Witnessing the election as an outsider

In the aftermath of this election, no matter how much I think and try to rationalize what happened, I can’t stop feeling sad and worried about the world’s future. Now, just as a friend did the day after the election, I’m attempting to put out what I feel and think in words to see if it helps me getting over it. Apologies for missing many sources here, but I won’t spend too much time going through the archive searching for them, at least for now.

Let’s begin by saying the title here is not entirely right. I think nowadays nobody is a complete outsider in a US presidential election, we have been building a global economy for decades and the political shifts in any of its members send shockwaves across the world, especially coming from one, if not the most powerful one. But even after living in this country for over five years, I’m still not able to vote in the country my own daughter was born. Those are the rules of the game though, it’s fine, I can’t complain much about it but it certainly made the whole process very special to me, watching the show from the second row.

Back when this was inconceivable

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy most of the people around me said it wasn’t a serious thing. As time went by they seemed a little surprised of the traction he was getting, but kept saying it couldn’t be real. I heard this was a joke, a marketing campaign, a game, etc. Nobody thought somebody saying those things and insulting so many people could be elected as POTUS (another of the beloved acronyms it gave me a ‘doh’ moment after googling it). No matter where I looked, nobody seemed to support him nor even consider him having a real chance. So I thought there was no much to worry about those statements about latinos.

And then Brexit happened, all of a sudden. I didn’t know about the referendum and thought it was just absurd that one of the first nations to embrace pluralism, trade and diversity would want to leave the EU. Discussing about it the next day, someone told me that this could be a backlash against globalization from the ones that don’t feel part of it. So I rushed on to reading more and there it was, people were standing up against an establishment they saw as the elite taking all from them and leaving them behind. This showed a divided country, the Leave vote seems to have been stronger in rural areas and London was in shock, some started to call for a city-state independent from the U.K. while others alerted this was known trend that could repeat from the past and Trump rising would be coming next. Then it all started to become real.

Can this really happen?

Since I moved here I’ve half jokingly said I don’t really live in the US, instead I said I live in California, and more specifically, in San Francisco, because it really didn’t feel like the country that I watched from the outside while I was growing up. Once we started traveling around a bit within the country, we could really feel there were two parallel realities. Unless we were in one of the narrow and dense liberal paradises like NYC, Chicago or SF, we felt people being not so nice to us, doing less of an effort to understand us, putting more pressure on us to hide our accent, and just overall it felt a bit hostile. But it was ok, we would soon return to our bubble and just forget about the other country out there and try to fly over it next time.

I didn’t pay real attention to the reality of the two countries until after Brexit unfolded, only then I started to occasionally dive into the developments that ultimately would explain why Trump was getting traction.
Even though globalization has created more wealth than destroyed it, it clearly hasn’t been distributing it well. The middle class has been shrinking in the US to the point of being less than 50%. Don’t look further than California: being the 6th largest economy of the world, it is also the state with the highest poverty rate in the country. So even if we are able to avoid that reality in the liberal urban areas, it does exist, and when living in poverty or without all their basic needs covered, people don’t build up their opinion by reading their social media feed on a smartphone or a book in a Saturday morning while sipping dripped fair traded coffee in a third waver roasters coffee shop (yeah… that represents me too), they follow their gut and emotions which is what they can hold on to, and they support any familiar face that can claim to understand them and be able kick out the establishment that has done nothing for them. In short, they follow demagogues, but let’s be clear, that doesn’t invalidate their opinion, just being on the other side doesn’t make them flat out dumb.

