Responses to the 2016 presidential election.
November 16, 2016
The places I call home have been targeted for the ash heap of history.
If Trump has his way on climate policy, the forests of the Southwest—already in grave peril—are finished. If Trump has his way on border policy, an ever more militarized atmosphere is destined to overlay the life of the borderlands.
November 13, 2016
The gallows humor isn’t even funny.
November 13, 2016
The event of Trump’s election looked like it was already being absorbed into the banality of the post-material marketplace.
I’m afraid that if I say the wrong thing there might be a knock at my door in the middle of the night, and on the other side of it someone who won’t wait for me to say “come in.”
November 12, 2016
To what extremes of disobedience and resistant behavior do peaceful Americans know how to go?
It is far better to “overreact” at this moment than not to react—probably better to be wrong, before probable wrongs are done, than to wait and see. It is more important to seize hold of the abnormal, than turn violation into the normal.
November 12, 2016
I have a strange impulse to laminate my documents—or plate them in gold.
November 12, 2016
In victory, Trump has issued a license for jubilation and fervor. It is open season.
On Tuesday night, as the little blue line on the New York Times graph started to plunge to below 50 percent, I began to imagine President-elect Trump embracing the parents of grieving servicemen and servicewomen; Trump greeting a Girl Scout troop on the White House lawn; Trump dedicating a new national park (before privatizing it).
November 12, 2016
How are mutely inexpressive votes—boxes ticked once every four years by a minority of the voting-age electorate—legible?
Until November 8th, it seemed clear that one thing was going to happen, and now another thing—the exact opposite—happened, and I can’t see how this doesn’t provoke a sense of chagrin and humility.
November 11, 2016
Just trust us. Our policies are healthy and good for you.
November 11, 2016
I had not previously imagined the people around me having to react to Trump’s election.
November 11, 2016
Paradoxically, the front lines of feminism tend to look like its tail end.
Feminists can use the resources at our disposal to safeguard the institutions that protect the rights of women—cis, trans, everyone—and gender nonconformists.
November 11, 2016
Trump’s advisers comprise a small right-wing criminal class within the larger corrupt political class.
More Americans voted for Al Gore than for George W. Bush, and this didn’t prevent Bush and his team from implementing a maximalist right-wing agenda the minute they got into office.
November 11, 2016
I thought I would watch the results and drink champagne with women I love, and then we’d wake up the next day and begin our dutiful critique.
I watched my Facebook feed fill with friends dedicating their votes to their mothers and grandmothers and daughters. Despite my disillusionment, I began to feel sentimental.
