I have spent countless hours in the weeks following Donald Trump's electoral college victory consoling shocked, grieving patients in my psychiatric practice. Normally I can think up what I think is some clever way to reframe a distorted negative interpretation, but Trump stumped me. For once I was at a complete loss. There were no pretty words to put on the disastrous outcome.
A disproportionate number of my clients are women with histories of abuse by narcissistic men, so seeing one win the oval office was like a blow to the gut. The access to health insurance and with it healthcare itself is entirely up in the air, especially for anyone who purchased a plan through the newly formed exchanges. They will join the tens of millions scrambling to find coverage with a pre-existing illness which insurers - no longer interested in offering policies in an individual marketplace that might not exist - may now be free to deny.
Yet when faced with something intrinsically and unconditionally awful, there are still several ways to find peace while fighting for values we believe in. Voting in an election is only one means of making one's voice heard:
Accept what happened. Not in the sense of welcoming the president-"elect" as he's called but in recognizing that bad things do indeed happen in this world. Not always, not even often (for most of us in the West anyway) but they do happen. The prospect of a president Trump is one of those Bad Things. As stupid as it sounds, recognizing that this did indeed happen is a first step to figuring out a solution. I would like to live in a country in which 81% of evangelical voters and 58% of white voters saw Trump as their man, but we do. We have much work to do.
Acknowledge what didn't happen (and likely won't). As bad as Trump's Electoral College victory might be, there are many things it isn't. Yes, it has the potential to affect many aspects of our lives, but as is usually the case with projections made when people are shocked and frightened, the future is less likely to be as dark as our most nightmarish projections. Life will go on as it always has even in the worst of times.
George Soros writes that for him, coming of age as a Jewish boy in hiding from the Nazis, then resisting the communists after the war was a very exciting time. He never felt more alive. It certainly was informative philosophically, inspiring him to advocate for open, transparent societies with accountable, reality-based governments accountable to their people.
Many soldiers who experienced the horrors of war also remember many of the best times of their lives interspersed among those moments of sheer terror.
And we are neither at war nor occupied by Hitler despite some of the frightening parallels. So we should be able to carve out space and time, sanctuaries from the madness going on in Washington, to enjoy life with friends and family, to immerse ourselves in a good book, to learn a new language.
We won. Clinton received over 2 million more votes than Trump. When all votes are counted, it is highly likely that more Americans voted for Clinton in 2016 than either Mitt Romney or President Obama in 2012.
The only reason she will not be inaugurated is because of our bizarre Electoral College, a troubling vestige of slavery, a compromise with white slave-owners such as James Madison, who insisted slaves counted as 3/5ths of a person to avoid northern states voting slavery out of existence. Then, as now, white voters who did not view African Americans as either fully human or deserving of the franchise felt threatened by direct democracy. Clinton received almost 2% more votes than Trump, yet Trump will likely get 25% more electoral vote. This is the fourth time in United States history, the second in the past 16 years, in which the loser of the popular vote will become president.
290 electors I never met will likely vote for Trump as president, but perhaps as many as 65 million of us voted for Clinton. Never forget that.
Term limits. The most time we must put up with this man is 8 years and with any luck, it will only be 4.
Mid terms. The best antidote to an all Republican government is a few years of an all Republican government. Pendulums swing. Dramatically. Remember that Bush (both Bushes) went from a 90% approval rating to some of the lowest presidential approval ratings ever. George W. Bush had an 86% approval rating in September 2001, but set a record low of any president ever of 22% in October 2008. Nixon was solidly popular (68%) in January 1973. 19 months later, he plunged to 24% (although Americans apparently thought more of a post-Watergate Nixon than they did of a mid-financial-crisis W).
Madness of crowds. "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of men," Isaac Newton once said after losing a fortune in the South Sea Company Bubble that sucked him in with so many otherwise sane and rational men.
Although the madness of crowds hurt us this cycle (sort of - Hillary Clinton as of this writing has won the popular vote by more than 2 million votes and counting), the only certainty about crowd behavior is that it will be uncertain. Baron Rothschild once replied, when for a prediction as to what stocks would do, "I think they will fluctuate."
Indeed.
