For the previous yr we now have been strapped right into a seemingly unending curler coaster of vicious propaganda, vitriol, racism, sexism, queerphobia, and a smug complacency within the face of a bloody genocide.
Election 2024 introduced the bottom of lows—Donald Trump’s wildest, most fascist fantasies manifesting in a parade of hate—and the very best highs—the late-breaking entry of a multiracial girl of coloration who snagged the Democratic Get together’s nomination. Vice President Kamala Harris launched a record-breaking billion-dollar marketing campaign amid a tidal wave of younger ladies progressives spurred by assaults on their bodily autonomy.
Again and again, we have been instructed this was crucial election of our lifetimes. We, the folks, have been requested to decide on between an apologist for genocide, the specter of fascist rebellion, or a third-party possibility that had no critical prospects for victory.
Alongside the best way to successful the election, Trump and his allies decreased so many people to things, to evildoers, to rubbish, to the enemy. If we made it by these previous months, it was with a way of nervous hope that the insults and assaults had an expiration date. If we may simply make it to Nov. 6, we may take care of the trauma, heal, and sit up for holding the centrist institution accountable.
Alongside the best way to dropping the election, Harris and her backers flirted with A-list celebrities and anti-Trump Republicans, repeatedly shunned Palestinians preventing for his or her rights, pushed again in opposition to calls for to carry Israel accountable for genocide, and wrapped all of it up with an look on Saturday Night time Stay.
With each candidates’ approaches high of thoughts, I started monitoring election outcomes on Nov. 5, feeling—to cite one girl I overheard say to a different that morning—“nauseously optimistic.” As I anxiously monitored the New York Occasions’ election needle, coaxing it towards the blue-tinged left, I discovered myself reliving the trauma of Election 2016, when that very same needle veered immediately to the red-hued proper.
So, right here we’re once more, waking as much as a brand new chapter of the identical nightmare we skilled from 2016 to 2020. Now, as we’re nonetheless reeling from many months of abuse, we face the prospect of 4 extra years of it.
We have to perceive what has occurred and the way to transfer from right here. However we additionally must take a second to mourn—for ourselves; for our fellow People and particularly immigrants; for our Black, Brown and queer sisters, brothers, and kinfolk; for our kids’s imperiled future; and for our nation’s destiny.
Within the coming months, we’re going to learn reams of analyses about why Harris misplaced the election: the insurmountable polarization our nation is experiencing, third-party candidates’ “spoiler” results, the blind spots and failures of the Harris marketing campaign, political amnesia, whether or not the nation is able to elect a girl, and the way Trump’s voters will remorse supporting a demagogue.
However perhaps it’s not even that sophisticated.
“In so some ways our leaders have failed us, and lots of people are actually struggling,” immigrant rights organizer and creator Silky Shah stated on a latest episode of my present, YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali. “And the simple factor that occurs is blaming immigrant communities when, in reality, clearly we must be blaming those that have put in these insurance policies that aren’t serving to communities on the entire.”
Most People agree on their fundamental wants: good jobs and unions, reasonably priced housing, and so forth. In addition they don’t belief the federal government. Certainly, a few of those that picked Trump may need executed so as a result of he’s promised to burn all of it down, whereas others could be hopelessly invested in racist, misogynist, queerphobic, anti-immigrant hate—or each. Collectively they quantity greater than 71 million People, or 51% of the citizens, with elevated turnout of Latino males, youthful voters, and first-time voters.
The remainder of us—about 67 million—who picked Harris, both did so holding our nostril to maintain Trump away from the levers of energy, or genuinely believed she was a pressure for good. (It’s this latter group that’s most likely most shocked and perplexed by the election outcomes).
As a substitute of a shift towards insurance policies that prioritize collective care—which may unite People—what we acquired from the 2 major-party political candidates have been false narratives that largely fell into two camps: Trump painted the nation as a dystopian quagmire that solely a strongman like him may repair, whereas Harris’ marketing campaign was primarily based on the concept we should protect the booming financial system she and incumbent President Joe Biden ushered in.
However in reality, each events have moved dramatically rightward. In keeping with investigative journalist and YES! contributor Arun Gupta, “One is a hard-right Republican occasion referred to as the Democrats, and the opposite is a fascist occasion, a MAGA occasion referred to as the Republicans.”
Shah concurred, saying she discovered it “really actually surreal to see how far to the correct issues have moved and the way a lot Democrats aren’t even actually advocating for immigrants in the best way that they have been earlier than.”
Gupta attended Trump’s Madison Sq. Backyard rally in New York Metropolis that made headlines for its audio system’ hateful feedback. He noticed a distinct actuality than the one being reported in company media retailers. “You had plenty of anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant bombast. However that’s solely half the equation,” he stated, per week earlier than the election. “What’s actually occurring at these rallies … is love and hate.”
He concluded that Trump supporters are “there as a lot out of hate as they’re out of affection. They usually go there as a result of these rallies make them be ok with themselves. They make them be ok with the nation, that they’re a part of a motion.”
What if we all search a love-based motion that prioritizes us over the pursuits of elites? What if Trump’s election is a horrific manifestation of a nation chopping off its nostril to spite its face? There aren’t any simple solutions to those questions, however since we now have did not stave off extremist hate from occupying the very best rungs of energy, we all know probably the most susceptible amongst us will doubtless pay a heavy worth within the coming years. The remainder of us can’t surrender.
“Our energy and our potential really goes past the poll field,” says Khury Petersen-Smith, co-director of the New Internationalism Mission on the Institute for Coverage Research. “We have to carry on pushing on all of these levers [of power], no matter who wins, it doesn’t matter what day—Election Day, the day after, Inauguration Day, the day after.”
We are going to—we should—get by this time by reminding ourselves that the majority of us need the identical issues: security, safety, stability, and—dare I say it?—love. However how we get there as a nation is a conundrum we should proceed grappling with.
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Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer season 2021, constructing on an extended and embellished profession in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated tv and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of unbiased and group radio stations. She can be Senior Correspondent with the Unbiased Media Institute’s Economic system for All mission the place she writes a weekly column. She is the creator of Rising Up: The Energy of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming e-book is known as Speaking About Abolition (Seven Tales Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Girls’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Grasp’s in Astronomy from the College of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate levels in Physics and Astronomy from the College of Texas at Austin. Sonali displays on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx discuss of the identical identify. |
