New Hire

Well, I made my recommendation to the management, and they did not accept it.  Donald Trump is going to be the next president.  Donald Trump is going to be the next president.  Donald Trump has been elected to serve for the next four years as the President of the United States.  Donald Trump is going to be the next president.

Sorry to type that so many times, but I'm still pretty solidly in the denial stage.

When Donald Trump won the Republican primary, I thought that my party was broken.  But I thought Mr. Trump would be crushed in the general election, that the fringe elements of the base would be properly humiliated, and that the party would be forced to examine itself and correct for a world that is increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan.  I was wrong.  The Republican party is not broken; it is dead.  The party that organized itself around fiscal conservatism and family values (and military spending and active foreign policy and abortion and gun rights) is dead.  The electoral map has changed, the base has changed, and that party has disappeared.  But it has been seamlessly replaced by a new party - a party large enough to win a presidential election - that calls itself Republican but is not what I was introduced to growing up.  It must have been there all along, metastasizing in birthers and the Tea Party; but I didn't want to see it.  Now that it's here, however, I am trying to come to grips with it, and to understand what it is.

As far as I can tell, it is a new kind of coalition.  It's a coalition that's weaker than the old one in Utah and stronger than the old one in Wisconsin, that's even less aligned with Californians and even more aligned with Floridians.  It's weaker in Arizona and Nevada, but stronger in Maine and Pennsylvania. 

What do I know about this new coalition, aside from its geography?  Well, the one thing I know for sure about this new Republican party is that they elected Donald Trump.  What does that say about the party?  It's hard to generalize, especially since there are as many individual motivations for voting as there are voters; nevertheless, I'm going to try to infer a few general trends from the loudest parts of the Trump campaign and the loose collection of ideas that made up his platform.  I think the result might be predictive of what this new party will stand for in the years to come (although making predictions about the future is something I'm apparently terrible at doing).

The new party distrusts the media.  Deeply.  Never has a candidate for president been so widely denounced by the media, including an unprecedented number of Clinton endorsements or Trump anti-endorsements from conservative newspapers.  The new party does not trust these sources.

The new party hates Hillary Clinton.  Perhaps even more than they hate the media.

The new party will vote for a candidate who is not easy to pin down on most issues, but whose most consistent stances include the following:

1) Mexicans take away our jobs and commit violent crimes, and no Muslim should be allowed to enter the country without "extreme vetting".
2) The Second Amendment should not be repealed.
3) Manufacturing jobs exist, are currently in China, and can be returned to the United States.
4) The US is too involved overseas.
5) Law and order is at risk in the United States, and tougher policing must be the response.

Finally, the new party has come to terms with electing a man who was caught on tape speaking about trying to sleep with a married woman and bragging about how he can get away with groping women he considers attractive.  Although, given their distrust of the media, they might believe that the tape was faked, and/or that the alternative was a woman who routinely gets away with murdering people (despite being unable to get away with a private email server).

I do not belong to this new party.  My registration is still Republican, but it is a symbolic gesture, an act of respect to the best parts of a flawed party that now no longer exists.

I thought the Republican party would be doing a lot of soul-searching after this election.  Turns out they don't exist anymore, and I'm doing the soul-searching instead.

No wonder I can't sleep tonight.

Morning after update:  I should be clear that I do not believe that all Trump voters hold the views I outlined above.  I just think they represent the most likely version of what a party platform based on this election would look like.  People vote for parties even when they disagree with some or most of the ideas, and I understand that.  I still love you even though you voted for Trump.