"Not my President!"

These three words were captured in a trending hashtag and resounded from protests across the country. Major cities saw traffic grind to a halt against displays of civil disobedience, some violent and most not. On my own college campus, Wednesday morning felt like a funeral. Silence is louder than words in our progressive community, and these days have been thunderous.

Self-care and mediation on what had occurred was quickly followed by frantic, public rationalization. Assurances that the electoral college would buck over two hundred years of tradition and act off of the popular vote to elect Hillary Clinton sounded from every group of shuffling, defeated students. Calls for protest, especially over social media, began to roll in.

Intellectual circles within my community have identified this election as something of a litmus test for America's democracy. "Is democracy what's best for us," they asked, "when it led to the election of somebody who so fundamentally threatens its continuity?" At first, I was caught up in this speculation. Then, a deeper sense of horror invaded me like Trump's imagined ISIS agents, as I realized democracy had not failed in allowing Trumps election. It had worked exactly as intended.

Democracy, like justice, is at it's purest ideal intended to be blind. Like the line of code which closes its program, democracy functions correctly even when it leads to its own ruin. At its core, it is simply the process by which the people govern themselves. Of course, America is not technically a democracy (we are a constitutional republic), but democratic ideals guide our history as a nation. Donald Trump's flirtations with authoritarianism were some of his most abstractly frightening faults during the election, yet that is not in itself a technical problem. Trumps victory does not indicate a flaw in the democracy - in fact, his disconnection from the normal political culture indicates the democracy is stronger than we thought.

Rather, the horror of his election (aside from the danger women, people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community now face) is that it lifts the mask off of America and shows how ugly she truly is. Enough of the country either flatly agreed with Trump's positions on the aforementioned groups or were neutral enough towards them to give him his vote on the basis of his outsider narrative. The democracy did its work, and our comfortable ignorance about the people of America has been shattered.