Everything that the New York Times’s Charles Blow writes is overwrought and rarely worth considering, but his latest column provides the perfect understanding for why the divide between liberals and conservatives will, for many, if not most voters, only grow wider.
Blow wrote Wednesday that the people who chose to deny the president a second term by voting Joe Biden as his successor have to remember the “harm” caused to them by President Trump’s supporters.
“There is always so much talk,” wrote Blow, “of unity and coming together, of healing wounds and repairing divisions. … Do we prove to them that we can rise above their attempt to harm us, or do we behave in a way that is commensurate with the harm they tried to inflict?”
By “harm,” Blow literally means physical harm, or, at least, the attempt to “severely restrict our ability to pursue a life of equality.” And by “our,” Blow is referring mostly to blacks, but also illegal immigrants and women because, sexist, racist, bigot, blah, blah, blah.
“There must also be an acknowledgment,” he continued, “that the prejudiced were trying to harm you and that, but for a few hundred thousand votes in the right states, they would have succeeded in exacting that harm.”
No American was “harmed” by a single one of Trump’s policies. No, in fact, a cross section of voters supported his main ones, though enough of them clearly detested him on a personal level. That’s why Trump’s share of the minority vote did not shrink but grew relative to 2016.
But Blow, and many just like him, truly believe in their hearts that they were harmed by their fellow people who supported the president in the 2020 election — which is nearly 75 million people.
If a person believes my vote was an act of “harm,” how could we possibly be united or that we could politically “heal”? Not that liberals have generally shown any real desire to heal. They haven’t. And sentiments like Blow’s are why.
