The Election Downside: Millions Chose the Sociopath

A majority of Americans are now celebrating that Joe Biden has been victorious and that Donald Trump despite threats of lawsuits will be exiting the White House come January and America's four year nightmare will be over. I suspect America's standing in the world just ticked up as allies realize that sanity and fact based policies will return to being the norm.  The downside of the election is realizing how many Americans - the majority of them white - voted for a sociopath and malignant narcissist seemingly solely because of their resentment of others with different skin colors, different faiths (or no faith) and other imagined grievances. The most disturbing of all are the evangelicals who continued to support an individual who embodies everything a truly devout Christian should find appalling. On social media these Trump cultists - a great many from red states - are whining that those who don't work won as they conveniently ignore the fact that their states are the recipients of state level welfare funded largely by blue states who contribute far more tot he federal government than they receive. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the disturbing reality of Trump supporters.  Here are excerpts:

The moment every Donald Trump opponent has been waiting for is at hand: Joe Biden seems to be taking the lead [has won]. So why am I not happy?

I am certainly relieved. A Biden victory [is] would be an infinitely better result than a Trump win. If Trump were to maintain power, our child-king would be unfettered by bothersome laws and institutions. The United States would begin its last days as a democracy, finally stepping over the ledge into authoritarianism.

A win for Biden would forestall[s] that terrible possibility.

But no matter how this election conclude[d]s, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.

Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.

I [was never] among the progressives who believed America would repudiate Trump’s policies. For one thing, I am a conservative—and I know my former tribe. Trump voters don’t care about policy. They didn’t care about it in 2016, and they don’t care about it now. The party of national security, fiscal austerity, and personal responsibility supports a president who is in the pocket of the Russians, has exploded the national deficit, and refuses to take responsibility for anything. I had hoped, at the least, that people who once insisted on the importance of presidential character would vote for basic decency after living under the most indecent president in American history.

It’s clear now that far too many of Trump’s voters don’t care about policy, decency, or saving our democracy. They care about power. Although Trump appears to have received a small uptick in votes from Black men and Latinos, the overwhelming share of his supporters are white. The politics of cultural resentment, the obsessions of white anxiety, are so intense that his voters are determined not only to preserve minority rule but to leave a dangerous sociopath in the Oval Office. Even the candidacy of a man who was both a political centrist and a decent human being could not overcome this sullen commitment to authoritarianism.

Biden will become our 46th president. But Americans can take very little pride in the overall vote and what it reveals about nearly half of our electorate.

American voters, including those who didn’t show up or who voted third-party in 2016, are now like drunks who have been bailed out of jail in the morning, full of relief as their lawyers explain that the police aren’t pressing charges. [With] If Biden wins, we will have a second chance to keep our democracy intact. Some of us will have a moment of clarity. Most of us will just want to go home, throw up, change our clothes, and hope for the best.