Sometimes the truth is obvious: we're a more racist and sexist country than we thought. [View all]

[DanTex]

And all the intellectual contortions that people are going through trying come up with some other explanation won't change that. Trump put bigotry on the ballot, and bigotry won.

It's not just that Trump is a bigot. He made bigotry the centerpiece of campaign. Even down to his slogan: "Again" referred to a time when there were few Latinos here, blacks had to drink at different fountains, women cooked and brought coffee, and gays had to remain closeted.

But there's no need to read into his slogan to figure that out. He actually said it. Not just one gaffe. Over and over. He said racist things in interviews, in speeches, even reading from the teleprompter. What made Trump "different" wasn't that he was a Reality TV star with no political experience. It's that he's the first candidate in a very long time to make explicit racism his campaign theme.

And he won. I understand the desire of people to find some other explanation, besides the obvious one. It's not a nice feeling to realize that bigotry is so widespread. Although, my guess is that people who actually suffer from discrimination are less surprised by this that straight white men like me (and most of the people writing the articles about how no it wasn't really about racism).

But let's be real. We're a country with a deep history of racism. And we're not the only one. So it's not all that surprising that there's a lot of it still there.

It's not the Democratic Party that has "hard truths" to face. It's the United States.