Right after the 2016 election, a lot of people on Metafilter commiserated about this new, horrible turn the country had taken:
I suspect he knows exactly what he’s going to do…parade around state dinners with his wife, emboss “President Trump” on everything he can, and wrap the Lincoln Bedroom in gold. And let Pence actually do all the work.
This was one of my colleague’s fears too.
I was thinking more about what I said upthread, where I responded to Garrison Keillor’s “lay back in the buckwheat” stance. And y’all were correct to point out that it definitely comes across like “smug privileged liberal relaxes in his privilege”. I took it differently, and maybe that was because it sounded similar, but not exactly, like a different thing that was in my own head.
So lemme try rewriting what’s in my head. Here’s the scenario I envision playing out - let’s take the “wall on the border” as an example.
GOP Congress: Yay! So, we’re in charge now!
DEM Congress: …Yep, you sure are in charge.
GOP Congress: So we’re gonna build that wall and get Mexico to pay for it!
DEM Congress: shrug if you say so.
GOP Congress: Yay! So…wait, HOW do we get Mexico to pay for it?
DEM Congress: Search me, dudes, this was your idea.
GOP Congress: Huh. …Uh, how about we go ask him?
DEM Congress: (secretly smiling) Sure, why not try that.
GOP Congress: Okay….hey, Mexico, give us money for that wall!
Mexican government: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no.
GOP Congress: ….wow. That didn’t work.
DEM Congress: Well, gosh, isn’t that interesting. (starts notebook called “2018 talking points”)
GOP Congress: Shit….uh, maybe if we bribe them with something?
DEM Congress: What do you mean…“bribe”?
GOP Congress: Like, we offer to send them free tacos or something.
DEM Congress: (smothering laughter) One way to find out…(nudging each other and saying “watch this”)
GOP Congress: Hey, guys! If you build that wall….tacos on us!
Mexico: ….Dude, fuck off.
GOP Congress: Wow, that didn’t work either.
DEM Congress: …Fancy that.
You know? Just sort of standing back and letting the GOP fall flat on their face over and over. But I’m not suggesting the Dems stay TOTALLY hands off:
GOP Congress: Hey, how about if we declared WAR on Mexico!
DEM Congress: Okay HOLD up, THAT’S a big fat no.
or -
GOP Congress: I got it, we’ll round up all of the illegal immigrants and make THEM build it for nothing.
DEM Congress: Fuck that noise, no.
But otherwise…
GOP Congress: Fuck, how are we gonna make this happen?
DEM Congress: (munching popcorn) I dunno, dudes, this was your idea, I got nothing.
Here’s an excerpt from an email I sent to my dad back in July:
I saw someone say on twitter the other day that “you don’t have to be a racist to support Trump, you just have to be okay with racism,” and boy is that true. Voting for Trump says to Muslim citizens, you don’t have the right to feel safe in your home. To Latino citizens, you’re a bunch of cheating dirty criminals. To women, that you’d better be pretty and keep your mouth shut. And Dad, if you think that’s unfair, tough. Because that’s what it’s like for the folks out here who didn’t make it into the select group of people Trump hasn’t attacked yet. He’s built his entire campaign around othering huge swathes of the American population, and it’s depressing and scary how well that’s worked to vault him to such popularity. The Republican party should be ashamed of itself that it’s come to this.
I’m glad I wrote that to him. I’m glad I called him out, and my only wish is that I had done it more strongly and more often, because he needs to know. When my parents call me in a few weeks and ask me when I’m flying in and I tell them I’ve made other plans for Christmas, I want them to know why.
Call people out on their shit. Often. Tacit acceptance of racism is still racism.
Ok, enough with the doom and gloom.
First off, this isn’t the worst it’s ever been. There was a time when we had an actual civil war. And for a century after that it was all but legal for white men to torture black men to death for fun.
That doesn’t mean that the current situation is good, but let’s not fall into the trap of believing that were are in the worst time ever and that it’s all a downhill spiral from here.
We got better after the Civil War. We got better after Jim Crow.
This is a step backwards, but we can get better after this. It’ll hurt. We will suffer. Our friends will suffer. Our allies will suffer. But we can win. We can make that suffering temporary rather than the new normal.
More specifically:
Donald Trump will not overturn democracy in the USA. He may want to, but he can’t. Not even with the House, the Senate, and a 5-4 majority on the Court. He’ll try, things will get harder, vote suppression will be more prevalent, but we can still win this shit.
My partner’s parents lived through the worst Jim Crow in Texas, and they managed to vote in every single election from the time they were 18. If they can do that, in a much more blatantly and visibly racist and rigged time, we can overcome any voter suppression shit they throw at us.
Don’t let depression sap your will to fight.
While practicing good informational hygiene is generally a good idea, the NSA and the FBI aren’t going to be worse than they were back in the COINTELPRO days, and probably not even that bad.
