Terrance Williams/AP Photo
Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris react during her concession speech on the campus of Howard University, November 6, 2024, in Washington.
I had the strongest feeling in November 2016, in the days after Trump won and before my mother died, of being a member of an occupied people, as a woman, queer, a liberal Jew, a writer and reader, a college professor. It seemed so unnatural and new, and then I thought, Why? People do get defeated. This is a thing that happens. My people, the nation that I mostly imagine into being and sometimes get a glimpse of on social media (more then than now): We were vanquished.
It probably only seemed weird to me because I’m a white person living in the United States, a woman who rose in the aftermath of the women’s rights and women’s liberation movements. The daughter of a feminist lawyer and a father who was only sexist in his personal life and not in his stated opinions. A lesbian who came out and got into a serious relationship just in time for the 25th anniversary of Stonewall in 1994, and moved to Vermont when the state was still congratulating itself on overriding a gubernatorial veto to let Anore and me get married.
Loss, defeat, revanchism, herrenvolk democracy: These things happen. They have happened, historically. I have always been moved by what happened to the French during World War II, the “strange defeat” that the great historian Marc Bloch wrote about after his country’s proud republican army folded like a soggy crepe in the face of the Germans. The book came out in 1946, when the war was over and Bloch himself had long since been tortured and assassinated by the Gestapo for his participation in the French Resistance and for being a smarty-pants Jew.
As Bloch tells it, and as you get from books like Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française (Ukrainian Jewish, killed by the Nazis in 1942), there was just this sense of utter disorientation, of disbelief. How could it happen? And so fast? And so utterly? Who are we—and who are they, these enemies of ours who could overcome us and then treat us so ruthlessly? Are we still human? Are they?
It happens, it has happened. When Reconstruction, after the Civil War, let people see just for a moment what a real democracy might look like, with mass voting (at least for men) and a small cadre of Black political leaders gaining seats, it turned so quickly into “Redemption,” like a sudden explosion in the lab when the final teaspoon of chemical is poured in. Or, more accurate, when the relentless force on the other side finally pushed or putsched its way into the voting booth, the state constitutional convention, and the Supreme Court.
Our Black and white forebears woke up, too, the morning after the Wilmington Massacre or Plessy v. Ferguson, disoriented, aching, seeping from a wound they couldn’t remember someone having delivered. This was possible all along? Our adversaries, those who lost a little in our immeasurable gain, they held the country’s promises so cheap? And were willing to toss it all over, the red-white-and-blue thing, the Declaration and the Bill of Rights thing and the mass democracy thing, to hang onto all the chips instead of leaving a few on the table for someone else?
My favorite history book title is There Goes My Everything, Jason Sokol’s treatment of white Southerners’ experience of the Black civil rights movement and the transformations that ensued. He shows it can happen on the other side, too, the unmooring, the way history can grab you by the hair and shake you out of what you thought was your place in the world. It can make people desperate, did make people desperate, in defense of real material benefits they thought would be there for all times and, even more, maybe, in defense of the intellectual self-interests John Kenneth Galbraith talked about in The Affluent Society, ideas we’re so invested in that losing them may feel like losing it all.
In 2016, my father, my dear, liberal, sexist-only-in-his-personal-life father, who only weeks later would remember at my mother’s deathbed the way they promised one another early in the marriage that didn’t make it to change the world, called to say, “I can’t stand the pundits. They keep saying, ‘This isn’t who we are.’ This is exactly who we are!” (That admonition, those words—This isn’t who we are—get used by Joe Biden a lot, too.) My good friend, a D.C. policy pro and therefore professionally obliged to be optimistic, suggested that our problem, the denizens of that imagined nation of mine, was that we believed the arc of the moral universe was long but bent toward justice. What if it doesn’t? What if we sit around telling ourselves it’s going to bend and meanwhile the other side just gets to enjoy the decades, or centuries, when it’s in its immoral phase?
So what of 2024? I’m surprised by the outcome of the elections. I knew the risks, and I was scared, but … I’m still surprised. I don’t have the sudden shock, the body blow, I had back then. Not because I think things will be OK; I don’t, and as a historian it would be professional malpractice to suggest that a change in political direction such as we are in the midst of can’t produce vast harm.
The kind of terrible thing is, I think I’m getting used to it. People live under occupation for long periods. Historical analogies are treacherous, and of course people like me and my mostly white, mostly middle-class, feminist, queer, and trans students are not (yet) as bad off as Marc Bloch, or Black Southerners at the height of Jim Crow. The soldiers of the occupying army do not, at this writing, have their boots on our necks, as the U.S. Army did on the necks of the Plains Indians and the Filipinos who fought for independence after we helped them eject Spanish rule.
I’ve been hunkered down and waiting for the worst a long time already. I’ve been doing all the things liberal media suggest: all so well-meaning, so trauma-informed. I’ve been doing my bit to seed resistance and, meanwhile, allow survival. I don’t like it, but I think I’m ready.
