The election panned out pretty much the way I thought it would. I couldn’t see a path for victory for Trump due to him having to overcome the introduction of a large amount of mail-in votes. It certainly looked like Trump had it wrapped up until these mail-in dumps happened.
Too many casuals voted, people who usually won’t take the time to visit a voting booth.
The low-information voter bloc decided our election.
It is what it is.
Don’t underestimate how much that story about Trump calling fallen soldiers “losers” and “suckers” might have harmed him in rust-belt states.
Like anybody sane, I didn’t want to believe the story. But a part of me could believe it.
Trump has never been a true conservative, and is probably not a Christian. He is a lifelong liberal who partied and socialized in elite, Hollywood liberal circles. He has always been anti-war, for the most part, and like most liberals, holds a disdain for military types.
I don’t think it is outrageous to believe that he made those statements when viewed within the context of who he has been most of his life.
I don’t think Trump was a bad President, policy-wise. He didn’t get us into any wars. The economy, under his watch, was booming before the pandemic hit. He put America first (is that a bad thing now?)
In all, he didn’t deserve to lose the election. But he did, nonetheless.
Most valid criticisms of Trump are aimed at comments he made or his character. But not policy.
This is important. In many other timelines, Trump cruises to a reelection victory.
But when he needed to just tone it down, and act ‘Presidential,’ he just couldn’t pull it off. His first debate performance was so cringe-worthy that I couldn’t watch more than a few minutes of it. He came off as super-angry, close to being unhinged, and a loud-mouthed bully.
Not a good look for a President, honestly.
I don’t think Joe Biden is an evil man, but couldn’t bring myself to vote for him. I watched his supporters in our major American cities riot, loot, vandalize and terrorize the good citizens of this country for almost the whole of the summer. I saw people being killed in the street, cops being murdered, and recognized it all for what it truly was: domestic terrorism.
I began to realize that a vote for Biden/Harris was the same as bending a knee before the domestic terrorism we had been exposed to, for months.
I felt like America was better than that, that they wouldn’t cower in the face of this political violence.
But they did. And apparently America is not what I thought it was.
Perhaps the culture war is over. Perhaps fear really is the strongest motivator of men.
This is a sad reflection on our society. We all need to pray. We all need to rethink and revisit the role of the breakaway protestant church in all of this, as well. (I will write about this in depth another time.)
Finally, I think everything that has happened in the last 6 months set up the democrats for success based purely on the fact that the pandemic made people more open than usual to large-scale government intervention in their daily lives.
While Trump and republicans were talking about re-opening the economy, having faith, overcoming hardship through personal responsibility, the news media was promoting the idea that we need to be fearful, scared, at home, masked up, and faithless. Stay home. You have good reason to be scared. Let the government take care of everything. This is out of your hands, and only we can save you.
This obviously favored the party of big government.
And fear really is the greatest motivator.
If anything is to be learned from all of this, it is that the messaging of the democrats suited the fears of the people more so than the optimistic, more traditionally-American messaging of the republicans.
Some might even lament that fear and cowardice has won, in the end. Or that the people willingly submitted to an all-out assault on their peace of mind.
Maybe those are valid diagnoses. Maybe not.
But the virus is and was real. The fears we all experienced were and are real.
But faith and hope in the face of fear and loss is real, also. Faith serves goodness the way that electricity serves a machine.
So the question becomes: how are we going to fare now, without faith?
