Like many millions of people today, I'm suffering the emotional effects of the whipsaw upending of expectations that has turned a greyish political future into something that seems ominous and tormenting. Watching the results at a public venue last night, my initial exultation as I settled in for what I thought would be a tense but victorious romp by Hillary Clinton turned into a wholly unexpected sensation: that of being a rat caught in a maze designed by a sadist, moving east to west in search of a diminishing path of electoral votes that never materialized, switching desperately between the projected newscast and my smart phone, drilling down to county levels, searching for those urban votes that would turn this thing around, in my rodential stupor believing I was somehow still in control of my fate that night, until finally I was stared into a metaphorical and literal wall of red, having the random and inaccurate thought that I was staring into the eye of Sauron (I now realize whose bloodshot eye I was really seeing).
In the end, it was the slipping of Pennsylvania into the Trump column that was my personal reckoning point. It was a small comfort in that instant that Hillary was looking increasingly likely to win the popular vote, although my satisfaction in that fact, and its importance to our efforts to regroup and dig out of this hole, has grown and will surely grow more in the coming days and weeks, even as it's also a deeply frustrating fact.
In many ways, my formative adult political experience was the Florida recount in 2000. Even more than the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the recount was a wake-up call that we're engaged in a generations-long, take-no-prisoners struggle over the kind of country we will be. That progressives allowed that disturbing election to go by without any serious effort to amend the Constitution to abolish the electoral college is one of the bitter legacy we're all swishing around in our mouths today. Apart from the unfathomable incompetence of George W. Bush, the next eight years were all about catering to the 1% and unleashing pointless, unwinnable wars that have unleashed cycles of violence in the Middle East. When the bottom fell out, it took a Democratic Party still somewhat rooted in a vision of an activist government that can act on behalf of the majority and the less powerful to stop us from plunging into the abyss of a new Great Depression.
We're at another recount moment. The first order of business, as I see it, is to make sure that we point out at every opportunity how Donald Trump's election makes a mockery of our majority rules election system. Pretty ironic that Donald Trump spent the run-up to the election claiming that the system is rigged, only to be the beneficiary of the antiquated and undemocratic electoral college. You can already seen how his victory is largely being framed as a repudiation of Hillary Clinton, and of the Obama years. This is hogwash. A majority of the American population voted for Hillary Clinton. Let that sink in for a moment. A majority. A majority of the population wanted to continue the general policies of the Obama years. That this squeaker of a victory can or should be used to yank America to the hard right is a joke of the grimmest kind. We let this happen in 2000, and have been paying the price ever since. It needs to be resisted and called out from the start. We can't let Trump pull a George W. Bush and try to fashion a mandate out of whole cloth.