On Tuesday night, after tossing and turning for a couple hours, I said fuck

it and grabbed the laptop and started typing. What came out was a post
called Its Going to Be Okay. The next day, the post was read by over a
million people.
The reactions were intense, and most of what I heard boiled down to one
of these two things:

1) This made me feel better.

2) You got this really wrong.
For the people who reacted the first way, the post felt like a reminder of
the big picturethe fact that America was built to survive a guy like
Trump, no matter what he has in mind for the next four years, and the fact
that the nasty parts of Trump, his campaign, and his constituency are only
one part of the story here.

The people in the second category thought I was painting much too rosy a
picture. Some people pointed out that as a white cis heterosexual male, I
far too easily brushed off the fears that many other people are currently
feeling. Others were livid that I seemed to approve of Trumps choice of
Pence as a running mate. And some couldnt believe that I failed to
mention the environmental impact of the election at all.

My main feeling as I read through all the reactions was, This is why Wait
But Why posts should take at least a week to write.

A long post created over a bunch of days allows for me to paint a

complete picture of what I think and work through a topic with all the
nuance it warrants. A short post, typed out quickly and emotionally at
4am, without the usual many hours of deep thought and rigorous outlining
and careful wording, does not.

The result was an imperfect post that I think failed in some ways
and succeeded in others. Over the past three days, like many of you, Ive
read a bunch of articles about the situation, talked to a lot of people about
it, and done a lot more thinking. Its been an emotional rollercoaster. Here
are some things Ive been thinking:

1) God I wish Hillary Clinton were the president-elect.

Or Bernie Sanders. Or Marco Rubio. Or Jeb Bush. Or John Kasich. Or
literally any normal fucking politician.

2) In trying to focus on what I felt was an optimistic

long-term outlook, I totally under-acknowledged
the way a ton of Americans feel right now.
Some of the most hateful parts of our societywhich over recent decades
have been increasingly relegated to the fringeshave been made to feel
a lot less fringe by the election of a man who has spent the last year
validating their beliefs and nodding towards them with a wink. Hateful
behavior being thought of as shameful and taboo is a big part of what
prevents it from happening, and when the president signals that hes not
ashamed to think and speak in that way, it quickly normalizes the
behavior in many peoples minds. This reality was articulated well in many
blog comments, and in an email I received from my friend Billy Wheelan in
response to my post:
When some guy yelled out hang Obama! during Trumps acceptance
speech, I wasnt the only one who heard it. When my friend posted on
Facebook that after not enduring it since the age of 11 he was called a
faggot two separate times today walking in his neighborhood, he wasnt
misremembering his day. Muslims and trans kids arent bugging for no
reason. They are reacting rationally given the context of their life
experiences to a set of stimuli that isnt affecting you the same way its
affecting them.
This is a disturbing and scary time for many people to be in America.
My one paragraph about this topicwhich was focused on the long-term
outlookcarelessly glossed over the current state of things. Im sorry.

3) Three days after writing my post, this sentenceId

predict that President Trump is all about surrounding
himself with experts who know very well how to run the
executive branchis looking pretty not accurate.
Its too early to know what Trumps eventual cabinet will look like, but
early reports have me looking at news headlines and saying, What the
FUCK. Trump is an extreme ends-justify-the-means guyeven for a
politicianand what makes that most unsettling is we dont really seem to
know what his ends are. Its not even clear that he knows what his ends
are. Crossing my fingers that Ill look back on this and see that I was
overreacting.

