RUTHFULLY YOURS

The striking thing about the series of American Muslim viewpoint articles published recently is that we see Muslims complaining vociferously about the election of Donald Trump while at the same time being completely silent about the dangers of radical Islam. It causes me to think that too many American Muslims have a bigger problem with Donald Trump than they do with radicalized Islam.

On Slate, one Muslim proudly announces that he is not shaving his beard and that his hijabi wife will continue to comply with sharia law, even though Donald Trump has never asked him to shave anything.

Tuesday was a slow-dawning personalization of the election for me. First came a wave of anxiety at the thought of Trump in the Oval Office. Then came the nausea, realizing what it means for our nation’s moral compass.

What about the moral compass of Islam? The writer talks about fictionally being forced to shave his beard and remove the hijab. Does he realize that in many Muslim countries, people are killed for not wearing a beard, for not wearing a hijab? Does he realize how he sounds?

… we have someone who has made it abundantly clear that he believes Islam is at war with the United States and that regarding your neighbor with suspicion (and perhaps even hostility) is not just a protected right but a moral imperative. Why wouldn’t his supporters lash out at us? Who is protecting us?

Radical Islamists are massacring Americans, and this arrogant, self-absorbed Muslim is worried about himself. Last I checked, no Muslims were being killed in America for being Muslim.

You can read the same thing in the New York Times, where another Muslim fears for his safety now that Trump has been elected president.

As Mr. Trump’s base rejoices, American Muslim parents are furiously WhatsApping and texting one another about how they’re terrified for their children’s safety. Does my 2-year-old son, Ibrahim, and 3-month-old baby girl, Nusayba, deserve to be bullied at school for simply having a Muslim name? Do their mosques deserves to be vandalized?

Now what?

Nothing will be more important to getting that answer right in the Trump victory period than separating fact from abundant fiction.

The 2016 presidential campaign was a magic mushroom tour through the American psyche—its voters, its politicians and not least the exotic varieties of people who populate what we call “the media.”

For all of them, the Trump candidacy seemed to be a national Rorschach inkblot. Everyone looked at the same Trump events, Trump speeches and Trump polls and interpreted them as individual political biases and desires.

There was one exception to this mania: the collective wisdom of the American voter.

In normal times—and these are not normal times—it would have been impossible for a candidate outputting Donald Trump’s chamber of spoken and personal horrors to win. (Sometime in the next year, John McCain deserves an apology.)

What we learned on Nov. 8, 2016, was that voters looked past or through all the atmospheric debris of this campaign and focused on what mattered—the direction of their country. Its economy, its politics and the state of the culture.

One stunning example. White evangelical Christians voted by 81% for the nation’s leading proponent of the Playboy philosophy. They blew past that because they knew that Mr. Trump’s personal life would not bring into the Oval Office the Democratic Party’s triumphant secularism. That is the philosophy that sued Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor into religious obeisance and elevated transgender bathrooms to a litmus test. Thus, their vote.

Another fable propagated everywhere during the campaign, and especially in the time since the Trump victory is that he had unearthed some unknown catacomb of lower-middle-class anger . . . at everything. Mr. Trump himself tagged “globalization” with the blame.

Let us be clear about the economic status of the American middle class, and indeed of the middle-class people in low-growth Europe responding to populist appeals there. Economic life isn’t bad weather. It is the result of politics. Wrong political decisions have economic consequences.

We didn’t have this sense of ennui or dissatisfaction during the growth years of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s or the Clinton presidency in the 1990s. CONTINUE AT SITE

I have a take slightly different from David’s on the Democrats’ sharp decline in presidential numbers.

Hillary was a terrible candidate, no question. I could never understand why anyone on our side feared her. She’s never been good at this. She won a senate seat in New York, where the GOP barely has a pulse. She would have been nominated (or coronated) in 2008 if she could have gotten to 40 percent with Dem voters; she couldn’t, which is why Obama got consideration that someone of his inexperience and radical background should never have gotten … and he duly zoomed past her. This time around, the party rigged it for her, and she still struggled to beat a batty 75-year-old self-proclaimed socialist who wasn’t even a Democrat until 2015. As I’ve said a number of times, she was certain to be just as bad a candidate in ’16 as she had been in ’08, except now she had Benghazi and a generally lousy tenure at the State Department hanging around her neck – and that was before we learned about the homebrew email system, destruction of government records, mishandling of classified information, etc.

