Alex Pareene reacts to the election

He writes:

Blame white people. Blame white men in particular, but reserve plenty of blame for white women. Blame old people, too. Blame rich people, as always. Blame the public at large for Donald fucking Trump getting more votes than Donald Duck. Democracy enacts the will of the public; this is what the public wants.

Blame the Founders for enshrining white supremacy in our constitution and making it nearly impossible to fully expunge. Blame a political system that advantages rural areas at the expense of urban ones, mostly in order to preserve our white supremacist heritage. Blame the electoral college and blame the people in power who have done nothing to stop this exact circumstance—a candidate winning the popular vote but losing the election—from happening for the second time in 16 years. Blame the people who put them in power without a mandate to fundamentally change the mechanisms of a system designed for an 18th-century slave society.

Blame Scott Walker and the Republican plot to suppress minority turnout, and blame the mainstream political press for treating voter-suppression tactics as a given, a hurdle to be overcome by the opposing campaign’s turnout machine, rather than a horrific continuation of the worst racist abuses of our very recent history.

Blame haughty non-voters and third-party voters, but make sure to also blame the actual voters who chose Donald Trump, in particular the ones who showed up to punch the ballot for Obama twice and then this time went for his complete opposite in every important respect.

Blame the deep-seated misogyny of the the conservative press, which—with a clutch assist from much of the mainstream press—caused a politician who is calculating and ambitious in mostly ordinary ways to be perceived as a conniving Lady Macbeth, while somehow allowing a man with an incredibly well-documented history of chauvinism, harassment, and outright sexual abuse to pawn it off as regular, if slightly old-fashioned, alpha masculinity. Blame the Clinton campaign, which convinced itself, rightly or wrongly, that it could not allow its boss to forcefully fight back against her monstrous opponent’s blatantly sexist attacks, because to do so would be to risk making her seem too bitchy. Blame the very real misogyny of the national electorate that led Democrats to convince themselves, rightly or wrongly, that the first major-party woman candidate could not be any woman but the most battle-toughened politician with a lifetime of calibrating and compromising not to give offense—a politician who turned out not to be inured to sexist attacks, but instead predictably subject to 25 years worth of built-up, roiling resentment from raging male boomers and their equally toxic younger counterparts.