At first I thought our recent democratic exercise would have to be off-limits on Thanksgiving Day.
With Clinton voters passing gravy boats to Trump voters and Trumpistas helping Clintonistas to yams, I didn’t see how we could get all the way through the pies without the discussion taking a testy turn.
One could make a case for venting our disagreements in an all-out food fight — I have always wanted to flick a spoonful of mashed potatoes at someone – but I didn’t think our hosts would go for it, given the stubbornness of cranberry stains.
Last Saturday night, though, while watching my first Penn State hockey game (the furious intensity of which I thoroughly enjoyed), I got a wonderful idea. I didn’t see how we givers of thanks could totally skirt a topic that we have all been obsessing over for entirely too long (I’m for an official campaign start date no earlier than three months before a spring national primary day so that we may be spared the tedium of watching the aspirants crisscross the country for 18 months prior to an election). We just needed some ground rules.
The hockey-inspired solution: a penalty box. It doesn’t have to be a Plexiglass booth. A penalty box of the mind will suffice. Get called for yelling and you have to sit silently for two minutes before you can rejoin the conversation.
The need for some such arrangement became apparent to me about a week before the election during a phone conversation with one of my fellow Thanksgiving invitees.
“So,” I said, “who are you voting for?”
“You really want to know?” she asked.
“I do,” I said. “I promise I won’t say a word. I’m just curious.”
But of course I already knew: She’d picked the groper. The tax dodger. The deporter. The wall builder. The climate change denier. The race baiter. The water boarder.
True to my word, I said nothing. I was gob-smacked, though. Like the other 172 million eligible voters who did not vote for Donald Trump, I didn’t see how anyone, much less a member of my own inner circle, could vote for such a blatantly unfit candidate. (Temperament and character issues aside, isn’t it a bit reckless to hire someone to head a government who has never worked in government — like hiring a maestro who doesn’t read music, a police chief who’s never worked in law enforcement, or a sea captain who has never been to sea?)
Now, though, after a week of reading about the great divides between urban and rural voters, between educated and uneducated voters, and between black and white voters, I’m grateful to my inner circle member for defying stereotypes and forcing me to reckon with the fact that an educated, professional, urban woman for whom I have enormous respect was among the 60 million Americans who did vote for Donald Trump.
So why did she? Why did they?
Was it the belief that the country should be run like a business and by a successful businessman? (I don’t accept the premise: Government is not a business. And this guy, with his bankruptcies and massive tax-deductible losses, has had mixed success.) But OK, the politicians have made a hash of things; let’s give the job to a businessman.
Is there a fatigue factor that causes the American electorate to switch parties after two terms? (The pattern has been broken only twice in the past 60 years: in 1980, when the Democrats lost the White House after one term of Jimmy Carter, and in 1988, when the Republicans kept the White House after eight years of Ronald Reagan).
Was it appreciation of Trump’s unscriptedness, his rejection of false pieties, his watch-me-ride-a-motorcycle-through-the-church-picnic bravado?
Or, to paraphrase Bernie Sanders’ campaign slogan, did he offer a fantasy to believe in? Of “deals” that would bring back lost jobs; of undoing the red tape that stifles growth; of making “us” safer by getting rid of, keeping out and cracking down on everyone white Americans are afraid of (while ignoring the threats posed by climate change).
From the little she said about her choice during that phone conversation, I gathered that my fellow turkey eater didn’t vote for Trump for any of those reasons. She indicated that she has no great regard for the president-elect. In fact, if I remember our conversation correctly, the ballot she sent in was more of a vote against Clinton than it was a vote for Trump.
So whence her Hillary hatred? Misogyny doesn’t account for it. If we all agree to allow election talk around the Thanksgiving table next week, I will ask her one question: Where do you get your news? Not from any reliable source, I’d bet.
I’d best be careful though, lest both of us wind up in the penalty box. Or flinging Brussels sprouts and cranberries at each other.
