RUTHFULLY YOURS

The chronically guilty mind (it is believed) becomes attached to guilt as a badge of inherent superiority,” writes the psychoanalyst Deborah Tyler in The American Thinkerwhere she examines the psychodynamics of Obama and Hillary Clinton’s politics.

It was fatal for them. In general, recognizing one’s own faults and therefore one’s limits is a springboard for overcoming problems caused not only by ourselves, but also by others.

Trump, a man quite devoted to self-admiration and to the glorification of his actions, make us feel a little worried when he points his finger at Hispanics, immigrants, Islamic terrorists… And yet this was one of the basic tenets of his presidential campaign to move away from the guilt propagated by the Obama administration as the basis of American policy, which imbued its internal and external ethics.

Guilty, responsible, sons and fathers who all share the blame: Americans couldn’t stomach feeling this any longer, geez, given the multitude of troubles they already have.

We are all accustomed to fustigating ourselves: the war? We cynically chose it. Drone strikes? We don’t know if they kill innocent civilians. Immigrants? They’re the result of our imperialist policy. Islamic terrorism? A result of the ideological and social discrimination called Islamophobia that we’ve directed at Muslims; Racial and ethnic inequality, especially between whites and diverse groups? The effect of our racism that always in turn leads to discrimination, violence, and police brutality; sexism and homophobia? These are all vices of capitalist society vis-à-vis a peaceful and innocent world, a left wing world that doesn’t harbor prejudices (and the reverse is true); pollution, climate change, and adulterated foods? The upshot of fierce exploitative policies, including refrigerators, heating, longer life expectancy and a general improvement with regard to living conditions.

Whatever kind of president Donald Trump will be, there are many social and cultural reasons that have decreed an end to the control of the democratic elite associated with Obama’s Chicago-style politics. That said, we must consider the explosion of anger that people wanted to express while sweating, working, fuming and hearing over and over that they are guilty, plus all the dogmas of a political correctness that crucifies them to historical slavery, which forces them to consider themselves responsible for all the troubles of the world, a public danger, a colonial invader instead of that great American friend who runs to the rescue back when it defeated Nazism and many other evils at the cost of so many lives.

And what the heck! Can the leading thinker be Oliver Stone, who has rewritten America’s history by claiming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed for futile reasons, that Truman was insane because of his unresolved “gender issues,” that Kennedy was killed by the Republicans because he wouldn’t go to war with the USSR… Gradually, we arrive up to the 9/11 attacks as self-inflicted by America upon itself.

Not that many years ago one went to vote. One found the district. One stood and waited until the 107-year-old volunteers (bless them) found your name, and then you entered a booth, drew a curtain behind you and pressed little levers for your choices.

Now, for inexplicable reasons, you get a two-sided paper with little circles above each candidate that one must fill. You do this while standing behind a three-sided booth. Then you take this paper, covered by a manila folder, to another centenarian who removes the manila folder and tells you to place your paper in a scanner. Mine came back because the little circles were not filled in. Back to the first booth where you correct your error after waiting on line for an available booth, and then it is back to the scanner which, after a wait with your paper exposed to nosy onlookers, eats your paper of choices.

Where my sons vote six scanners were out of order and the wait was interminable. I was lucky. The younger volunteers, in their late eighties, recognized another superannuated woman and ushered me through.

Why did they replace an efficient system where you could do your patriotic duty in minutes behind the curtain with one that crowds the room with perplexed people wandering back and forth seeking the right booth and then the right scanner? I’ll never know. When I voted for Grover Cleveland it was so easy.

But why complain? My candidate won.

Asra Q. Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. She can be found on Twitter at @AsraNomani.

A lot is being said now about the “silent secret Trump supporters.”

This is my confession — and explanation: I — a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman “of color” — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”

In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.

But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Tuesday evening, just minutes before the polls closed at Forestville Elementary School in mostly Democratic Fairfax County, I slipped between the cardboard partitions in the polling booth, a pen balanced carefully between my fingers, to mark my ballot for president, coloring in the circle beside the names of Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence.

After Hillary Clinton called Trump to concede, making him America’s president-elect, a friend on Twitter wrote a message of apology to the world, saying there are millions of Americans who don’t share Trump’s “hatred/division/ignorance.” She ended: “Ashamed of millions that do.”

That would presumably include me — but it doesn’t, and that is where the dismissal of voter concerns about Clinton led to her defeat. I most certainly reject the trifecta of “hatred/division/ignorance.” I support the Democratic Party’s position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change.

But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, “HOPE NOW,” didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.

Finally, as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the “Islam” in Islamic State. Of course, Trump’s rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, their media channels, such as Al Jazeera, and their proxies in the West, in a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

In mid-June, after the tragic shooting at Pulse, Trump tweeted out a message, delivered in his typical subtle style: “Is President Obama going to finally mention the words radical Islamic terrorism? If he doesn’t he should immediately resign in disgrace!”

One of the most intriguing political shifts Tuesday was Donald Trump’s relative popularity with union members. Exit polls show that Hillary Clinton did not win union households in nearly the numbers that President Obama did in 2012. Although major unions like the AFL-CIO supported Mrs. Clinton, millions in the rank and file didn’t. Mr. Trump’s victory should provide hope to any union members alienated by their increasingly out-of-touch leaders.

Best of all, growing numbers of these workers have the right to decide that they don’t want to support a union that doesn’t represent them. Twenty-six states now have right-to-work laws, which bar unions from getting workers fired for not paying union dues. Similar legislation might be on the way after Republicans’ sweeping victory on Tuesday. Even more consequential could be Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. If the president-elect makes good on his promise to choose constitutionalists, the court could enshrine right-to-work protections for every government employee in the country.

Start with the states where right-to-work bills have been blocked by Democrats. Last year the Missouri legislature passed one with strong majorities: 92-66 in the House and 21-13 in the Senate. But Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed it, claiming that “it’s wrong for the middle class and it must never become the law of the Show-Me State.”

Term limits have ended Gov. Nixon’s tenure, and on Tuesday voters rejected his preferred successor. Instead they elected a Republican, Eric Greitens, who says he believes in right to work “because it would stop companies and union bosses from taking a cut of your paycheck to support their political organization.”

The story in New Hampshire is similar. In 2011 the legislature tried to make the state right-to-work. Then-Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, vetoed the bill. A strong majority of the New Hampshire House tried to override the veto, 240-139, but they came up 12 votes short of the two-thirds needed. A similar bill didn’t make it through the legislature last year, though Gov. Maggie Hassan would have likely vetoed it anyway.

But on Tuesday the state elected a new Republican governor, Chris Sununu. “We haven’t brought a major business into the state in eight years,” he said earlier this year, adding that right to work could change that. If so, New Hampshire would be New England’s first right-to-work state.

In Kentucky right-to-work legislation died in the Democratic House last year, after it was passed by the Republican-dominated Senate. Yet now Republicans have taken full control of the legislature for the first time in nearly a century. The GOP flipped a whopping 17 of the state’s 100 House seats on its way to a 64-36 majority. In a postelection newspaper op-ed, Gov. Matt Bevin included right to work in his list of priorities for the next session.

At the Supreme Court the stakes are even higher, as Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association shows. The suit involves Rebecca Friedrichs, a California teacher who wants nothing to do with her union. She argues that being forced to financially support the government union violates her First Amendment rights. CONTINUE AT SITE