My God, what have we done?
President-Elect Donald J. Trump.
Let that sink in for a little bit. Marinate in it. Let the idea seep in to your skin, your muscles, your bones, the very fiber of your being.
Hold on to that feeling and never let it go, because it is losing that feeling, allowing ourselves to become apathetic and complacent, that allowed this to happen.
For the sixth time in seven elections, a Democrat won the national popular vote. For the second time in seven elections, that Democrat was not elected President. All told, about hundred thousand people in a few states are all it will take to undo fifty years of liberal progress.
So, how did this happen? How did we bring about the darkest timeline?
Let’s start with the opposition. 35% of the American public will not vote for a Democrat under any circumstances. These are the most intractable members of the Republican party, and pursuing their votes or interests at the expense of anyone else is a lost cause. These are Hillary’s “deplorables”, the most virulent racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic members of society that see Make America Great Again as an acid trip to an imaginary 1955 where black people knew their place, Latinos were relatively unknown, gays stayed in the closet, women stayed at home, jobs were plentiful, and the white man reigned supreme regardless of whether he had a college degree or not. The other ten percent of the populace that ushered Trump into office may not be as racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, or homophobic, but they’ve spent the last twenty years getting the economic shit kicked out of them, and Trump’s message resonated in a way that Clinton’s did not. These are blue-collar workers that have seen their bills and expenses rise and their incomes stay flat or decrease. They see Wall Street bankers, Silicon Valley techies, and Hollywood celebrities that make nothing and get rich, while they get up every morning, get in the same car they’ve had for fifteen years because they can’t afford a new one, and go to the factory or the mine or whatever is the last place left in town to work at and struggle to make ends meet, much less get ahead. Their concerns should be our concerns, because an economic recovery that leaves half the country behind is no economic recovery at all.
Now let’s talk about ourselves. This election has removed the Democratic party from power, full stop. We do not control the White House, either house of Congress, the Supreme Court, or 35 of 50 governorships. The highest ranking Democrat in Washington after January 20th will be Janet Yellen, the Chairperson of the Federal Reserve, and she’ll only be around until 2018. It’s obvious now that America was looking for change that Hillary Clinton was not prepared or able to deliver. That after the election of our first black President, we got too high on our own farts and said fuck it, White America doesn’t mean shit, let’s nominate a woman with a staggering amount of political baggage that half the country already rightly or wrongly hates, that has been public enemy number one of the right wing hate machine for nearly thirty years, meddle with the democratic process by discouraging anyone else from running, and put her up against nobody except a septuagenarian Jewish Socialist from Vermont that exposed all of her flaws, and is nowhere near as charismatic as her predecessor. Obama’s coalition of women, gays, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks, and everyone that isn’t a total shitbag was exactly that: Obama’s coalition. The only chance we realistically had of holding it together is to either find some way for Obama to run for a third term, maybe as a Presidential version of Eddie Murphy’s “White Like Me”, or find someone that could tap in to that same vein of enthusiasm that propelled him to victory in 2008. This should be a lesson to any future candidate – enthusiasm matters.
The refrain I keep hearing from my conservative friends is “We warned you.”. That after years of calling them racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and homophobic, they finally said “Fuck it, you think that’s who we are? Well, then that’s who we’ll be.”. It’s a rebellion against political correctness. Against a changing world where they believe that women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, Muslims, Jews and literally everyone else that isn’t three out of four of straight, white, christian, or male has some kind of advantage in America except for them. That for the first time, they feel discriminated against on the basis of their gender, sexuality, religion, or race.
Let it never be said that there is no such thing as irony in politics.
What we’re witnessing is the right’s Red Pilling of a nation, an autonomic response to the left’s Wokeness. For every person that begins to recognize the structural inequalities for minorities in our society, an equal number emerge to preserve the status quo in which they benefit. As Van Jones put it so eloquently on Election Night, this is a whitelash, White America’s response to election of a black man to the Presidency.
So, where do we go from here?
For too long liberals and progressives have believed that we can win people over with ideas. That if only we explained how our myriad policies better, people would flock to our banner. That they would understand that we’re trying to make the world a better place for everyone. I think we now have sufficient evidence to dispel that particular myth.
