As a History major, I started out in Ancient Greek and Roman history, but after 2 years switched to American. I was ensconced in that and in my own tiny cell at the Library of Congress, where I could order up original diaries, financial records, legal documents, et al., of the area of my thesis. So, I was well into American history when I got to the required upper-level course of historiography, the study of how history is researched and written and the methodologies available for studying and writing about history. There is a saying that history is written by the winners, but, fortunately, that’s not always true or we would never know what really happened. Part of historiography is how the perception of existing historical writing about a specific event or person’s role, or period, or era varies over time, and it does. Sometimes as new evidence comes to light, sometimes as once popular biases and perceptions are changed.
Certainly, in our country’s history, we have many examples of factual history corrupted by biases, public opinion, a narrow perspective, such as slavery and racism, western expansion, the American Revolution, the relationship between the early settlers and the natives. That’s one to look at, especially with the onset of Thanksgiving! There are certainly many myths still perpetuated about that.
No doubt, our current bizarre election will endure biases, too. Why I think we made and are making history includes the activities of the previous election: the insurrection at the Capitol, the orders to disrupt the electoral procedures in the House of Representatives, the refusal to concede, the unprecedented and un-Constitutional Supreme Court ruling giving immunity to the President under certain loosely worded conditions. These were all anti-Constitutional and the rule of law that we had relied on for so long. Now that same person has been elected legally. These are all exceptional ‘firsts’ that definitely make history.
So does this election negate all that was done previously by this felon President-elect? No, but there will be attempts to erase it. Too much factual, documented evidence exists to make it go away. Some of which we all saw on television as it was happening. In the future, historians will have a treasure trove of materials from paper to electronic to make sense of it. Certainly they will start with economics, since so many gave that as their reason for voting for the GOP candidate and also immigration, another given reason. Of course, they will also look at the candidate that lost: a woman of color. In another post, I plan to write about those three reasons (four, if you want to count being a woman and color as two). Historically, all these firsts add up to explain what this era will be known for and added to our collective history. I hope future historians understand it better than we do.
Our current role in making history: the extreme depth of despair and depression beyond anything previously experienced in this country for followers of the loser. There’s never been an election in my 8-decades-long lifetime followed by such extensive outpourings of grief, and advice and tools to help get past the grief and its accompanying depression. Of course, in the past when your candidate lost, you might be disappointed, angry, concerned, but nothing like this. Another first of note for this era.
Psychologically, grief is the natural emotional response to a significant loss. It often manifests as intense sadness, denial, anger, shock, numbness, depression, and can rewire the brain to the constant stress syndrome. The latter is particularly unhealthy. Those who understand the grief process have reached out in huge numbers offering counseling, advice, multiple suggestions on coming to terms with the grief process, and it is a process; there’s not a one-time fix. Expect it to pop up now and again. Use your tools, because we need to overcome this in order to do the work necessary to maintain our democratic foundations. This great experiment isn’t finished yet!
Why grief? What was the significant loss? It wasn’t just the lost opportunity to finally have a woman president and another person of color. No, it is the loss of this country as we knew it and our never-perfect, but yearning and struggling toward a better day for all within our democratic Republic. This is a huge, most significant loss, especially for so many who voted for the loser because they are still working, one way or another, on moving us to a more perfect union. And we think she would have done the same. We know what has been written and said, that the President-Elect is intent on restructuring our government opposite of democratic principles. His oath to protect the Constitution will be another sham. He has already gone against it.
Why do we think democracy is being lost? For one, the normal guardrails are gone, like the Constitution, the rule of law, the 3 separate branches of government (Executive, Judicial, Legislative) that provided checks and balances on each other, now all in liege to one, controlled by others, just like a puppet, who know the necessary moves to fawn, adulate, and truckle to manipulate as they wish. And my sisters and my brothers, I think what they wish will be a curse to us. But we have witches, trolls, and banshees of our own. Just imagine a Grimm’s Fairy Tale of battles between good and evil. Oh, that’s already been done, you say, with multitudinous sequels.
This is as momentous as when the southern states seceded to save their economically necessary system of slavery. Blue states are not planning on seceding, nor is any sane citizen planning a civil war, but there will be extensive peaceful work to preserve the roots of our Republic, which is our democratic foundation that must survive.
The Library of Congress, Washngton, D.C., the repository of our history, along with the National Archives
You summed it up perfectly!
THANKS!