Like everyone else in the country, ad a good fraction of the world’s population as well, I am working through my reactions to the results of this week’s election. I am not surprised by the Trump victory. I had prepared myself for that weeks and weeks ago as while I found Kamala Harris a fine candidate, I was unsure of her electability. I am surprised by the decisiveness of Trump’s victory with a commanding lead in the popular vote as well as the electoral college. He was unable to win the popular vote in either 2016 or 2020 so I am still puzzling out why he did this time around. I’ve read dozens of opinion columns with pundits of various political stripes pointing fingers at all sorts of bogeymen but my guess is that Occam’s razor will leave us with the simplest answer. This country has always been and remains a patriarchy. It’s baked into our cultural DNA.
Our culture derives primarily from the British colonists who crossed the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries. People do not pull up stakes and undertake a difficult voyage fraught with the privations of travel at the time if their lives are going well. It’s the dispossessed, the endangered, the family that sees little hope for their children with the status quo, that are willing to make that sacrifice. (The same motives that are driving immigration northward from Latin America). The outgroup in the 17th century were the English puritans and related continental religious groups who rejected the empty pomp of the established state churches and came for religious freedom – The Congregationalists to Massachusetts, the Quakers to Pennsylvania etc. Their austere interpretation of religious doctrine and its role in public life infused the new world with a patriarchal world view, a culture of self denial, and the famous puritan work ethic. This way of seeing and doing things spread from the early metropolitan areas of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to the rest of the country as a formal union of the states created a national identity. (There are a few outliers – New Orleans, having developed from French/Spanish/Creole culture has a completely different set of mores from most of the rest of the country, most easily seen in the toleration of public drinking).
While we didn’t exactly relegate women entirely to the status of chattel, we certainly circumscribed their lives and made them dependent on the existence of their men folk in ways that the women of Saudi Arabia would recognize. Women were not granted the right to vote until 1920, 72 years after the famous Seneca Falls convention where the leading women’s rights advocates of the day met and drafter their strategies for empowering women politically. Women were not allowed financial independence from men until the mid 1970s when they were finally allowed to open bank accounts and have credit accounts in their own name. They could be legally raped by their husbands until 1993. They still have not achieved full bodily autonomy.
Patriarchal attitudes, especially as filtered through Victorian mores, have created a culture of idealized feminine purity which still infiltrates so much of what we do without thinking. The white wedding dress and veil and the giving away of the bride, the double standard in regards to sexual behavior and slut shaming, the idea that women and girls need to be protected from the harsher elements of life. When our culture ventures out of these unwritten rules, punishment is quick and severe. When Alfred Kinsey published ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Male’ in 1947, it was a cultural sensation and he was lauded for demystifying the subject. The intelligentsia all read it for titillation if for no other reason. When he published ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Female’ a year or so later, there was outrage. How dare such filthy things we said about wives, mothers, sisters, daughters. His career and research never recovered. When pop music in the late 70s was taken over by singers and creators who were predominantly female, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community, the culture responded with ‘Disco sucks’ and a quick elevation of straight male hard rock bands. (Dressed mainly in outfits from the Atlanta Eagle, courtesy of the influence of Rob Halford of Judas Priest). When then First Lady Hilary Clinton came up with quite reasonable solutions to the problems in the American health care system, she had to be laughed off Capitol Hill. Then there’s the sad tale of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Whatever the reason, patriarchy or other, we have the result that we have. The Democrats are too adult to march on the Capitol brandishing AK-47s and pooping on congressional desks so we’ll have a peaceful transfer of power (although I have the feeling that Biden has prepared for this moment and has a couple of tricks up his sleeve after the Supremes basically declared the president above the law). January 20th will roll around and we’ll be off to the races again. Just a reminder – when dealing with authoritarians – believe what they tell you. We will get at least parts of Project 2025. I hope the worst parts will become mired in constitutional challenges. We are likely to get a cabinet and senior government filled with sycophants rather than individuals of talent and capability. This may speed up my retirement plans. I’m not sure I can function in a health system guided by Joseph Ladapo and RFK Jr. (Between the pandemic and the aging of the boom, it’s already in crisis and that’s not the team that’s going to be able to shore it up). How much of the immigrant pronouncements are rhetoric and how much will be acted upon I simply don’t know. Rounding up and deporting tens of millions of undocumented individuals is possible (Nazi Germany showed us that – just take a look at the story of the Hungarian Jews). All I can say is if it begins, do not let it happen under cover of darkness and behind closed doors. Find out and publicize exactly what goes on in detention centers. Even a partially successful mass deportation will decimate the agriculture, construction and hospitality sectors. There will be no nursing assistants in nursing homes so you’ll have to take grandma in. Tariffs will cause price spikes so be ready to forego those cheap and readily available consumer goods. If we withdraw from NATO, forget that European vacation. Those with American passports may not be welcome.
What am I not going to do? I am not going to cut people with differing political ideas completely out of my life. I am not them. I don’t know what combination and culmination of personal choices has allowed them to select as they have. I will be polite, but I am likely to give them a wider berth and share less but I will not be an absolutist. That leads to an even wider divide in society and it’s wide enough already. Plus, politics are a funny thing. Things can change much faster than you might think. When I lived in California in the 80s and 90s, it had a Republican governor and a very conservative state house. In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8 which made gay marriage illegal. Just a few years later, Windsor and Obergefell changed all of that and just this week, California voters passed a state constitutional amendment enshrining gay marriage as a right. It only took sixteen years for everything to change, not 72.
As the Chinese curse proverb goes – May you live in interesting times.
I think I need a drink.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 