At age 80, I’m an “old guy.” I’ve been an avid reader and writer on multiple subjects all of my life. Though I write primarily about U.S. health care, I maintain a lively interest in politics generally. Since election day, I’ve been hearing stories that express a profound sense of trauma in millions of us. Many feel themselves to be in mourning for their beloved country. Others feel vindicated and not at all hesitant to say so. One narrative I heard from a lady who voted for Harris and whose husband voted for Trump was really chilling. She felt that her concerns as a woman had been so disregarded by her husband that she could no longer live with him or with one of her like-minded sons. She intended to file for divorce.

In such relationships, “get over yourself” is profoundly offensive and unhelpful. This is real trauma. And we cannot afford to let it become generalized to our society or violently acted upon.

However, this trauma is only one side of a story that has many other sides. We need to listen to each other with more grace and acceptance if we are to continue to live together in the same country, either politically or emotionally.

I empathize with liberals and Democratic voters who feel violated by the landslide for Trump. And I agree that some conservatives and Republicans who wouldn’t vote for a woman because their masculinity felt challenged may need to back up and ask themselves what they were thinking. But both sides of this divide seem to be ignoring a much more fundamental problem:

In other words, I’d suggest that we’ve been HAD!

Both Democrat and Republican leaders need to own up to the reality that they have massively failed working people. Neither party was willing to face or deal with the greatest source of division in our country: real wages have stagnated for 50 years. Today’s minimum wage of $7.25 is about 44 percent lower than its 1970 counterpart when accounting for inflation alone. In the public sector, both political parties have refused to tax the rich adequately to pay for social services that working people want and desperately need. Under the incoming administration, this refusal may become even more rigidly entrenched in our politics.

The wealth gap between the richest Americans and the rest of the population has been growing over the past several decades:

• The share of wealth held by the top 20 percent of Americans increased from 61 percent in 1990 to 71 percent in 2022.
• The top 1 percent saw their share of wealth grow from 17 percent in 1990 to 26 percent in 2022.
• In 1963, the wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of middle-class families. By 2022, this gap had grown to 71 times.

Is it any wonder why only 10 percent of Americans trust their political class to do the right things? Our politicians have been bought!

Both Democrat and Republican leaders have allowed themselves to be silenced by campaign contributions and dark money. Holding power has become more important than doing what is right. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work any better from Democrats than for their opposition. Prattling on about how the economy is really much better than people think it is doesn’t hack it with people who are paying more than ever before for groceries and who can’t buy a house because of astronomical prices that only the rich can afford.

Republican leaders have their own delusions, which we may see come to fruition in the not-distant future. Economic disasters that the new administration creates with tariffs will predictably drive inflation and depress the stock market. Unemployment will rise. Working people will feel the pinch, but mostly they will not understand why everything is so expensive.

Some of us will buy into the lie that all government programs (except their own) are “socialism” and that poor people made bad decisions, or they wouldn’t be poor. That latter claim is a lie in a society where the poor are born into disadvantages of a permanent underclass that is ill-educated, ill-housed, ill-policed, and locked out of prosperity by prejudice. But politicians won’t be able to reach these potential allies by emphasizing how much they’ve done to promote labor unions that serve only 10 percent of U.S. workers.

I must suggest that the only way out of this quandary for our political class on both sides of the aisle is to do what is right:

1. Change tax policy so that corporate executives pay at least as high a tax rate on all of their income as the executive assistants in their outer office and the machinists on their factory floor.

2. When lobbyists come to a legislator’s office to buy influence with dark money campaign checks and not-so-subtly demand that politicians preserve the perks of their contributors, then legislators need to show them the door and tell voters prominently what they did and why.

3. If politicians want to deserve jobs in office at any level, then they will need to dig in and deal with the crisis in our Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid systems that is about to finish off our middle class. Without more tax income to those programs, both funds will be insolvent by 2034. Where are you going to be when seniors get clobbered with at least a 25 percent benefit cut? And how many affordable houses are going to get built when the next administration has deported a large number of the undocumented but hard-working immigrants who provide most of the labor in our construction industry?

Anything less than these necessary steps will worsen the mess. It is time for politicians to put their sorry behinds into gear and stop wringing their hands over trivial nonsense! This country is in a fight for its life as a democracy. We will lose that fight if our political leaders do not lead thoughtfully and with real compassion.

Yes, we are a nation in trauma, but not for the reasons you think!

Richard A. Lawhern is a patient advocate.