4) I still think this country is ready for a

female president.
But the term I usedunbelievably readymay have been a little much. I
think were ready for a female president to the extent that were ready for
a black president. Obama definitely lost a good number of votes in 2008
and 2012 because of his race, and Clinton definitely lost a good number of
votes this election because shes a woman. In 2016, being a woman adds
in a hurdle thats not there for menI just dont think the hurdle is
insurmountable. Some people argued that if Hillary were a man, she
would have won. Perhaps. But Id also continue to argue that if she had
Michelle Obamas personality, and/or fewer scandals in her past, shed
probably have won as well.
5) I still think we shouldnt group all Trump voters
together and demonize them all as horrible people.
Heres why I dont think its really fair to call all Trump voters hateful
people, just because Trump ran a hateful campaign:

Imagine an election between Ted Cruz and a charismatic Democrat in a

year when a Republican had been in office for the past eight years. Now
imagine that the Democrat has this awkward quality where he often says
horrible, disparaging things about religion and evangelical Christians in
particular. Cant you imagine a bunch of staunch Democrats voting for him
despite wishing he werent so nasty about religious people? Theyd justify
it because A) a Ted Cruz presidency sounds like a nightmare to him,
especially knowing that hed nominate ultra-conservative justices and do
his best to overturn abortion laws, B) theyre not religious and dont know
any super-religious people, so theyre not as sensitive to the vocal
criticism of evangelical Christians as others might be, and C) theyre
feeling scared and just really badly want a Democrat in office. Would they
feel guilty about voting for kind of a nasty candidate? Probably. Would
many of them vote for him anyway? Probably. Would that make those
voters hateful people? Not really.

I know these situations arent perfectly analogousIm making the point

that voting for a candidate does not imply that you espouse all of his or
her views. People often hate some of a candidates views and still find
reason to grit their teeth and cast their vote. A little over 60 million
Americans voted for Trumpor about 19% of the country. While a good
contingent of those are definitely what Hillary called deplorables, Id
imagine that a bunch of the Trump voters are simply conservative
Republicans who care deeply about Supreme Court appointments and
hate high taxes and are feeling scared and frustrated and just
really wanted a Republican in officeand they felt strongly enough about
it to vote for Trump, despite being uncomfortable with the man he is and
the way he campaigned. This isnt letting them off the hook for the
consequences of their voteonly saying that its probably not correct that
all Trump voters are hateful people.
6) Some of what liberals are upset about was inevitable.
Putting Trump himself aside for a secondpolitically, what I saw Tuesday
night is an inevitable shift of tide. In American politics, the party zig-zag is
one of the most reliable patterns you can find. Over the last century, one
political party has maintained power for over 12 years straight
exactly oncethe 20 years Democrats were in power between 1932 and
1952and that was a time of exceptional circumstances because of World
War II. Its been a full zig-zag.
This makes sense. In any given year, most people in a country feel like
they want a better life, so once one party has been in power for a while,
its a layup for the other party to run for office successfully on a platform
that essentially says, If youre satisfied with your life how it is, continue
voting for the party thats been in powerif youd like a better life, vote
for us. Further, when one party is in power for an extended period of
time, citizens of the other party begin to feel increasingly frustrated,
desperate, and disenfranchisedwhich translates to increasing political
support for the party out of power, while successive wins for the party in
power leaves those voters increasingly complacent and overconfident.

Liberals are upset about a lot of things right now, but a large number of
them simply amount to the fact that the Republican Party has inevitably
regained control of the government. Peoples horror over what will now
happen with the Supreme Court, climate change policies, and the gutting
of Obamacare, for example, would be no different if a far less offensive
Republicansay, Marco Rubiohad won the presidency. And history tells
us that if the Republicans hadnt taken over this year, they probably would
have four years from now. So a blow to the liberal agenda in all these
areas was predictable. These various causes were never going to simply
remain on a steady progressive pathnot in this country.
That doesnt mean liberals shouldnt be upset about having their most
important causes in jeopardy. It just reinforces the fact that if you dont
think you can convince voters of the other party to agree with you about
an issue, then government policies regarding that issue will only be on
your side half the timeand you should focus on solving the problem
outside of government, if at all possible.

7) When I feel long-term optimistic, its because Im

thinking about my graphs from this post.
In the post, I talked about how humans are normally on what I called Step
1 of consciousnessand how it should be our goal to try as much as
possible to see things from Step 2, a place with a higher vantage point
that provides a more zoomed-out view. Then I compared how good and
bad events look from those two steps:

Something good happening:

Something bad happening:
8) Nahhhhhhhhh.1
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