Trump, fist raised, 9 November 2016. Evan Vucci/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.There will be a lot of moralising talk in the coming days, and many articles written mentioning words like ‘elites’ and ‘system’. There will be talk about how we didn't take this threat seriously enough. How we underestimated it, despite the fact that we campaigned as vigorously as we could – for my part, I haven’t slept for the last five days. As far as ‘the media’ is concerned, we called Trump a ‘threat to the republic’ more times than I can count, and we published unprecedented conservative endorsements of Clinton, and many thorough critiques of Trump. ‘Like Brexit,’ people will say, ‘the elite pollsters couldn't have seen it coming.’
Here's the thing.
The cold hard truth, and the thing that most of our writers will not be talking about in the coming days, is that this has nothing to do with ‘elitism’, or the economic struggles of a segment of our population. This is not about Brexit, or any international incident. It is not about national security or economic policy or really any kind of policy. The only thing that is incontestable, that has been statistically proven through this election, is the thing that is most difficult to talk about – that we have tens of millions of American voters who are willing to vote for the only things that have distinguished the Trump campaign: bigotry, antisemitism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, a deep distrust not in ‘elitism’, but in cherished values like education and empathy for those who are less fortunate, economically, than ourselves.