No fact nor data point matters

I started to follow the campaign closer through media outlets like the New York Times. They officially endorsed Clinton and were still trying to unmask Trump through fact checking and pure data. They released his shady tax techniques, they tracked all his lies and insults and, right after the Access Hollywood tape leak, they published the claims of at least two women about Trump sexually harassing them, but at the end of the day none of that seems to matter. We all shortcut to consume what validates our own point of view instead of what confronts it, we just listen the voices within our echo chamber and in a digital world open to so many people to publish any information they want, anyone can back up their own version of the truth by looking it up online, it will be there no matter what our truth is.
To top it all, apparently the media itself fell in the trap of just looking around and feeling reassured that things must be just like they are around us, without looking further. It was absurd to see the ‘prediction’ models go from the >80% Clinton they predicted for weeks before the election to >95% Trump in a matter of hours.
There is a lot of analysis going on now on what went wrong there, but it feels to me like another piece of evidence of the distance between the two countries: one of them has access to technology to communicate easily with itself, forgetting that the other country is not in that digital world. We like thinking technology is democratizing by giving access to information to everyone, but the reality is the access to it is not uniformly distributed and it grows more in certain demographics instead, just like a steep gaussian distribution. In fact, 40% of americans don’t have access to internet, and just look at where they are:

By the time the debates started the divide was clear, and everyone just wanted to see their truth crushing the other side’s. Through our own lenses, it was clear the truth was going to surface and make the other side wake up.

Election Day

It felt like a special day from the beginning. I really liked seeing people proudly saying they voted and calling everyone else to do it. It’s not just about the presidential vote of course, the ballot in California was extensive but people would do their homework, study it and vote for things I wish my country would give me the chance to vote for. It’s certainly an inspiring day.

But everyone I talked to was cautious and nervous about the most important thing in play, the presidency. The day went by fast and by 5pm preliminary results started to surface from the east. It was what we didn’t want to believe, what our digitally connected liberal world told us was nearly impossible. By that night my social feed was all shock and tears. I was also stunned, but the reality is that the more surprised we were the more we were validating the protesting voice of the ones we ignore.
As an immigrant family, we felt genuinely sad, worried and a bit scared about the future. Our friends and family abroad just couldn’t believe nor understand it, but it’s hard to understand the process from the outside. This country and its electoral system are complex, more so the social sentiments building up for years that brought us to this outcome. That also moved me to write this and gather some more information trying to provide an insider-outsider perspective.
One of the things discovered while trying to understand how this happened was that drilling down by state you can see that even in states were Trump won, the democrat vote is strong in the denser urban areas. Look at Pennsylvania for example:

This is again, rural people, the ones that were told decades ago than more than education they needed to work hard to be able to live well, own some land and retire at ease, rejecting the highly educated elite they saw as the ones to blame for the situation of not longer being able to sell their produce or work in their steel mill because things were getting now imported from cheaper and foreign sources in a globalized world they didn’t want.

What now?

The future seems to be, at best, uncertain and at worst, terrifying. If even 10% of the things promised in his campaign are materialized it will mean a significant step backwards in things so hard fought, like inclusion, equality, reproductive rights, etc. I deeply hope the multiple institutions involved in running the country play a key role into moderating those changes. Now, it’s easier said than done but hate and divide brought us here and they are not the way out. Ideas like moving to Canada or calling for an independent California to me are like taking the ball with you in the middle of a football game you’re losing because the ball is yours or plainly stating than the winning side of the country is too stupid and you have had enough sharing the roof with them. That is the kind of the arrogance and hate that fed them, similar to how hate for all muslims feeds ISIS after a terrorist attack.

I can’t adventure into suggesting ideas for short term actions we can take, but I like to think there are some values we can keep in mind when taking important decisions like the communities we join or the work we do, that might have some impact in the long term. And on that line I think more empathy is what we need.
It’s hard for me and my heart often has trouble listening to my head, but I truly think we need to be kind and respectful on a personal level and sympathetic at all levels. The progressive side needs to be even more inclusive, because even if we think we are, at least in my surroundings we not always are, starting with the tech industry. So many companies (big and small) wasting and burning money in unnecessary perks or solving problems for people already having easy lives. We need to connect with the other side of the divide, instead of suggesting giving them a basic income to keep them quiet while we work on how we automate everything and get to Mars, that is not empathy, is arrogance.

At the end I think this is a lesson that should push us to do even better. I’m convinced the direction we were taking was right, but in the execution not everyone was being included. That lesson is coming with high and painful toll, but you only learn the hard way right? Just pray to whoever you believe in that this doesn’t end up in a world wide catastrophe.