My family is like a microcosm of what went wrong in this election.
My mother raised me to be like Hillary Clinton, but she voted for Donald Trump. Words cannot fully describe how pissed off I am about this. She has voted Democrat since the 80's. She waited for several hours to see Bill Clinton's motorcade when he came to town for something back in the 90's.
My dad, who also raised me to be like Hillary, voted for Gary Johnson, but this was somewhat less surprising since he's usually just to the right of my mom politically and mostly votes Republican. They're live in CA so it really didn't make a difference, but it doesn't make it any better.
My brother didn't vote. He never does. He lives in Arizona. It's not a swing state now but probably will be soon.
I voted for Hillary, of course. It would be easy to say that the results are not my fault, that it's random uneducated white people in towns in middle of the country, but my own family, particularly my mother, suggests otherwise. Collectively, the four of us are part of the problem.
I didn't ask my mom who she was going to vote for, since I assumed it would be Hillary and it's usually kind of hard to get a word in edgewise, anyway. Normally I call her out on some of the more sexist things she says (which seem to be increasing lately). My dad told me, after the election, that my mom "just doesn't like Hillary." I am kicking myself for not discussing the election with her. She's a smart woman, and went to college at a time when that was still sort of uncommon for women to do so. But she also has a lifelong fondness for talk radio (which mostly veers right these days), and a new-found fondness for clickbait and its young cousin fake news. I also know she has absorbed a lot of internalized misogyny, and it's rearing its ugly head now, perhaps due to all the talk radio.
I can't even...
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