Across the country, voters disappointed with President Trump’s election are coping with their feelings in various ways.
Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton supporters comforted themselves through “alternative reality” websites based on the fantasy of Hillary prevailing in the 2016 race (here and here, for instance).
One of these, HillaryBeatTrump.org, included imaginings about the terrible fate awaiting the NRA in this alternative universe. A fake news item at the site writes how “President Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a fiery, furious, brilliant speech excoriating the National Rifle Association as ‘America’s leading terrorist organization,’ calling the group ‘a sociopathic group of pro-gun, pro-murder, male extremists whose ongoing support for violence poses the single biggest domestic threat to our national security,’” with fake-President Clinton “instructing law enforcement agencies to shut down the NRA, ‘as a terrorist organization that’s responsible for killing more Americans than Al Qaeda, Ebola, and heroin combined.’”
Now, according to Rolling Stone magazine, the most recent election has rekindled similar “fears and hurt and memories of what was previously,” with Harris voters struggling to process their candidate’s loss along with a “loss of identity, loss of agency and loss of voice” that accompany the feelings of “political grief.” “Experiencing grief and disappointment doesn’t make you powerless,” say the consultants quoted by the magazine, who encourage sufferers to “find ways to take that power back, to be an agent of change in your community.”
Rather than volunteering at the food bank or donating to local unhoused populations, as the article recommends, for many the reaction to the new presidency is manifesting itself as a commitment to impede the democratically elected president and his allies, often under the paradoxical guise of “protecting democracy.” This, predictably, includes stepped-up efforts to enact extreme gun control measures.
In New Jersey, Assemblywoman Carol A.
