What I Learned at Thanksgiving

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.

It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

-Mark Twain

Leading up to Thanksgiving there was a palpable zeitgeist of anxiety about the discussions that would probably take place over the holiday.  There were articles, there were little proclamations by radio DJs about how we all should just not get super agitated with one another.  It seemed as though everyone was afraid that there would all out fist fights at the dinner table on Thursday.  That anxiety was hard to shrug off, especially since I knew I was going to be surrounded most of the time by Trump voters.  There are people who I know to be Trump supporters, enthusiasts and zealots of various sorts, I was planning to avoid conversations about politics with them.  But there were more of a second category, people who simply voted for him because they couldn't stomach Hillary, or because, all things being equal, they buy the conservative party line and he is, for better or worse, the Republican nominee.  There were people who took a sort of bizarre leap of faith that perhaps he really is going to "drain the swamp," their frustration is more with the general state of politics in general than with any particular party ideology.
If I got the chance, I expressed how disappointed I was with the current state of affairs, but I had to (mostly) leave it at that, because I have become aware that there are simply too many conflicting narratives at work in our world to really have a constructive dialogue about politics right now.  You can have good arguments, if you enjoy that sort of thing (I admit, I do under the proper circumstances), but you cannot really expect to "win" a debate.
Why? Because we can't actually agree on the facts, and maybe even deeper than that, we really don't want to see truth if it conflicts with our opinion.
I spent most of this past year learning to sort through my sources.  I learned that Mother Jones and Occupy Democrats probably aren't going to give me the straight story, no matter how much I like their version.  I learned that TV News is about worthless when it comes to anything but weather and finding out who won the football game.  I fell back on what I feel is our last, best hope of serious journalism: newspapers.  I subscribed to the Washington Post and began sifting just about everything I put any stock in on the basis of whether or not it appeared in a credible major newspaper: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal etc. If I saw an article that exhibited "Truthiness," and I didn't recognize the legitimate paper of record for say Portland Oregon, I would check into that source.  And I spent a lot of time with the fact checking sites.
I kept in mind what Neil Postman told us in Amusing Ourselves to Death: "You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content." I kept going back to that, throughout the campaign.  Trump is such a master of television, he understands the impermanence and the lack of depth so well, he kept making Hillary seem shrill and wooden, despite the fact that she repeatedly ran circles around him in debates, and whenever "facts" or "policy" was on the floor.
As it turns out, none of the traditional tools in the political arsenal actually mattered. The fact that his policy proposals were vague, the fact that he kept having moments and gaffes that would have been catastrophic to anyone else. Trump was crafting a narrative that would resonate with the alienated majority. His vulgarity was somehow endearing to many, his lack of detail made for hard targets to shoot at.
He wasn't starting from scratch either.  He had eight years of Obama-hating, liberal-blaming, angst building up a head of steam.  He has had twenty years of right wing propaganda vilifying the "liberal media." His biggest weakness seemed to be the fact that his own party wasn't truly behind him, but he had a cure for that too: they have been visibly obstructing everything good, bad and indifferent for the past six years to the point where Mitch McConnell is probably not much more popular than Nancy Pelosi in most of Middle America. In the end, he sold his story to enough people in strategically located places, and sold the narrative that he was just the guy to break down the walls. It worked well enough.
I felt like I was finding all of this out through a sort of forensic investigation, sifting through the rubble of an explosion.  Because my own narrative, the one that has been being told inside the Democratic bubble, is that having a grown-up for a President has been pretty good. I'm going to miss Obama, with his mediocre successes, his balanced, reasonable tone, his steady presence, and his Dad Jokes.  Of course I wish things could have been better, but inside the bubble it doesn't seem like that was our fault.  Hillary seemed like a logical progression: first black president, first woman president, it's just the direction we're headed.
My bubble didn't exactly blind me to her flaws, I knew she was forever and always saddled with the legacy of her husband.  I knew that she has been in politics way too long not to be covered in mud.  I knew she had a major likability issue, I just thought that the obvious, unrepentant and outlandish behavior of Trump was going to make all of that a moot point. I was resigned, after a brief moment of hope during the Bernie insurgency, to voting for another shuffling, shucking politico.  But I was only probably a few solid hours of Fox News away from feeling the same way many of the Trump voters felt.  I found that I could not really defend the Clinton machine with any sort of conviction.  I was doing the same thing with her past as Trumpers were doing with his.  Sure, I told myself that it was not the same thing, but that logic doesn't really hold, when you're trying to argue with someone who believes that her defense and loyalty to Bill Clinton during his various immoral and reprehensible sexual escapades is the same as or worse than Trump's conversation with Bill Bush.  The primary difference is in the narrative that you're following.
Now I'm kind of angry with myself and the Democratic party in general for not diagnosing the situation correctly.  That's what this past weekend has taught me: that there are some very different approaches to reality floating around out there, and the rise of the internet, the nature of visual media and the decline of print journalism have left us ill-equipped to accurately parse out what is actually true.  Confirmation bias, our tendency to believe things more readily if they jive with our pre-existing opinions, is one serious hurdle to our commonweal. I honestly don't know how we're going to get around this fix we're in.
We are at the mercy of salesmen, liars and cheats. Perhaps this is how our Empire will fall: ill formed opinions, misinformation, fake news and slanted facts. Once upon a time, there were people called journalists whose job it was to save us from these things.  We fired them a while ago. Bad ratings.