Across the country, the dust from the election has mostly settled, but I find myself still deeply troubled that such a large minority of Americans voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in an election where everyone agreed that democracy was on the ballot.
In a world where much of the news is dominated by left-of-center groupthink, it should be of no surprise that the misinformation from the ever-present doom loop has seeped into the psyche of those who are seemingly the most educated among us. I’ve read far too many pieces in the past two weeks rooted in fear and not grounded in truth. The reality is that the privilege of having luxury beliefs is only for the select few, and the current status quo is working just fine for them. Of course, their position would be, “How can these uninformed plebeians not understand? They must only get their news from cable TV and X.”
Last week, while ice skating, I thought of a quote from “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt: “Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.”
You don’t have to dig deep beneath the headlines to see why most Americans support the former president. Things are bad, abroad and at home. I worry about things escalating in the conflict in Ukraine due to poor leadership in the West. I worry about the knock-on effects that poor climate and fiscal policy will have on our nation’s most vulnerable. I worry about the middle class continuing to get crushed under the weight of a bloated and increasingly authoritarian bureaucracy.
Democracy dodged a bullet this month, thanks to a well-informed majority that understands the systemic problems our nation faces. Still, there is much work to do.
— Daniel Sager
Anchorage
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