Great piece.
Via WSJ:
Al Gore acknowledged defeat in the 2000 presidential election 16 years ago today. Hillary Clinton’s confession was only a day late, but a lot of President-elect Trump’s opponents are still experiencing severe cognitive dissonance. As songstress Ani DiFranco puts it in a Salon piece: “I heard one cancer survivor describe this political moment as the period right after diagnosis and before treatment, where you’re slammed around between hope, delusion, dread, denial, joy, resignation and regret.”
In other words, they’re completely disoriented. “Everything that we—the collective political horde—thought was conclusive about how you win an election . . . was disproved in one fell swoop on Nov. 8,” marvels the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. Actually it was a group of swoops, though all were indeed fell:
The traditional rules of the road would have meant that Trump never rose beyond the 1 percent of the vote with which he started the Republican primary-season fight. The idea that a candidate could bully and insult his way to the Republican nomination over 16 (largely) serious candidates was simply unthinkable. The “rules” said it couldn’t happen.
To his credit, Cillizza never mentions Hitler—a somewhat unusual omission in a Post opinion piece. Also to his credit, he admits he has no idea what’s going on:Is Trump an exception in politics or the new rule? Is it his unique combination of celebrity, social media and brashness coupled with these deeply anti-political times a one-off? Or does he represent a new normal in politics? Will the 2020 campaign be filled with Trump takeoffs—Mark Cuban, Howard Schultz, Kanye West(?)—or will it be the usual assortment of governors, senators and House members?
I don’t know.
Others are trying to shield their confusion behind a mask of certainty. The New York Times’s Charles Blow: