"I Thought More Of My Country" - Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein, at Vox:

Trump’s victory is unnerving in a way nothing else in politics ever has been to me — it suggests there’s no bar, no floor, no you-must-be-this-decent to serve. I thought more of my country.

And:

The argument I can’t make is why so many of my countrymen looked at Trump and deemed him acceptable. Polls show that in narrow ways, the voters saw what I saw — people did believe Trump unqualified, unkind, dishonest, indecent. It just didn’t matter.

To explain Trump’s competitiveness, if not his win, you have to search for truly primal appeals that overwhelmed all that — the power of partisan identity, the fear of Others, a dominant racial majority that rose in fury against the idea that it was becoming a political minority.

I hope Trump is a better man as president than he showed himself to be on the campaign trail. But I can’t confidently explain his win. In some ways, I don’t want to — I am scared of the conclusions it forces.