A couple of days after the election, a closeted Republican friend sent me a compendium of messages and social-media posts he had gathered from some of his left-of-center colleagues. They were utterly wild.Even worse than Masko's anecdotes were the stories of some of my family and friends whose own families have refused to spend time with them at Thanksgiving or Christmas because of how they voted. A relative of mine has been told by two of her sons that they will not be visiting her over the holidays because her vote for Trump was inexcusably immoral. She's heartbroken. A friend shared with me that his son has told him the same thing, and an acquaintance related that he was told something similar by his daughter.
One insisted that while all of us needed space to “grieve,” we had only a few months to prepare for “solidly authoritarian rule.” Another was looking for open university positions overseas in her specialty, since she couldn’t come to terms with living in a country “that hates so many of us,” where “half of us are denied the highest leadership position purely because of our gender.”
A Massachusetts resident asserted that “my rights as a woman are about to be compromised.” A man sarcastically congratulated his fellow Americans for voting for four more years of “fascist ideology,” “blatant misogyny and racism,” “toxic masculinity” and “spiritual bankruptcy.” A woman wrote late on election eve that while she didn’t exactly want to die, “it’s just that I don’t care if I don’t wake up” on Nov. 6.
Nonleftists wonder if fears such as these are sincerely held or merely performative. After all, while one could have plenty of reasonable doubts about a second Trump administration, the fear that we are in for a resurgence of fascist authoritarianism, that America voted against Kamala Harris because it couldn’t countenance a female president rather than due to her singular weaknesses as a candidate, and that Massachusetts is going to restrict abortion aren’t among them.
Yet as unrealistic as these fears are, they seem to reflect the sincere beliefs of at least some otherwise reasonable people. How can that be?
Right-leaning commentators regularly zero in on one key reason: the echo chamber of the media and the Democratic Party. The Harris campaign parlayed Donald Trump’s quips about being “a dictator on day one”—i.e., issuing lots of executive orders, as other new presidents have also done—into alarms about the return of fascism.
Mainstream journalists insisted that Mr. Trump must have intended to echo a pro-Nazi gathering in 1939 when he chose Madison Square Garden, site of the 1992 Democratic National Convention, for a rally. Oprah Winfrey suggested that if Americans didn’t elect Kamala Harris president, they may lose the right to vote.
Perhaps had Harris won the election there would be some Trump voters who would've reacted in the same way, I don't know, but I do know that neither my relative, nor my friend, nor my acquaintance would've responded in such an unloving, ungracious, and even hateful way.
Nor is it easy to imagine that television talk hosts on, say, Fox News, would recommend that family members be shunned over the holidays as hosts on The View and the Joy Reid show on MSNBC have.
What does politics do to people that causes them to want to hurt those who deeply love them by estranging themselves from them? Are their lives so empty that their political ideology is the only thing that gives them meaning and significance? Are their egos so fragile that they implode if someone votes differently than they do?
No wonder such people have been called "snowflakes."