Nobody ever went broke betting on human irrationality. But many have gone bankrupt underestimating it.
The rosy pro-Clinton polls on election night 2016. The laughter at the impulsive Donald Trump. The smug self-assurance that the more qualified and experienced candidate would convince the American people to vote for her.
To a psychological eye, all this spelled out a familiar syndrome: denial.
Unlike so many of my friends and colleagues, I grew up outside the liberal bubble of cappuccino rationality and remained in conversation over the years with conservatives and reactionaries: the people made fun of by those like Bill Maher, whose ceaseless derision and bigotry inadvertently greased the path of bigoted Trump's ascent to the White House.
Yes, many who voted for Trump were xenophobes, misogynists, and racists. The usual image is of angry working class white men in sweat-stained t-shirts. One could even argue that anybody who votes for a racist is one. But a more careful assessment might note a few inconvenient but important truths: that some Bernie Sanders supporters swung over to Trump; that quite a few white women voted for Trump; that many middle-class people did as well. (Some of them, alas, were family members of mine.) Even a handful of people of color voted for him.
Those who voted for Trump shared one important psychological characteristic: deep hatred and suspicion of the US government. Many of them knew Trump to be unfit for office. But that, for them, was secondary to the fact that, aside from Sanders, he was the only other highly visible candidate to challenge business as usual in Washington. They would have voted for Wile E Coyote had he promised to use Acme dynamite on the national government of bank bailouts, globalization, and mass surveillance.
The Democratic Party never reached out to these frightened people. In fact, they made the worst possible error by backing a candidate who was part of the very government of which millions of voters were highly suspicious. Bernie would have stood a better chance with them. Clinton stood none.
Democrats tend to be rationalists who believe that the era of irrationality is scientifically over and that putting the facts before an enlightened public will convince them. But the era of irrationality is never over, and the fact hasn't been invented that could counter the stories people tell themselves: stories with a deep emotional investment for the tellers.
Trump had a story: Make America Great Again. What did the Democrats have? Business as Usual. They even failed to capitalize until far too late in the campaign on the deeply stirring and historically pivotal story of a woman finally having a chance at the US presidency. And so the glass ceiling under which they planned to celebrate remained intact; instead, they shattered.
It might be said that such a psychologically naive political party deserves to die, but with it goes an official buffer against the racism, sexism, and hatred of the Other that a Trump win reinforces. Already, emboldened whites are telling people of color that, as one put it to an Indian American acquaintance of mine, "Your kind won't be here much longer."
The sheriff has been chased out of town, and the Wild West now ensues. In the absence of any effective political leadership, we shall have to put on our own badges and get right to work.