The argument was clear: You are in danger, threatened by a brown invaders and black saboteurs. Donald Trump will keep you safe. It was a remarkable display of demagoguery, a clear sign that the Republican Party—whatever it was before Trump—is now a party of overt white nationalism. And it was just the beginning.
I feel like I'm "whitesplaining," but I think (I hope) I'm just "liberal who has followed the Republican Party for two decades and has read obsessively about American political history-splaining" (rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?).
The GOP has been headed this way for almost 60 years. Rick Perlstein has done a tremendous job chronicling this. It worked for a while, as those whites with memories of completely subjugating blacks under Jim Crow could be told by their economic betters, who don't give two shits about what they have to do to get their taxes cut, to blame their own declines on minorities. But each year, more of those die off, and every report on institutional racism or iPhone video of a policeman killing an African-American is another Emmett Till moment for those who haven't seen through this façade already, and another nail in the old guard's coffin (which they eagerly dug themselves). We're talking about a party that has won the popular vote once in the last six elections.
It felt like an ordinary event at an ordinary convention. That was the scariest part of all—the feeling that people here had already fit Donald Trump into the normal rhythms of American political life.
It's part of the normal rhythms of American life for the half-full arena of white octogenarians in a city where they're really not welcome:
There are fewer of them, and they know that. It's making them scream louder. But the volume of their insane bellowing does not increase the number of votes they have.
No matter what Michael Moore says, Donald Trump will not win in November.
This is not to say we should rest on our laurels; through a variety of ways of cheating or at least skirting around the spirit of the law, the Republicans have held a lot more power than should be reflected in the number of votes they have. So we need to change that. Aside from electing Hillary, we need 60 seats in the Senate, and a majority in the House. That's a really steep hill to climb. If we do pull it off, we restore voting rights, repeal Citizens United, and roll back this ridiculous gerrymandering of the last decade, and continue to repair the damage done by the other side's slash-and-burn tactics.
This country is not getting worse. It's getting better. Not as quickly as we'd like; the bad guys are not going down quietly. But they are going down.
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