To be disillusioned you have to have some faith—in institutions, in progress, in human decency—to begin with. There are plenty of Americans who never had such faith, or who lost it at an early age. Black people who have seen members of their community shot by police and imprisoned under flimsy pretenses, undocumented immigrants who faced more deportations under President Obama than under any prior president, trans people who feared using public restrooms long before North Carolina sought to criminalize them for doing so, Muslims who experienced fingerprinting and surveillance after Sept. 11, 2001—these are among the many groups who largely shrugged their shoulders at all the white liberal weeping and gnashing of teeth after the election and said, “Well, what did you expect?” This attitude doesn’t minimize the very real threats these and other marginalized groups have faced since the election and will face when Trump takes office. But it’s possible to be frightened and angry without being disillusioned. The only people who experienced disillusionment in 2016 were people who had distanced themselves from the ugliness in American society enough that they could convince themselves that we were making meaningful progress.
After Trump’s election, it is more or less impossible to believe that we are making meaningful progress. White liberals who woke up horrified on Nov. 9 weren’t horrified because the world had suddenly changed—we were horrified because the scales had finally fallen from our eyes, and we could at least see our unjust, racist, sexist country for what it is. The next president will not be a woman, the makeup of the Supreme Court will not shift toward progressivism, and we are not jolly passengers on a cruise ship sailing toward an era of tolerance, justice, and respect for the dignity and rights of all.
To look for an upside to all this would be ironic. And disillusionment in and of itself is not a virtue.
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