I have been saying since last December that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States. Endless amounts of scorn have been heaped on me by centrist liberals whose credulous belief in the support-exorcising power of anecdotes about Trump's racism and sexism and their own ability to be offended is rivaled only by their unshakable support for the rights of hardcore pornographers, and by conservative #NeverTrumpers who knew from the moment he talked about the possibility of raising taxes that he could no more be their man than Bernie Sanders and have spent the ensuing year inventing other, loftier-sounding reasons for disliking him.* To borrow a line from my favorite president, I welcomed their hatred.
The line that has gotten the most laughs in bars is my assertion that if Bernie Sanders were not the Democratic nominee, Trump would win my home state of Michigan. I said it would be a damn near-run thing, which it was, but I never doubted that in the end the man who told Ford executives that he would destroy their profits before he would allow them to build another factory outside the Great Lakes State would beat a woman whose husband is more responsible than any other living American for their economic woes and who herself shares his belief in the unlimited prosperity-making power of free trade. Michael Moore deserves a great deal of credit for understanding this also when virtually no one else in the commentariat did.
How did anyone think that this cynical unlikable creature of Wall Street would capture the hearts and minds of people of all ages and races who supported Sanders during the primaries? It didn't matter how much money she raised or how many neat bespoke apps her digital team developed. She was never going to have a good turn-out operation. No one much likes her because she doesn't much like anyone. Practically her only two constituencies, if you can call them that, were young women who think that feminism means being keen on infanticide, having a high-paying job, and exercising a lot, and the self-aggrandizing foreign policy "establishment" who believe that a supporter of the Iraq war and architect of our disastrous intervention in Libya is "credible" because her prose style is almost as boring as theirs.
Far and away the most myopic group was my fellow journalists. Nothing has been more hilariously revealing this election cycle than reading hundreds of thousands of words of self-righteous fact-checking gibberish—as if that thousandth old CSPAN clip on a website he has never heard of would finally convince the son of a factory worker whose wife makes just above minimum wage at a temp agency and whose brother-in-law just got busted for meth again that voting for Trump was beyond the pale and that what he really needed to do was sell his ATV, quit smoking, move to Austin, and learn Python. A great deal of guff has been talked about "fake news" in this cycle. I agree that there is a general epistemological crisis in this country that has made discourse about politics, art, religion, and virtually every other topic of importance impossible. When the press and the political and scientific establishment believe that butchering babies and selling their organs on the open market is morally licit, it's hard to blame anyone—including the establishment themselves—for not even attempting to see things as they are or even as others see them and retreating into a world of private illusions.
Still: the 97 percent chance given to Hillary Clinton on the election blog of the New York Times just before Nov. 8 beggars belief no matter how much you try mentally to adjust for the fact that these people also believe that Beyoncé is great art (or even great pop) and that, as one prominent senior editor once intimated, they are morally superior to people in "flyover country" because they watch Game of Thrones instead of Fishing With Roland Martin. Has any candidate ever had a 97 percent chance of winning any election? Is there ever a 97 percent (or higher) chance of anything other than the rising and falling of the sun and the Second Coming of our Lord? I wouldn't give Alabama a 97 percent chance of beating the University of Hawaii tomorrow. How many signs—the total lack of grassroots enthusiasm for Clinton, especially among Sanders supporters who, even if they were voting for her, would not be knocking on doors or making phone calls or raising money or driving people to the polls; the simple intuition that if you equate support for Trump with moral opprobrium people, especially in the polite Midwest, probably aren't going to own up to it over the phone; the lessons of '68 and '72 and 2000 and 2004—do you have to ignore to be that certain unless for you journalism is not about analysis or even advocacy but simply a matter of self-congratulations?
Anyway, I'd like to close with some advice for the left. I remember how all this feels. I stayed home from school in 2004 when Bush was re-elected despite everything the polls had suggested—and I wanted to kick myself almost immediately afterwards for putting a Kerry/Edwards sticker on my acoustic guitar right under the spot where I'd written "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS." Don't allow yourself to be co-opted by the party of Chuck Schumer, Wall Street's favorite senator. You went through this during the Bush years. These people don't care about justice for the poor or about peace or about the environment. They want power and money and, most of all, the intoxicating feeling that comes with winning and watching their opponents lose. Most of you are decent, non-vindictive people who care about actual issues. You already have moral authority when it comes to them. Don't squander it by compromising the way Sanders did when he endorsed a woman who held him and everything he stood for in utter contempt. Instead, I say, let your freak flags fly. Rip the pipeline out of the ground in the Sioux Nation. Push for Obamacare to be repealed and replaced with single-payer.
Also, maybe, just maybe, consider spending just a little bit less time on what I have come to think of as the genital issues. Let me be brutal: most of the people you're fighting for don't give a toss about any of this stuff, I promise. In fact, many of them actually disagree with you. Think about it this way: at the very least, it's interesting, isn't it, that Tide and American Airlines and AT&T and Expedia and Puff and Ugg and Walgreens and virtually every other brand and major corporation in this country were ecstatic about something that you think is a crucial part of your mission. Maybe I'm wrong and it's great that you can do whatever you want with your private parts—but what has that got to do with justice exactly?
*Most people in the latter group have come around in the space of 48 hours. They're already exchanging high fives, getting their résumés together, deleting old tweets, angling for administration jobs. The few who aren't are pretending that a delusional unmarried supporter of gay marriage in his forties is the next Ronald Reagan. I wish them the best in their endeavors.