Don’t let paranoia sap your will to fight.
We have much better tools to coordinate and communicate these days and with that we can overcome. Our forebearers overcame worse odds with worse tools. If MLK and Malcolm X and the other Civil Rights activists could go up against the entrenched, violent, power structures of the old South and win with the pitiful tools they had then, we have no business despairing today when we face a weaker foe and have better tools.
Don’t let despair sap your will to fight.
We have a long, hard, four years ahead of us. Things will not be easy. We’ll need to organize and work in multiple areas, sometimes competing for the same resources and labor. Don’t form a circular firing squad. Some of us will be focused on areas that others of us think are secondary, let them fight their fight, you fight yours. Some of us will be working to shuttle women to places they can get abortions safely, others will be working to subvert and overcome voter suppression laws, we’re all on the same side even if we aren’t doing the same thing or focusing on the same battles.
Don’t let factionalism divert our resources from the fight.
Most important, now is the time to fight, and while the enemy is strong they’ve given us weapons or surrendered some of their most potent weapons. Provided we call them on it, the Evangelicals can no longer pretend to moral superiority, indeed they’ve given us the tools to factonalize them, shatter their unity and break their spirit by turning their most potent weapons against them. Provided we call them on it, the Money Republicans can no longer pretend to be laissez faire capitalists. Like the Evangelicals, they sold their best and most potent arguments for a short term gain at best.
The time to organize, to rally, to fight, was last year.
We fucked up. We got complainant. We allowed ourselves to split, to blame each other. Maybe we couldn’t have won no matter how hard we fought, no matter how united we were, but no one can seriously claim that we went into this election fully prepared and unified.
We made judgments based on hope and aspiration rather than pragmatism. Clinton’s negatives, no matter how fictional they were, were too great. It is horrible to say that we should have let the Republican lies prevent her from running, but the truth is that 35 years of constant, vicious, outrageous and preposterous Republican lies did truly make her unelectable. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, I didn’t believe it myself until today. I thought for sure that truth would win out and the Republican lies wouldn’t be able to sink such a capable and strong woman. They did.
From now on we can’t let optimism blind us and lead us to failure. It will hurt to cut off those the Republicans have successfully smeared, but it must be done or we will face this problem again.
Would we rather be right, or would we rather win? I chose to win.
Meanwhile, we must learn from their success. We must identify up and coming Republicans and destroy them, as they destroyed Clinton, so that they cannot be successful candidates. We need a team we can disavow, a group of hate radio equivalents, to burn the best and brightest of the upcoming Republicans as they burned Clinton. We need people willing to sacrifice their social respect to be the left’s version of Alex Jones and Ann Coulter, to be the people who say horrible, awful, untrue, things about Republicans just to get those things into circulation. That way we can say “of course it isn’t true, but the rumors from [insert sacrificial liberal here] are that Ted Cruz fucks pigs!”
If they fight dirty and we try to appeal to the refs we lose. There are no refs. Either we fight back just as nasty, just as hard, and by doing so frighten them into backing off, or they keep fighting dirty and we keep losing. Hell, infiltrate and subvert the Green Party, or some other group to be surrogates to carry out hte attacks so that the Democrats can bewail (loudly and publicly while amplifying and repeating) the awful lies from those horrible, horrible, far left wing types. Isn’t it AWFUL how the horrible far left claims Trump fucks pigs? Certainly we’d never say so, but if true that’s a very serious allegation.
But most important, we’ve got to work. We’ve got to get out there, tomorrow or the next day when we’re finished crying, and join the local Democratic party, volunteer every moment of spare time we have, and get the job done.
We can’t win the House in 2018, it’s too well gerrymandered. But we can win the downballot if we work hard enough. We can win at the county level, the city level, the water board level, the school district level. And we must. Those offices are the foundation of power. We’ve foolishly allowed the Republicans to own them, and we must take them back.
We have to fight. We have to work. We have to win.
We can’t take back the Federal government in 2018. We should put up the best damn fight we possibly can, but we should go in knowing that we’ll probably lose and count even the tiniest of gains as victories. Because they will be. But we should be ready to sweep the lower elections in 2018.
We probably can’t take the really gerrymandered state legislature districts, but city government, county government, school boards, all the places the Republicans traditionally own we can take.
We have the numbers, we just need the organization and will.
I woke up this morning in despair. I’ve wallowed in it for a while, and maybe you need longer. But don’t take too long.
Find your local Democratic Party, join up. Get to the meetings. Volunteer for everything. Help out. We can’t win without strong county parties, without strong precinct chairs, and workers.
If we work hard enough, if we fight hard enough, we can make Trump a one term president. He’s damn sure going to give us plenty of weapons to use against him, we just have to be willing to use them.
For the future of America, for my child’s future, for my black partner’s future, I am willing to use every scrap of white privilege I have to serve the greater good.
