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Sixty-three Million Trumpsmen Can't Be Wrong

Sixty-three million people voted for Donald Trump.

"Why?", Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote.

It wasn't economic anxiety.  Research has shown that people worried about their jobs voted for Hillary Clinton.

"But people who dislike Mexicans and Muslims, people who oppose same-sex marriage, people morally offended at a White House occupied by a black guy with a funny name, they voted for Trump.

"That's the reality, and its time we quit dancing around it."

That is to say, Pitts went on to argue, the culture is changing, and sixty-three million people preferred what Donald Trump is, or did not care what he is, to what is changing in our culture.  Which leads to the still-more important question:

"What in the world is wrong with us?"   (In the Miami Herald)

In 1927, Willie Raskin, Billy Rose, and Fred Fisher wrote a hit song which compared censorship and prohibition in the United States with the attitudes of the French, who embraced exactly what Americans were determined to stamp out.  The song was titled, "Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't be Wrong".

But, of course, about sixty-six million Americans did not vote that way.  The
Electoral College did.

"What is changing is our culture."  And it is.  And it ought to.  From any, even half-hearted perspective, the hostility to Barack Obama was stunningly about race.  It wasn't his policies.  It was absurdly about whether he was born in Hawaii or Kenya.  It was about having a Black man in the White House.  It was about his intelligence and education and accomplishments.  It was about his eloquence, his decency, his admirable family.  It was about everything Americans have been struggling with ever since slavery.  Ever since the Civil War.  Ever since the Civil Rights struggle.

Our culture is changing, and it is painful, and we do not want to admit what all of us know about ourselves:  that we grew up believing, somehow, that White, Anglo-Saxon people are the crown of God's creation; that men are superior to women, and that real men take care of their women; that our religion is good and true and beautiful, and that heathens and anybody with any other god is simply wrong; that men are men, and women are women, and that is the way God wants it to be.  And so on.

Is there none of that in your soul?  Really?


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