Make no mistake: war is here. A war over the very existence of liberal democracy. Does the United States still stand as a melting pot, a nation of immigrants, open to anyone, with freedom and justice for all? Or are we a banana republic, ruled over by oligarchs and religious fanatics, where rights can be stripped on a whim, where the press isn’t protected, and where we align ourselves with human rights abusers and the dregs of the world?
Unfortunately we’re limited by the power structures we have in place. That means the Democratic Party, which at the moment has been reduced to a shadow of what it was in 2008. For all the pronouncements about the end of the GOP, myself included, they showed up and we didn’t, and it’s obvious now that whatever coalition on the left that will have to emerge to strike down this existential threat to democracy will have to be one that is both inclusive and enduring. Relying on demographic change to strangle the GOP of voters hasn’t worked; old white people simply aren’t dying fast enough, they show up to the polls at rates far greater than their younger counterparts, and the GOP’s efforts to suppress the vote of everyone other than them will continue unabated. Clinton and the DNC’s vaunted data-driven ground game, the offices all across battleground states that was supposed to propel her and other Democrats to victory, did precisely dogshit. It turned up Democratic voters in numbers less than there were in 2012, much less 2008, and has done nothing during the midterms.
The war to retake America begins in the states. That means statehouses and governorship’s. Without them, places like Virginia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and every other formerly blue state will go red, which means more voter suppression, which means less votes, which means less Democratic candidates for higher office. That means places like California, New York, and Illinois, the bulwark of Democratic support, cannot be taken for granted anymore. There are no unimportant races.
Michelle Obama said during the campaign that “When they go low, we go high.”. That we must meet the forces of hate with love and compassion. With all due respect to the First Lady of the United States, it is now painfully obvious that when they go low and we go high, we just end up being cut off at the knees.
The DNC needs to be swept clean. Tthe current leadership has become too entrenched, inflexible, and unresponsive to both the base and the country at large to be a viable vehicle for a progressive message. Superdelegates, ironically instituted to prevent the rise of someone like Donald Trump, instead delivered someone in their own image that the voters resoundingly rejected. It’s clear that Americans are sick of political elites. They are no longer interested in being pandered to by full time residents of DC that only go home to their districts when it’s time to find enough voters to send them back to office, then go back to DC and kowtow to donors and lobbyists like cheap whores.
Conservatives have been painting the election of Democrats as if tilting Washington and the states liberals would be the literal end of the world. It’s long past time to respond in kind. Our enemies have used every dirty and underhanded trick in the book, and we have responded with disapproving tuts. We cannot play by Marquess of Queensbury rules anymore. This is a street fight. That means we show up with brass knuckles, broken bottles, steel chains, and baseball bats, and we don’t leave until they beg for mercy.
The GOP has control of all the levers of power. The last time this happened they plunged the nation into a war and economic crisis we still haven’t extracted ourselves from. We must make them own every scandal, every fuck up, everything from now until Democrats regain control. They have the advantage, so it’s up to us to make it asymmetrical; to engage our enemies in political guerrilla warfare. We must delay, deny, obstruct, harass, and do everything in our power to make the GOP fail. Democrats have always been the party of good government, so every time the GOP is out of power they throw monkey wrenches into the works and say “Look, government doesn’t work” and blame us for their fuck ups. Well, let’s see what happens when Democrats stop protecting government and start tearing it down. Let the old norms of politics burn on the ash heap of history. Let them fail.
Our next election is in two years. That’s two years to find enough qualified candidates to start taking our country back. That’s two years to find prospective state representatives, governors, and Congresspeople to make a go at every open seat.
Liberalism itself must be transformed. We cannot be seen as a bunch of wimpy, limp-wristed, ivory tower intellectuals that care more about whether people are using the right gendered pronoun and if our overpriced granola is free range than the plight of our fellow Americans. Liberalism must be seen as going boldly into the future, where everyone is equal, where jobs are plentiful, where everyone has a fair shake at making a better life for themselves and their families. To stand athwart history, stare the forces of hate right in the eyes, and say that they will go no further. To aggressively pursue injustice in all it’s forms.
Liberals in the United States brought this nation Social Security, Medicare, clean air and clean water, safe food and drugs, and a thousand other accomplishments. We are the Party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama. We are the future of this country, not them. This is it. There are no more tomorrows. Our backs are against the wall. We are the bulwark, the firewall, the last line of defense between Western democracy and authoritarianism.
The days of rage have arrived, and I’m ready to pick up my proverbial gun and stand at my post. How about you?