I’m done with despair. I’m fired up. I’m going to get out there and I’m going to fight and even if I lose I’ll make them spend resources they never thought they’d have to to beat me. Every one of us who volunteers for the Democrats is another volunteer they have to scrape up, or a few million they have to throw at the elections.
Enough with the doom and gloom. It was worse, far far worse, in the past. I will not shame those who went before me, my mother in law who sent her daughter to be the first black girl in her first grade, my father in law who organized local voters in the face of very real threats of violence, Dr. King and all the others who were martyrs for the cause. How can I despair when they faced so much worse and persevered?
I will fight.
I just met a friend for drinks, and we talked a bit about how we felt about this election. (Full disclosure: currently drunk, to the point where I need to check every word to make sure I’ve typed it correctly.)
I believe this election is going to be looked at, historically, as a sea change in a lot of ways. It’ll be the culmination of the Republicans’ approach since the adoption of the Southern Strategy, for one. Less specifically, the culmination of the Republican’s adoption of rhetoric and sound bites over actual meaningful governance. And the ultimate end of the modern Republican mindset in other ways, too. Whether your goal is pure obstructionism, or advocating and normalizing hate-based politics, either way, Trump is your man and you should revel in this brief window of calm before the consequences start coming home to roost thick and fast.
I am so angry. I was talking to a friend about this just now, and it’s hard to express how angry I actually am. I’m hurt, and angry, and disgusted, at levels that I don’t even know how to productively express.
I lived through Bush v Gore, and I was angry about that outcome, though not as invested as some. After four years of Bush, I was as angry as I ever get, politically speaking, and I wasn’t in love with Kerry but I was deeply invested in his success. I could literally not imagine how anyone in their right mind would vote for Bush again. I was sitting at the bar in my neighborhood watering hole in November 2004 and I remember loudly (drunkenly) announcing to the bar that I was not going to move from this bar stool until Bush was out of office. (Of course in retrospect Kerry wouldn’t have taken office until January 2005 but that was my drunken position at the time.) And I remember, that night and for many days thereafter, how betrayed I felt, how angry I felt, about what the rest of America had to say about who should govern us.
The betrayal I feel now, and the anger I feel, is diminished in some ways because I’m older. It’s been 12 years. I’ve come to understand that politics is messy and it’s rare that we actually get what we want. And yet I feel worse now, so much worse today, and so much angrier as a result, than I did in 2004. And part of that is because I personally know a lot of people whose lives are going to get worse as a direct result of this decision. Gay folks who worry about the status of their marriage, disabled folks who worry about what kind of healthcare options will be available to them, people who provide mental healthcare services who are deeply dependent on federal funding, all of them are worried (and rightly so) and I am worried and angry on their behalf. And I am angry on a personal level because I think to myself, how could anyone not see how cynical this Republican campaign has been? How can anyone in good conscience vote for this person, given the embarrassment of evidence we have that Donald Trump is a sexist racist opportunist who is saying whatever he thinks he needs to say to get a majority of votes from people who are too lazy or ignorant to look any deeper than the R next to his name or the empty platitudes he’s been spouting for the last year?
Right now I am… I don’t know. Lost, I guess. Adrift. The majority of this country has chosen how and by whom they want to be governed for the next four years (at least), and by extension what they want their Supreme Court to look like, and it’s so far removed from what I want that… I don’t know how to think or respond. At the best of times I have trust issues, but now I have clear evidence that more than half the country I live in is so foreign to me that I could never possibly trust or productively relate to them. More than half the country I live in wants the people I care about to either die as soon as possible or be fucked over in ways we’ve only begun to comprehend.
The anger in me is so, so hard to manage. I want to rage and scream in the streets. I want to shake everyone who voted for Trump to make them understand the extent of their betrayal of this country. Part of me, I hesitate to admit, wants to buy a sniper rifle and prepare for an opportunity to end this travesty, if it appears to be edging any further from rhetorical fascism to the practical application of these hateful ideals. I’m not (today) doing any of these things, but I’m also having a very, very difficult time figuring out how to go from today into Thursday, and Friday, and a weekend, and then a normal Monday where I’m expected to make small talk about how my weekend went and commiserate over how short the weekend was.
I don’t know how to be that person again. I can’t imagine it.
The only way forward that I can imagine now is, complete disengagement. I need to not look at any news and not have any political conversations for at least four years, because I don’t know how I might conceivably do that without an explosion of rage and frustration. Yes, I know we’re fucked. I know the Supreme Court will be fucked for the rest of my life. I know healthcare will be fucked indefinitely. I know my minority and disabled friends will be fucked indefinitely. But short of absolute violence I don’t see anything I can do to help for now, so I’m going to try to distance myself as much as possible from everything. Maybe in 2018 I’ll think about re-engaging, if it looks like we might actually see productive change, otherwise I’m pretty much done with political engagement in America.
I am so tired, and so frustrated, and so angry.