My mistake was that, as a combat veteran, I lived in a country that was better than I perceived (adapted from Rebecca Solnit - The Guardian)

My mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. My mistake was to think that racism and misogyny and outright cruelty were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an narcissistic, demented, adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler.  My first thought when Trump declared victory was why did I put my life in danger to "protect democracy" in Vietnam, when Americans don't really care to have a democracy?  The number of votes Trump received was about the same as in 2020.  Harris lost votes from some voters who either didn't vote for President or voted for a third party.  Historically this is the young voters, many of which warned us that because of the Gaza issue, would not vote for either candidate.  In this case this was 10s of millions of voters.

Particularly among young men there was a crisis of masculinity, the failure of the mainstream news media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a way they are all the same problem. The media might be the simplest to describe or blame in this case. A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry, millions of voters that desire to be misinformed. When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly destroy the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed.

Americans, at least half of them, want to be entertained.  The truth and explanations of what could be under a rational, well-qualified President is of no interest to half of the country.  Sure, many voted to preserve a deranged view of Christianity that to them appears to be under attack, or fear that their assault weapons might be taken away, or women might have the right to decide on their health care, or men need to regain power over women, but the two million or more winning votes were by Americans that didn't really care about a dystopian future.  Voting for Trump for many Americans was a current fad, seemingly especially for young suburban women, many of whom voted for Biden last time.  "No need to think, my friends are all voting for Trump".

Social media is very much to blame.  Social media arose like a school of sharks in the information pool and began to devour the economic base of the news industry, to undermine the filtration systems that had limited the spread of hate, lies, misinformation and disinformation. But to talk about it as an information pool is to underestimate how much it has changed consciousness itself, how addictive and how distorting it is, how it manipulates values and emotions and beliefs. Young men seem particularly vulnerable to its offerings, and many dank corners of the internet recruit them into misogyny and white supremacy via influencers and insular subcultures, into antisemitism and conspiracy theories, and more than that into becoming unmoored, destabilized, unwell, isolated.

And just like Clinton after Bush I, Obama after Bush II, and Biden after Trump, the rest of us and the rest of the world will be the cleanup crew because men like this never clean up after themselves.

Hopefully, there will be free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028, because much of the electorate are quite fickle and there will be new fad, and an awakening of at least a portion of Americans.