It’s probably not the best idea to begin an essay on a Virginia politics website by admitting to broad ignorance of the state-level political apparatus.
But admit it I must. I’m no insider. Most of what I know I learn from reading this site, the Times-Dispatch online, or Bearing Drift.
Ok, even that is a stretch. In fact, the only loose connection I have to Virginia politics is that someone who coincidentally shares my name just got elected to Congress.
(Crucial note of clarification: I am not THAT Tom Garrett)
I do fancy myself a keen observer of human behavior, social norms, and culture, however. And moving from Richmond to Northern Virginia two years ago has been . . . instructive.
NOVA (or “Occupied Virginia” as one of my high school history teachers calls it) is truly a state unto itself. That’s not exactly breaking news, but, prior to migrating north, I assumed the differences were largely confined to voting preferences and superficial cultural markers. A few more lattes per capita. That sort of thing.
Sure, I was confounded to learn that I would now have to get my humble Camry’s emissions tested every 24 months, but, for the most part, my new home was about what I expected.
Then Donald Trump won.
I began working in the DC area just in time to catch the tail end of the 2014 election cycle. I was living in Arlington at the time, and I wasn’t shocked to see only one identified Republican listed among the 23 candidates for office on my ballot that year. After the results were in, there was some anticipated consternation from my fellow NOVA dwellers over the fact that Republicans had dared to retake the Senate with gains not seen since the Reagan Revolution. As it wasn’t a presidential year, though, I now realize in hindsight that the angst was actually muted.
I’ll pause here to acknowledge that Trump is a special case. Many Republicans, myself among them, were opposed to his winning the nomination for a variety of reasons. I voted for Marco Rubio in the primary and Evan McMullin in the general.
Yet, Trump’s unique, uh, characteristics notwithstanding, nothing was more emblematic of why he won than to witness the post-election behavior of the denizens of Washington and Northern Virginia.
The best way that I can explain it is that, come Wednesday morning, about three-fourths of the people around me acted as if their beloved pet dog had died.
Folks I knew across town reported that coworkers had to leave the office early that day. Some never made it in at all. Some employers in DC called impromptu staff meetings to “make sure everyone was OK.”
Most of these people—including many I consider friends—had never even contemplated the possibility that Trump could win.
Progressives in DC are in a bubble-within-a-bubble.
I freely admit that I underestimated Trump’s chances. Only Russell Wilson has made me look more foolish when it comes to assessing someone’s probability of success. But, even as I believed Trump wouldn’t win the nomination (and, until the final days, the general), there was never a moment where I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Trump somehow won.
For many in NOVA and DC, they never reached that moment. Not even as Trump was declared the winner in the wee hours of Election Night.
And this phenomenon is not limited to laymen. Quite the contrary. Many of the same SERIOUS JOURNALISTS ™ who previously said that Trump’s “rigged” comments were borderline treasonous were now only-too-happy to tell us that the election had been “hacked.” They used intentionally sloppy language to imply that the actual result was questionable.
Even after Trump’s victory, his most vocal opponents clung to fantasies of recounts and faithless electors. Now, they’ve moved on to day one impeachment as their pipe dream of choice.
Questioning the very legitimacy of the president, once the sole province of “unpatriotic racists,” is now a mainstream position, and will remain so for as long as Trump is in office.
I long for the days when Hillary Clinton was explaining that refusing to accept the legitimacy of election results was a threat to our democracy.
(AKA late October)
As for the media, the mask officially dropped during this cycle. Major outlets that had long scoffed at the notion of bias have chosen to take an openly anti-Trump (and, to a lesser extent, anti-Republican) stance.
We’ve also seen a tacit admission of the longstanding accusation that the media was easy on President Obama. Just this week, Politico‘s Jack Shafer said that a Trump presidency means that the press’ collective gloves can now come off, implicitly admitting that the media and the White House have had a friendly (or at least symbiotic) relationship in recent years.
You should be sensing a common theme by now: A lack of self-awareness.
That scarcity of perspective is one reason why Democrats are finding it so hard to win elections these days. It’s also why we may have finally reached an intractable position when it comes to political discourse—and that’s certainly not limited to one side of the aisle.
But the example of NOVA/DC is helpful. Being unable to fathom particular political outcomes becomes very, very easy when everyone with whom you work and socialize agrees with the same set of ideological positions. Likewise, that narrow view of the world stunts imagination, making it much harder to deal with realities that don’t mesh with the outcome that you wanted—and assumed was inevitable.
More plainly: It’s gonna be a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnng four years for a lot of people.
And, even if they can make it that long, their sanity won’t.