America has changed, but it has much further to go. Hillary Clinton was hit by a double whammy that Van Jones partially got. But it is much deeper.
Van Jones gets it half right
Van Jones goes where most of the TV talking heads were refusing to go. Unfortunately, he is only half right, and we better start realizing that.
“We have people putting children to bed tonight,” said Van Jones. “And they are afraid of breakfast. They are afraid of ‘How do I explain this to my children. I have Muslim friends who are texting me tonight saying ‘Should I leave the country. I have family of immigrants that are terrified tonight. This was many things. This was a rebellion against the elites. True. It was a complete reinvention of politics and polls. It’s true. But it was also something else. We’ve talked about everything but race tonight. We’ve talked about income. We’ve talked about class. We’ve talked about region. We haven’t talked about race. This was a whitewash. This was a whitewash against a changing country. It was a whitewash against a black president in part. And that’s the part where the pain comes. And Donald Trump has a responsibility tonight to come out and reassure people that he is going to be the president of all the people who he insulted and offended and brushed aside. Yeah. When you say you want to take your country back, you have a lot of people who feel that we are not represented well either.”
Everything Jones said is absolutely true. He failed in that clip to give the appropriate weight to Hillary’s gender. Black men got the right to vote before women. To date, within the church and other institutions, there are codification forbidden women to have certain jobs and positions. It is not surprising that the evangelical church played such a large part in Clinton’s defeat. While not codified in our laws, sexism and misogyny are figuratively codified in the psyche of too many Americans.
One may call the election of Trump a protest vote or ‘stick it’ to the elites or the establishment. If this were true, however, all the establishment Republican candidates that got reelected would not have gotten reelected.
I am most disappointed in the ‘educated white women’ and ‘educated white men’ that allowed the classic behavior of the oppressed acquiescing to the oppressor,