freedom.
It would take another conflict, the civil rights movement, to help us find that next new normal from which we could again expand. In the beginning, the African American protesters were nonviolent, so it was shocking for America to watch as white people, thought to be the “moral” race, turned into vicious and ugly perpetrators of a most immoral savagery. When whites in the more liberal parts of America could no longer bear to watch the worst of their race, they insisted that the conflict be resolved, and Martin Luther King insisted on the voting rights act.
The last few years have created new pressures. Jobs lost, gay marriage legalized, the guilt induced by not accepting more refugees in the enormous wave of mass migration. And African Americans have finally said “enough!” to police brutality. Loss of the good old days may have kindled a general sense of unease, if not outright fear. Donald Trump capitalized on that fear to win a white majority.
Following the election, street protests have once again erupted—not by the ones who threatened violence if their Dear Leader didn’t win, but by those who felt betrayed by half the electorate: their fellow citizens who, after all this country has tried to stand for, would still vote for someone who stood up for bigotry. This ultra-white wing of the Republican party is dangerous—but so is justice a danger to bigotry.
As Lincoln said in his spiritual reflection: “What we need in this hour of trial … is confidence in ‘Him,’ who sees the end from the beginning.” We may eventually see that there is a greater purpose to our current conflict. If we can’t trust God, perhaps we can trust history. Then again, what entitles us to think we can trust either one?