Nevermind every other theory or tactical complaint about what happened in this election. Kamala Harris did everything she possibly could to win. The fault is not hers. 

The fault is in our nation. We must come to the realization that America is deeply racist and sexist, incapable of electing a Black, Asian woman to its highest office because of our culture’s innate, widespread, and unreconciled bias and hatred. That is the root of it. That is the weed that will now grow unkempt no matter how much media wish to groom the nation to make us look as if it were not so. Its aims of oppression will grow daily.

Women will lose control over their bodies, their health, their lives. 

Black Americans know better than anyone, of course, how racist America is. Now there will be no limits to it; this election gives it permission. 

LGBTQ+ people may be deprived every precious right they fought so bravely to attain as bigots try to force them back into closets.

Some portion of Latino voters may think — like Italians long before them, who once were considered people of color and then were not — that they might buy their way into favor with white America with their votes. But note well that even today, Italian-Americans are a protected class at CUNY; discrimination never ends. No matter their contribution to Trump’s victory, some citizens will again be called garbage by those in power. 

Immigrants, whether documented or not and citizens or not, will find their families and lives torn apart as Trump follows through on his promise of mass deportation, tearing husbands, wives, parents, and children from each other on the suspicion brought by an accent, a name, the color of skin. 

Every consumer will suffer higher prices — no matter what their yard signs promised — as Trump undertakes his deportations and tariffs. They admit the economy will be in shambles.

God save the people of Ukraine, who will face defeat as Trump gives his Putin anything he wants, and the people of Gaza, with Netanyahu completely unconstrained by his friend Trump. NATO, South Korea, Taiwan, and the beneficiaries of American generosity, support, and diplomacy are all at risk. 

Trump’s political opponents and whistleblowers will suffer in ways he is only beginning to imagine. 

Justice will suffer as Trump and his Senate can now stack every federal court with young extremists for generations to come, allowing them to tear down the institution of the Constitution under the guise of interpreting it with convenient pedantry to support their absolute power. The institutions of voting rights, fair elections, and equal rights under the law will diminish further. 

Every institution will be attacked, for that is the goal of this brand of so-called conservatism: not to conserve institutions but to destroy them, rather than share their benefits with those who follow. 

Elon Musk will do Trump’s bidding, outlawing the institution of the civil service, replacing it again with political patronage.

RFK Jr. will drive Trump to outlaw vaccinations, essentially outlawing the institutions of medicine and science.

Education is under constant attack from the right. What DeSantis has done to universities in Florida will no doubt provide a model for the destruction of the university and its institutions: academic freedom, faculty governance, tenure, pure research, the humanities. 

The institution of free speech will be very much at risk, even as Trump, Musk, and their supposedly contrarian lock-step thinkers argue they are its protectors. They will forbid and harass speech of which they do not approve. 

The institution of journalism will suffer, as it is likely that more journalists will be harrassed, even sued or jailed by Trump and his thugs. Mogul publishers will think themselves vindicated for obeying in advance and continue to squash controversy unpopular with power. Journalists — some of them — will let themselves be carried along with the right wing, declaring it the will of the people. Just this morning, I heard one guest commentator on MSNBC say that identity politics is dead and that Democrats will have to abandon progressivism to win — which is like saying that Democrats must commit suicide to live. 

Journalists and media executives refuse to acknowledge their key role in sane-washing dangerous insanity, soft-pedaling fascism, enabling amnesia and historical ignorance in the populous they serve. These journalists will get angry with the liberals who are angry at them. Their incumbent institutions — Trump bump: the sequel or not — will decline and they will have the gall to wonder why.

What is to be done? That is the question I am hearing from friends and family. No one has an answer. 

In my books, I theorize that what the most important thing the internet has done is give people who were not represented, heard, or served in so-called mainstream mass media their stage at long last — and that is what those who controlled the stage resent and resist. Thus I wonder whether the Reformation of this era of technological change will turn out to be the racial Reformation of #BlackLivesMatter, and the January 6 attack on the Capital and Trump’s triumph its counter Reformation. 

Where will this end? Print and Luther’s reformation led to peasants’ wars of exactly five hundred years ago and the Thirty Years’ that followed. Must we find ourselves in such open struggle to reach a conclusion or at least a truce?

I write this while on an ill-timed trip to Germany to give a talk, wishing I were not away from home right now as everyone I know and love is in pain. But being here, I wonder whether American fascism will have to find its denouement as it did here in Europe, in vast tragedy and destruction, before sanity might return. 

This election was my hope that we could find a different way, to rebuild not from the ashes but from where we stood. Now I am not sure. What is ultimately broken is not the set of institutions the extremists are trying to destroy but instead our nation itself. Until we face its faults of racism, sexism, and inequity we will never be finished fighting our war, our endless Civil War. 

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