What the 2020 election says about who we are
Are Americans Homo Sapiens or Neanderthal? That is the question I posed in the last column before the election. I said this election would tell us. Although the presidency has not yet been decided as of midday on the day after the vote, the election spoke volumes.
About half of the American electorate sees in this Neanderthal president a reflection of itself, someone who “looks like me and feels like me.” Identity was key in this and in the last election. Nothing mattered as much to those for Trump, certainly not the president’s tragic handling of the pandemic, or his record-breaking lying, or his lack of empathy, or his constant obnoxiousness.
He may be an obnoxious bully, they think, but he is our bully, and we need one to protect the real America—white, religious, conservative, pro-pure capitalism, anti-socialist—from the pretend America of those who don’t look like us, insist on speaking foreign languages, arrived the day before yesterday and want to tax business into the ground and use the money to weave a social safety net so thick we will end up with socialism by another name.
In discussing Donald Trump’s racism, xenophobia, sexism, and homophobia last week I wrote: “We [liberals, progressives, denizens of the big cities] thought we had begun to put all this to rest beginning in the 1960s and culminating with the Obama election. We were wrong. The Neanderthals were not extinct, just hibernating in their caves. The insult to their Neanderthal sense of pride and status resulting from a Black man in the White House rudely jolted them awake. They came out of their caves to tear down everything Obama built.”
They elected Donald Trump to do that and more. To stop all the things that made them no longer feel the master of their own house. Invasions of brown and black immigrants. African Americans aggressively seeking power through the political process and often achieving it. Protests on the streets against the police, sometimes escalating into violence, rioting, and looting.
Today many people are surprised that Trump and the Republicans did so well despite all their outrages and disasters, a runaway pandemic and an economy limping along carrying on its back the albatross of the Coronavirus. After each incident in which Trump behaved like the archetype of Neanderthal, the pundits—at least almost all the white ones—declared that “this is not who we are.”
I argued that this is exactly who we are and have always been. I think I was right, to my sorrow. This election showed that for many this is precisely who they want to continue to be into the future. Neanderthal may have not crushed sapiens, but it has not been driven back into the caves as we hoped the election would do.
Neanderthal still controls the Senate and more than ever the Supreme Court. The obstructor-in-chief Mitch McConnel will continue to block everything and pack the courts. Trump’s reelection fair and square looks increasingly uncertain as remaining big city votes and absentee ballots are counted. But Trump will try to lie, bully, bluster, and litigate his way back to the White House. And he has the advantage in that he is willing to use any means necessary while the Democrats largely play by the rules.
The wide Neanderthal streak in American politics will continue as a toxic influence until we figure something out: Not how to have a national kumbaya conversation about civility but how we drive Neanderthals back deep into their caves before they figure out how to drag us into their darkness.