But all that said, I look at Hillary as Obama’s policies without Obama’s aura. Obama the historical figure has always run ahead Obama’s policies. Because race remains a highly charged issue in American life, the first African-American presidency excited people in a way the prospect of a woman president does not. By that, I mean to imply the opposite of sexism: Geraldine Ferraro appeared on a presidential ticket a generation ago, Sarah Palin eight years ago, and women have been holding high-level cabinet, congressional and judicial posts for decades. The electorate has more women than men, many women are visibly successful in private industry, and our close ally Britain now has its second female prime minister. It’s just not that big a deal to people. The playing field has leveled to the extent that when, sometime in the easily foreseeable future, a woman wins the White House, it will be based on merit, not sex. Hillary’s problem is not that she is a woman; it’s that she is Hillary.

Obama is a very different story: people who are not particularly supportive of his agenda have nevertheless supported his presidency – although the number declined markedly after his policies took hold in 2009. His personal charm has always been lost on me – I find him aloof, thin-skinned, condescending, and dishonest. But even I can see that he is handsome, graceful, impressively confident, has a great voice, is clearly comfortable in his celebrity, and is by all accounts an admirable husband and father. Many people like having him as their president. His presidency’s historic nature makes them feel better about the country (which is why it is so tragic that he further divided the nation racially when he was uniquely positioned to unite us). Even if people are not crazy about the direction in which Obama has taken the country, he often does not get blamed for his policy failures.

But let’s take Obama The Historic President out of the equation. Since he became president and Democrats got onboard his aggressively statist governance, the party has been routed across the country: in both houses of Congress, and in state and local governments. When Obama’s policies are on the ballot without Obama, Democrats tend to get shellacked.

In addition to her lack of political gifts, Clinton was plainly hurt by her scandals, WikiLeaks, and the FBI’s machinations, which publicized many of the sordid details uncovered by the bureau’s investigation and then redirected the public’s attention to the emails after she hoped she had put them behind her. Still, as much as anything else, Clinton was hurt by the implosion of Obamacare in the critical final weeks of the campaign. It is Obama’s signature policy, and she had to run on it.

Obama’s policies do not run well without Obama on the ballot.

It will take a long time to analyze exactly what happened in the extraordinary election of 2016. It is already clear, though, that what propelled Donald Trump to the presidency was his grasping, before others caught on, that the contest was far less about right versus left, or even Republican versus Democrat, than about the country versus Washington.

He is now President-elect Trump. On Monday, however, he seemed a likely loser. In his pre-mortem, Charles Krauthammer opined that, even in defeat, Trump would remain the de facto leader of the Republican party because he had “created a movement.” I think, though, that the movement actually created the Trump candidacy.

Indeed, the movement was emerging fitfully in the late stages of the Bush 43 administration — a time when most people would have pegged Trump (to the extent he had identifiable politics) as a member of the establishment camp that catalyzed the movement. It is the movement whose outlines were sketched by Angelo Codevilla in 2010, pitting “the ruling class” against the country — the latter consisting of ordinary Americans of all races, ages and creeds, who were outraged when the bipartisan Beltway and its corporate cronies colluded in a massive wealth transfer to bail out insiders in the mortgage meltdown. It is the movement that gave rise to the Tea Party and other grassroots revolts against Washington’s monstrous growth and intrusiveness, the rigged system that prospered as everyone else’s economy flat-lined.

In the Obama years, as the divide widened, the political establishment took on a post-American cast. But the American people, it turns out, still like being the American people. The electoral blowback, beginning in 2010, has been intense, notwithstanding Obama’s 2012 reelection (in which he lost nearly 4 million voters from his 2008 victory). Equally intense has been the opposition to Washington’s way of doing business. While the media have been unable to hide their disdain for what the narrative holds to be the divisive forces that prevent Washington from “getting things done,” increasing numbers of Americans, across ideological lines, objected to the things Washington was doing.

Donald Trump saw an opening to become their champion, and that is what he made — or remade — himself into. For a very long time he was not taken seriously, just like the alienated forces he represented were not taken seriously. I certainly did not believe he was for real until very late in the game — and I say that as someone who has been aligned with the anti-ruling-class temper from the outset; I simply never thought Trump was the right vehicle for the movement.

But that was not for me to say, and now I get to hope and pray that he proves me wrong.