Make America Sane

Published on by D. G. Hart

I won’t reveal how I voted. Nor can I claim to be happy about yesterday’s outcome (I married a woman who took it hard). But a piece of me thinks that a Donald Trump presidency may make it harder for certain sorts of outlooks or activities to be taken seriously.

The first is the grief counseling offered to students at U Mass Lowell:

Dear Students,

We at the Multicultural Affairs Office hope this email reaches you and you are doing ok. We know many of you stayed up waiting to hear of the election results. These are unprecedented times. The nation as well as our community is reacting in many different ways. We are reaching out to each of you because we know that this was an intense election and we are already hearing a number of reactions, feelings and emotions. This is a critical time to make sure that you, your friends, classmates, neighbors are doing ok and seeking the appropriate support especially if they need a place to process or work through what they’re feeling.

You may hear or notice reactions both immediate and in the coming weeks, some anticipated and many that may be difficult to articulate or be shared. While it may take some time to fully take in all the recent events, please also know that the OMA office is here for you. Our UMass Lowell community is here for you. Do not hesitate at all to come in or ask for support.

Today there is a Post-election self-care session from 12-4pm in Moloney. The event will include cookies, mandalas, stress reduction techniques and mindfulness activities. Counseling and Health Services will also be available. We have sent out messages through our Social Media sites as well as encouraging students to drop in all week. Above all, take good care and know that there is strength in our community that you can lean on.

Kind regards,
Office of Multicultural Affairs Staff

Do these people cower when reading accounts of the American founding for all of the self-actualized agency that colonists displayed in seeking self-determination and limited government? (Read: are they American?)

The second is Damon Linker’s description of the cosmopolitan w-w that has dominated the Obama years (thanks to Rod Dreher):

Underlying liberal denigration of the new nationalism — the tendency of progressives to describe it as nothing but ‘racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia’ — is the desire to delegitimise any particularistic attachment or form of solidarity, be it national, linguistic, religious, territorial, or ethnic… cosmopolitan liberals presume that all particularistic forms of solidarity must be superseded by a love of humanity in general, and indeed that these particularistic attachments will be superseded by humanitarianism before long, as part of the inevitable unfolding of human progress.

For those of us 2k Protestants who have managed to hyphenate ourselves, and found ways to recognize our multiple loyalties, the notion that all attachments to what Edmund Burke called little platoons block national progress is — well — unwelcoming. It’s also dumb. Were the Students for a Democratic Society wrong to exclude Young Americans for Freedom?

I don’t think President Trump will issue executive orders for colleges students to human-up or for Orthodox Presbyterians to sponsor OPC Pride Parades. But I do sense that he will not lend the support of the White House to the touchier and more ethereal sides of American character.

9 thoughts on “Make America Sane”

  2. ” I won’t reveal how I voted.”
    Hey, that’s unfair! How will I know if I still agree with anything you’ve written?

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  5. “But a piece of me thinks that a Donald Trump presidency may make it harder for certain sorts of outlooks or activities to be taken seriously.”

    I’m afraid I’ll have to add the outlooks and activities of both the Racial Reconciliation Corporation and the Gospel Centered Industrial Complex to things that should not be taken seriously in light of Trump’s victory. Some of our friends on the Racial Reconciliation beat at TGC are viewing white Evangelical Trump voters no differently than writers at the Huffington Post, NYT, New Yorker, Washington Post, etc. The Starbucks and Whole Foods Loving Creatives (Redeemerites) are besides themselves that people who don’t Worship The City, Love The City, Live In The City actually have a different opinion on “gospel-centered” living. Who knew that Missional Gospel-Centered Urban Christians had their own SJW counterparts?

    How ironic that those who talk the most about diversity, tolerance, and inclusion of “The Other” never seem to apply it when “The Other” is a White Evangelical Trump voter.

    Happy Times Ahead. Happy Times Ahead.

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  6. So Obama gets two terms and his wife has about as much cultural cachet as Beyonce and Oprah, but this election proved the racist and sexist underbelly of the american electorate? How about you ran a candidate who had less charisma than Al Gore, admittedly didn’t like to campaign, ostensibly didn’t get after it until the last three weeks and needed the black president and his wife to motivate her OWN base and, oh by the way, you defrauded the populist in your own party(Sanders) out of the nomination. Maybe this was less about the electorate and more about your candidate.

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  7. She fails to turn out the members of her own party at the same level Obama turned out TWICE against white males on the other ticket, in the same democratic districts, buy you’re mad at and blame republicans for not breaking ranks and voting for your candidate or abstaining? And this after bragging about how dominant you were on the ground and you might even have an electoral landslide? And this is somehow the fault of white men and women? Hurry up and get through your stages of grief, so you can start reconciling to your self-inflicted failure.

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  8. Sean Michael Winters notes how President Obama did not help American sanity:

    I am friendly with two families that have a transgender child. I know how difficult and challenging this situation is, and how little we know about the phenomenon. I am deeply sympathetic to how an issue like which bathroom you can use will affect a child going through the already difficult teen years. But, when the attorney general had a big press conference to announce a lawsuit against North Carolina on the issue, I remembered something my mother used to say when I would not let a given issue go: “You don’t have to make a federal case out of it.” From the time spent this year discussing transgender rights, you would think it was one of the most pressing national issues. Was any such attention lavished on less trendy causes like the dearth of health care in poor rural areas? Same goes for lighting up the White House after the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. Did Obama ever think of lighting up the White House for something important to white, rural Americans?

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  9. Do correspondents do a better job of complicating matters than historians?

    To those who scoff at the suggestion that Clinton would have benefited from talking at greater length about policy, I’d point out that the idea isn’t that she needed to plunge into greater specifics. On the contrary, an over-abundance of specificity on small-ball proposals that micro-targeted the panoply of groups in the Democratic Party’s identity-politics-based electoral coalition was precisely the problem.

    Where was the overarching vision for the country and its future? The closest Clinton came to articulating one was in the leaked transcript of a speech to a private audience of bankers, in which she dreamed of a hemisphere-wide free-trade and open-border zone. That clashed with the populist mood of the moment, but a full-throated defense of that dream — or a passionate repudiation of it — would have been better than what Clinton did instead, which was attempt to coast to victory on an air of inevitability and an undertow of Trump hatred.

    Clinton narrowly lost, but she should have massively won. It’s in the interest of the Democrats to figure out precisely where things went so wrong — so they can make sure that it never happens again.

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