By Tom H. Hastings
I’m writing this bit three days before the 2024 US election. Jess Bidgood just noted in the New York Times that:
When Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Me Too movement had not yet forced a reckoning among women about the way sexism shaped their lives. The Dobbs decision had not turned women’s right to an abortion into a matter of geographic privilege, nor had it imprinted searing stories about those denied care into the national consciousness.
It is this logic that persuades me that the polls are wrong; Harris will sweep the swing states and run the table. Mark my words.
Also know how erroneous I have been in the past about these matters. Perhaps I have made a career out of overestimating the decency of the American people, my people, my fellow citizens, co-workers, and neighbors…
Nah. I got one thing right every time; where I live I understand. What I have come to realize is that the US is not some extension of where I live. I’ve lived in Minnesota, Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Oregon. Where I’ve lived and when I’ve lived there the voters–my people, my country fellows, voted for good decent people, and I joined them.
When I lived in Massachusetts I could feel the strength of the George McGovern campaign–but, as it turned out, only in the state where I lived.
Obviously, the common decency of the folks in Minnesota when Walter Mondale lost big was my environment, but more isolated than I understood.
When I lived in Wisconsin it was safe for me to vote for Winona LaDuke (yeah, and Ralph Nader) because it was overwhelmingly clear that Al Gore would take the state, so my vote was not “thrown away.” It’s been the same in Oregon.
So the fact that I “know” that Harris is about to win and Trump is about to become a sadass footnote is something to take with a block of salt.
But if Trump wins fair and square it will fire up the secessionist in me. His time in the White House was the longest lucid nightmare of my life; I have no desire to enter that waking horror picture show again. Maybe a new Confederacy can secede, but without the violence this time.
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is Coördinator of Conflict Resolution BA/BS degree programs and certificates at Portland State University. His views, however, are not those of any institution.
