From The Atlantic:
[N]o matter how this election concludes, America is now a
different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of
his splendor — his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies,
his contempt for democracy in all its forms — and they decided that they
wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about
the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance
on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how
Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.
Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because
they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by
picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.
To be clear, I never expected a Biden landslide in a country as
polarized as the United States. I was a wet blanket even among my Never
Trump comrades, holding out only the modest hope that Biden would
recapture the states Clinton lost in 2016, and possibly flip Arizona.
But I expected the margins in all of those states — and especially in
Biden’s birth state of Pennsylvania — to be higher. I suspected that Biden
had no real chance in places such as Texas or Georgia or even North
Carolina, all states in the Trumpist grip.
Nor was I among the progressives who believed America would
repudiate Trump’s policies. For one thing, I am a conservative — and I
know my former tribe. Trump voters don’t care about policy. They didn’t
care about it in 2016, and they don’t care about it now. The party of
national security, fiscal austerity, and personal responsibility
supports a president who is in the pocket of the Russians, has exploded
the national deficit, and refuses to take responsibility for anything. I
had hoped, at the least, that people who once insisted on the
importance of presidential character would vote for basic decency after
living under the most indecent president in American history.
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