My Faith in Humanity Is Being Challenged

Living through the election and presidency of Donald Trump changed my perspective in some important ways. The one that feels the most obvious is that I used to believe that when it became clear that Republican policies were a failure, voters would wake up and recognize what had gone wrong.

Based on the 2008 election, I had reason to believe that was true. After Bush/Cheney completely botched the response to Katrina, lied to get us mired in an endless war in the Middle East, and implemented policies that brought on the Great Recession, voters actually elected this country's first African American president who promised "hope and change." 

But I failed to envision that someone like Trump could come along and exploit the racism those eight years unleashed. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:

Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

Over the course of Trump's presidency, he told more than 30,000 lies. Face-checkers were so busy they could hardly keep up. With the spread of a global pandemic, those lies became deadly. 

None of that affected the stranglehold Trump had on the Republican Party. Instead, steps that would have helped curb the spread of the virus were politicized as "tyranny" and things just continued to get worse. 

Then, when it was clear that Trump lost the 2020 election, he unleashed the Big Lie. Even today, Fox News is reporting that, according to their polls, 77 percent of Trump voters think he actually won. That lie set the stage for an attempted coup. And yet still, polls show that, in a head-to-head match-up with Biden, Trump wins a plurality of voters. 

Regardless of the economic boom currently underway, voters fail to give Biden any credit, while "Republicans say, bizarrely, that current economic conditions are much worse than they were in March 2009, when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month."

What I have had to grapple with over the last year is that, no matter the facts, a rather large share of voters will fail to recognize that they've elevated a lying con artist and are prepared to follow him - even if it means the destruction of our democracy. A "great awakening" for these people is not going to come. 

On the one hand, this realization has forced me to question the judgement of people who are friends and family. While I've disagreed with most of them about politics for a long time now, this divide goes much deeper. I literally cannot imagine how they rationalize their support for Trump. But it makes me question their discernment in other areas of their lives as well. 

But the big question that remains is "how does this end?" Since I can't imagine a "great awakening," it seems that I have no choice but to believe that, in defense of their position, things will simply get worse. The escalation of threats and violence we've seen this fall feel like a harbinger of things to come. 

Every fiber of my being wants to reject that conclusion. But my mind tells me that's my privilege talking. I've grown up in a country that, even as we struggled, seemed to eventually move in the direction of doing what's right. That core belief is being challenged today. 

All of that reminds me of something Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a few days after Obama was elected in 2008.

Here is where Barack Obama and the civil rights leaders of old are joined -- in a shocking, almost certifiable faith in humanity, something that subsequent generations lost. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. may have led African Americans out of segregation, and he may have cured incalculable numbers of white racists, but more than all that, he believed that the lion's share of the population of this country would not support the rights of thugs to pummel people who just wanted to cross a bridge. King believed in white people, and when I was a younger, more callow man, that belief made me suck my teeth. I saw it as weakness and cowardice, a lack of faith in his own. But it was the opposite. King's belief in white people was the ultimate show of strength: He was willing to give his life on a bet that they were no different from the people who lived next door.

That makes me wonder what Rev. King would say today. Certainly the obstacles he faced were much more severe. But we've watched thugs pummel people who simply wanted to protect the Capitol. Trump and his supporters just cheered them on. 

I truly have no idea where all of this will lead. But perhaps the hardest thing for me to grapple with these days is that my faith in humanity is being challenged. That one goes to the core because cynicism has never been an option for me.