The New America: Trumpsters Fear It, Clintonites Embrace It

Hey, Straight Whitey: While you were drinking your Coors Light, America got more diverse, less religious, and more tolerant. Oh, and started drinking real beer.

If you build it, they will come. Well, we built it.

Sorry about the crack about the beer. Few bars where I live look like a Budweiser ad. It takes five minutes to figure out which of the twenty-three craft beers you want to drink.

Yet it's one of the many ways a nation can change. And, boy, has America changed.

Mostly, I've liked it, even though as an aging baby boomer I've been brought along kicking and screaming, but I got over it. Enough about me, though I feel representative of liberal America, the part that encourages tolerance and thrives under it.

Then there's the other part, those who have looked around and hated the gay, the brown, the black, the Asian, those who aren't of the Real America™. They also have problems with the new role women wish to assume, you know, the role where women participate in our society with equity, respect, and dignity, where a woman with ambitions is not a bitch worthy of suspicion.

Sorry old America, but it's not the province of white male authoritarians anymore. As Dylan said -- all too early, I'm afraid -- "Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command." That famous Dylan lyric, from "The Times They Are a-Changin'," was first sung fifty-two years ago, but finally it's not an aspiration, it's a reality.

Yet it's a reality that those who have gathered around Donald Trump and the Republican Party reject out of hand. If there's one thing that has grown particularly obvious in 2016, it's that the so-called conservative side of America is not going to go quietly into that good night of tolerance, acceptance, and inevitability. No, it will fight to the last ditch.

And here's where the division is the most stark. Now, Hillary Clinton embraces more that the liberal left. No doubt she's more centrist than those on the left would want, and she finds a home in the center, too, where many have not made up their minds about which direction America should go.

But don't be confused: Hillary Clinton wants to lead us towards a new America, one more tolerant, more embracing, more modern. This new America is ready for true, tolerant equality, with no more lip service and wink-wink, nudge-nudge. America is changing and for the better.

White nationalist America is resisting with every fiber of their being. But here's the bad news for them: It's beyond their control, it's over. Humanity is moving the way it could have been predicted centuries ago. Europeans would have their time, then everyone else was going to sweep them aside, or at least take their places as equals. It's happening, and all the DNA in the white world is not going to stop it.

And this is not a good or a bad thing. It's just a thing.

So that's where we are. To get political -- and real -- for a second: A vote for Trump is a vote to make the death throes of white America and the Republican Party a little longer, a little messier, a little deadlier. A vote for Clinton, while not revolutionary, will move America forward toward the new reality.

Of course, since this suspicious, anti-intellectual, anti-science, white, politically conservative side of America has resisted fighting climate change long enough that we're doomed as a species anyway, in a few decades it won't mean a damned thing. But for now, wouldn't it feel nice to fight the good fight, to embrace the new world, that isn't the same as the old one? So we can party like it isn't four degrees Celsius hotter?