What a surprise. Not an entirely unwelcome one for me. As my wife said, there was going to be trouble if somebody won the election. But I think I prefer this trouble to the alternative.
Some of those on the losing side have gone rather around the bend. I'm not sure whether they really believe that Trumpian storm troopers are going to drag them from their beds in the middle of the night, or it's just that odd thrill, similar to that of watching a horror movie, that some people seem to get out of imagining such things while in their hearts knowing that they aren't going to happen. I wonder about this person, for instance:
So I am in my reality and they are in theirs and still we live in the same world; and there are others, who have been legitimized and mobilized by Trump’s win, whose reality includes my extinction and my families’ extinction, and the extinction of anyone who is not white in America.
Extinction? Really?
One of the oddest things about that piece is that she is a young (I assume) Chinese-American woman whose own family members were victims of Mao's Cultural Revolution. But she blames, not the communist government that actually perpetrated it, but "fascism." Well, that unfortunately is fairly indicative of the continuing unwillingness of the left to face the historical truth about communism.
I guess there is no reason, other than a combination of bewilderment and alarm, to multiply examples of such sentiments. I'm sure everyone has seen plenty of them. There are a lot of hysterical predictions, and a lot of reports about various acts of bigotry. No doubt there have been some, but I think there is a lot of exaggeration and outright fabrication, as this piece at Reason (the libertarian site) shows.
I had hoped that having Donald Trump as president might make some on the left reconsider the wisdom of consolidating more and more power in the central government and in the presidency in particular. I'm not seeing any indication of that, though. The effect seems to be rather to inflame their desire to take control and keep it. Screams of hate and fear seem to be the predominant mode of expression. A few liberals have tried to make the point that the obvious contempt of their fellows for everyone who disagrees with them played a role in Hillary's defeat, but I don't get the feeling that very many are listening.
The racial climate may have changed permanently for the worse. Whatever Trump's own views may be, it can't be denied that genuine racists have hitched themselves to his wagon. What seems more significant to me, though, is that he has catalyzed something that I've been predicting for a long time: that whites would decide that they should do what other groups are doing and openly look to their own interests as a group. As someone said the other day, identity politics for me but not for thee was never going to work as a permanent state of affairs. It seemed to be taken for granted by many on the left that the role of whites in our racial politics was to stand still and be beaten while apologizing.
At The Federalist there's an excellent analysis, by a writer named David Marcus, of what's happened: "This Election Marks the End of America's Racial Détente". He describes the situation from the passage of the civil rights laws until quite recently as a period of détente in which
The rules of the deal were pretty straightforward. For whites, they stated that outright racist statements and explicit appeals to white racial identity were essentially banned. Along with this, whites accepted a double standard about the appropriateness of cultural and political tribalism. For obvious and reasonable historical and economic reasons, black and brown people explicitly pursuing their own interests was viewed differently than whites doing the same thing.
The other side of the deal was that so long as white people were sufficiently punished for acts of outright racism, minority leaders and communities would be cautious with accusations of racism….
Privilege theory and the concept of systemic racism dealt the death blow to the détente. In embracing these theories, minorities and progressives broke their essential rule, which was to not run around calling everyone a racist. As these theories took hold, every white person became a racist who must confess that racism and actively make amends…
Within the past few years, as privilege theory took hold, many whites began to think that no matter what they did they would be called racist, because, in fact, that was happening….
The unfortunate place where we now find ourselves is one in which blatant attacks on white people, often from white people, are driving them further into a tribal cocoon. Samantha Bee’s awful and irresponsible berating of white women as the evil force behind Trump’s victory, while condescendingly describing magical people of color as the only ones who can save us, is a clear example of where white defensiveness and victimization are coming from.
Furthermore, the ever-present drumbeat from the Left that every conservative victory is the death throes of bad, old white people who are about to be swept away by waves of brown immigration is making many whites dig in. On a certain level, how can you blame them? They are explicitly being told that their values and way of life are under the sword. How do we expect them to react?
How indeed? As I've said more than once here: sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
(I think Samantha Bee is a comedian. Not sure. Maybe one of those "comedians" who are 50% jokes and 50% left-wing blather.)
Light On Dark Water 
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