Regression to the mean. Any extremely deviant measurement tends to be followed by a less deviant one, one closer to the long-term mean or average. If some working class white men, many of whom voted for Obama 4 years ago, voted for Trump this cycle, it is very likely that many of these will flip back next cycle (or be somewhere between the 2 extremes). This isn't a prediction that because many white people voted Republican in 2016 that many white people will vote Democrat in 2020, only that the strength of the white preference for Republicans in critical rust belt counties is likely to be less strong (and therefore lead to a different outcome).
The First Amendment. We have the right to assemble peacefully, to protest nonviolently, to speak up loudly and often about what is going on. It might feel impotent at times, but it is the only thing that really leads to long-term societal changes.
Demographics. The 69% of voters who are white in 2016 form a shrinking proportion of the electorate, down dramatically from 78% in 2000. The fact that whites, especially those with lower education, had a stronger than predicted impact in a single election doesn't change this long-term trend. 31% of voters were non-white in 2016, up from 29% in 2012. According to the Census Bureau, "no one racial group will be a majority of the country by the year 2044."
- source: Pew Research Center
Whites were the only demographic that preferred Trump; every other demographic strongly favored Clinton. Let's not forget this. 88% of African Americans (93% of African-American females), 70% of Latinos, and 55% of younger voters voted for Clinton. Although Trump won whites by 21%, this net preference was nowhere close Clinton's victory margin of 80% among African Americans and +40% of Latinos. I imagine that the next Republican candidate will be less overtly racist than Trump, so the White Power vote will be less drawn to him or her.
America's long-term track record of success. We have suffered through tremendous crises including terrible presidents, ill-advised invasions and occupations, a horrific civil war, and centuries of slavery followed by a century of Jim Crow. We got through it. We'll get through this somehow. We'll muddle through.
Even in my lifetime, so much has changed for the better. When I was born, schools were mostly segregated and President Obama's parents could not marry in about half the states of the Union.
Religious tolerance meant a Protestant living next door to a Catholic. Jews were not admitted to most country clubs and many prestigious colleges.
Women could not attend Yale or Harvard or serve in the military except for in support roles. The military academies were all male; West Point would not admit women until I was 12 and the first class with women graduated only 6 years before I arrived there.
Gay Americans were terrorized, shamed, assaulted, marginalized, and murdered. The American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a disease and would until 1973. Had anyone told me that marriage equality (not even a concept back then) would be the law of the land, I would have laughed (in that charming way that toothless babies who have no idea what you just said do).
China was a totalitarian, poor country suffering mass murder under Mao and about to go through the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution. Tens of millions didn't know it, but they were going to die, along with 1.5 million of 7 million Cambodians killed by a Mao-inspired revolutionary named Pol Pot when I was 11.
It could always get worse.
Russia and half of Europe was completely disconnected from the rest of the world. 8 years before I was born, Soviet tanks rumbled into Hungary to crush a rebellion. When I was 4, they brutally crushed a Czechoslovakian rebellion. When I was 15, they invaded Afghanistan, kicking off a brutal war, internecine fighting, the rise of the Taliban, invasion by the United States, and continued fighting that has now lasted 37 years and counting.
An electrified fence criss-crossed Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic, famously called the Iron Curtain by Winston Churchill in 1946 (and less famously by Joseph Goebbels a year earlier) manned by men with orders to shoot anyone trying to flee separated east from west.
The year before I was born, an American president had been murdered (in the same city to which my parents moved from London), then the man who killed him was himself murdered, screaming "I'm just a patsy", and the new president was sending advisors to a tiny Southeast Asian country called Vietnam.
There was no Medicare or Medicaid. The poor, the elderly, and millions of African Americans through the the south were literally starving, dying from easily preventable illnesses (grabbing the attention of an activist named Marian Wright Edelman who was to found the Children's Defense Fund, personally inspiring Robert Kennedy and Hillary Clinton to devote themselves to combating poverty and racism).
Life expectancy at birth was about 70 (today it's almost 80) but that didn't include African-American life expectancy. Why? Because African-American life expectancy wasn't considered worth measuring, apparently (I was 6 years old when people started to measure it; whites could expect to live almost 7 years longer than blacks then; an African-American born today has a life expectancy 5 years greater than a white American born when I was and the white-black gap has narrowed to 3.7 years).
Things will get better. The Trump phenomenon will be an embarrassing episode lost in the long upward arc of history, like a market crash or correction on a long-term stock market chart. Like the Know Nothings or McCarthyism, the Donald will keep future historians and psychobiographers busy but will not amount to much.
You cannot stop an idea or a people. We're bigger than any single person.
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