(IMHO) People in other countries envy the US because it is the land of opportunity. You can be rich! There are no rules, no pesky hidebound traditions to restrict our relentless pursuit of happiness. Blue jeans! Rock and roll! McDonald’s! Hollywood! The New York Yankees! Yesterday’s election is one consequence of shiny object thinking. We’re all in on the pursuit of happiness (which conspicuously replaces the French “fraternity”). We don’t owe nobody nothing. The original sin to social conservatives is Roosevelt’s New Deal, which (to quote Jon Stewart recently) had the audacity to say “Hey, wait, that guy’s hungry? What if we gave him soup?” And people would be like, “What? No! That is the job of the Sisters of the Poor. Government can’t do that.”
Randy Newman’s song Rednecks describes a New York TV audience laughing at Lester Maddox, a 1960s era staunch segregationist from Georgia. The line that I keep coming back to is “he may be a fool but he's our fool. If [we] think [we’re] better than him [we’re] wrong.”
I am again (as I was back in 2016) reminded of what Hunter Thompson wrote: “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
Look, we’re all numb. We don’t want to think about what the next 4 years will bring. We will reach out to our friends and grieve. We will laugh at clever parodies on SNL. We will post on social media maps of the United States describing an increasingly large swath of the country as “Dumbf*ckistan”. But we will find a way back. As Kamala Harris said today, sometimes the fight takes a while.