11/09/2016
Change I Cannot Believe In
Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States. These are the words that I hoped I would never have to utter the day after the 2016 Election. Yet here we are. When I look back at last night and try to unpack the several factors that led to a stunning Trump victory, I always come back to one reason: People want change in their lives. What is so disappointing in the voter who circled the Trump/Pence ticket in the ballot box last night is not their explicit or tacit endorsement of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, and it is not that they want to see change in the country and change in their lives. It is the profound lack of understanding of how change occurs when it comes to public policy. And that change is hard.
Exit polls released yesterday showed that 9 percent of registered Democrats voted for Donald Trump. Many of these people likely voted for Barack Obama in 2008 on the wave of optimism and hope that accompanied his Presidential Campaign. Despite change not being realized in their lives, many of these white working class males likely voted for President Obama again in 2012 with the hopes that he would fulfill his promise to them of helping them reclaim their livelihoods that many of them had lost over the years due to globalization and the financial crisis that cost many their jobs and their homes and their life savings. So when it came to the candidacy of Donald Trump, instead of seeing a demagogue without a shred of knowledge about public policy (Sometime today I hope that Donald Trump will take a break from admiring himself in the mirror and tweeting about the dishonest media to do a quick Google search to learn how a bill becomes a law) who was fanning the flames of cultural and economic insecurity to prop up his fact-free dystopian view of the United States that he alone could fix. These same people turned and looked at Secretary Clinton and saw an admittedly flawed candidate who offered a more candid assessment of the state of the country that included inconvenient truths about the hardships that accompany an economy recovering a massive recession.
It was irrelevant to these voters as to whether or not Donald Trump’s plans were feasible, or more pointedly if Donald Trump had any actual plans to bring their jobs and bring back prosperity to their economically depressed communities.
While much of these revelations were deeply unnerving for me to realize, what brought the most anguish to me is not that these voters did not understand how public policy works, but much like their candidate over the course of this election cycle, it is not at all clear to me that they ever cared to learn to understand it. For to understand it is to learn the hard truths about public policy. Barack Obama’s presidency has been far from perfect and some of the policies that he has enacted have seen problems that are in need of fixing. Regardless of what you think of these policies, they were created and enacted through pragmatic and thoughtful deliberation from informed policymakers who used data and reasoning grounded in facts, not rhetoric. Policymaking is not always exciting, it is not fun, it is grueling work that often must go through the meat grinder of partisanship and special interests before it can come to fruition. I personally could care less if this truth is inconvenient or unsettling for a voter, but anyone who believes that somehow Donald Trump is going to come into the White House and change any of this is living in an alternate reality where public policy can be written and enacted with a simple decree or order from the President.
I do not doubt that some Republicans and disaffected Democrats will read this and conclude that I am simply trying to ignore the fact that last nights election results showed a repudiation of Hillary Clinton, the Obama Presidency, and a desire for an outsider to bring down the hammer on the Washington Elites and Establishment. First, I would be remiss if I did not note that at this current point it appears that despite Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, Secretary Clinton is going to win the popular vote. However, she lost the popular votes in states where there are predominantly white populations with large swaths of working class males. In hindsight it should not surprise me that Hillary Clinton won the diversifying swing states of Colorado and Nevada, only to fall to states such as Ohio and Wisconsin. Because in states such as Ohio and Wisconsin, there are thousands of Trump supporters who may despise much of what he has said, but they hear his calls for change and they want to believe the simplistic terms he speaks of enacting change can be done. Because to accept that change in public policy is a long, difficult process is to accept an inconvenient truth that the America they long for is never coming back. Secretary Clinton was candidate that had flaws in her character, but she had a plan to continue the pragmatic progress that President Obama has led for the past 8 years, which was change that I could believe in. Donald Trump represents the antithesis of this. I do not fault any Trump support for wanting change in their lives and change to the status quo in this country, but I fault them for entrusting this belief in a man who has absolutely no understanding change in public policy comes to pass.
That is simply change I cannot believe in.
Yours truly,
Samuel Hird, President of Elon College Democrats
