by Adam Marletta
Warning: This article quotes President-elect Trump directly. Language may be unsuitable for some readers. Discretion is advised.
Twelve days after the 2016 presidential election, I am still having difficulty fully processing the fact that reality TV celebrity, Donald J. Trump will be the next president of the United States. Like most of the pundits, I expected Hillary Clinton to win. (Cue accusations that third-party voters like me “spoiled” the race in three … two … one …) The media and pollsters did not expect that a Trump presidency was coming.
How wrong we all were.
To put this into historical context, the country’s first African American president will be followed by a narcissistic megalomaniac and outright racist, sexist and Islamophobe. He has open ties to white supremacist groups, including the KKK. This is a man who has a long, disturbing history of sexual harassment of women and young girls. He bragged in a now infamous recording that he enjoys “grabbing them by the pussy.” This is a man who began his xenophobic presidential campaign by claiming that Mexicans are “rapists.” He promised to build a wall on the Mexican border, and to force Mexico to pay for it.
And now voters have just handed this man the reins of Executive power. The Trump presidency will not only inherit nuclear launch codes, but also an ever-expanding set of tools that now make up the security and surveillance state.
When faced with a choice between an arrogant, racist, sexist and a bellicose establishment elite, who represents the very epitome of bourgeois neoliberalism, voters decided to take their chances with the racist. Admittedly, it was not much of a choice, at all.
And this is acknowledging that about half of eligible voters were so repulsed by the option of Clinton or Trump that they abstained from voting. I can’t honestly say I blame them. So much for the “world’s greatest democracy.”
The Trump Presidency
Make no mistake, Trump’s election marks a chilling turning-point for the country and the world.
A Trump presidency further emboldens the racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-immigrant groups and their sentiments of fear and hatred that he stoked throughout his campaign.
But also, on the environmental front, a Trump presidency spells almost certain doom for the prospects of keeping global temperatures from rising above two degrees Celsius — the perceived “safe zone” for maintaining a habitable planet. He denies climate change and vows to pull the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate negotiation. Additionally, Trump will charge full-speed ahead with coal production.
While I maintain things would still look considerably (if not quite equally) bleak had Clinton won, we must be very clear about the unique and frankly frightening threat that a Trump presidency will present to our already beleaguered democracy.
Indeed, the next four years are going to be very tumultuous. We will likely suffer a number of serious losses on our side. Those of us on the left should, by all means, mount a sustained, organized resistance to every aspect of Trump’s vile agenda. But we must be prepared for the harsh reality and difficulties that await us.
As Dan O’ Sullivan writes in a recent piece for Jacobin:
It will be bad — a violent acceleration of America’s drift, and with it, perhaps, the destruction of the last remnants of an enlightened society.
Medicare and Social Security will be on the chopping block. War will reign as the boss universal, the very pretense of diplomacy discarded with, once and for all. America won’t just continue its deportation regime; it’ll be something akin to a reality show now. Capital will surge up the ladder even faster, marrow being sucked from the poor.
How the hell did a Trump Presidency happen?
So how the hell did this happen? How could the ostensibly enlightened pollsters, pundits, and intelligentsia been so completely wrong in their electoral forecasts?
There are, certainly, a number of answers to this question. Indeed there has been no shortage of post-election assessments from the same clueless, chattering classes. But for now, I think it is enough to attribute the Democrats’ stunning loss to a single name: Hillary Clinton.
The fact is, Clinton was probably the worst candidate the Dems could have run for this election — one in which the clamoring for an “outsider” candidate was so clearly pronounced.
It is not just that, as a politician, Clinton possesses none of the charm and charisma associated with her husband. Rather, policy-wise Clinton’s campaign offered virtually nothing enticing that voters could enthusiastically rally around. At least not in the way that they rallied around Bernie Sanders.
Clinton’s entire response to Trump’s asinine promise to “Make America Great Again,” was that “America is already great.” Not only was this simplistic slogan incredibly inane, but it only further marked Clinton as an out-of-touch elite. She is completely detached from the everyday economic struggles of working-class Americans. Calling Trump supporters “deplorable” (even with the understanding that some of them absolutely are) obviously did not help.
Bernie Sanders
I maintain my criticisms of Sanders’ decision to run in the Democratic Party rather than as an independent or as a Green. I also continue to criticize his hawkish foreign policy platform. But, the fact is his campaign offered bold, radical solutions to ameliorate the devastating effects of capitalism. The thousands of voters who packed into stadiums to hear the 74-year-old, self-described “democratic socialist” talk about universal health care, tuition-free college education, paid maternity leave and the urgent threat posed by global warming, showed that Americans are ready for, if not quite socialism per se, at least something closer to socialism than voters have been offered in decades.
Clinton, in contrast, proposed that we must “save capitalism from itself.”
In the end, the Democratic Party — not just the DNC or Debbie Wasserman Schultz, mind you, but the entire party — crushed Sanders’ campaign.
Ultimately, the election has vindicated Sanders to a Democratic Party and its subservient corporate media that never had much time for him. Now, we must not let the Vermont senator off the hook. Sanders chose to play the role of “sheepdog” and campaign for Clinton after the primaries. He could have continued his presidential run with the Greens. The fact that he did not demonstrates his own culpability in this sad, unfortunate affair.
The left should not forget this going forward. It is yet another reason why we must abandon the Democrats, entirely. They are not on our side.
Make America Ungovernable
The one silver lining we can take from all this is found in the dozens of protests that have erupted in major cities throughout the country since the election. At least four major demonstrations have already taken place in Portland. Students have staged a walkout at USM on November 15th. The students protested both Trump’s win and the Dakota Access Pipeline.
We need to make these demonstrations a permanent fixture of the Trump presidency. After all, as Howard Zinn famously observed, “What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House but who is ‘sitting-in’ — and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.”
We must ignore the calls from accommodation-ist liberals. There is no time to “give Trump a chance,” or to “see what he is going to do.” We already know what Trump plans to do. We should not give him an inch to enact any of his horrific, regressive agenda. No, our goal for the next four years should be to make America ungovernable.
The Flag of Socialism
We must firmly plant the flag of socialism. It is imperative, now more than ever. We must find ways to attract some of the legitimately angry and disaffected workers. They voted for Trump (or did not vote at all) out of desperation. We cannot simply write them all off as irredeemable racists. Indeed, a majority of Trump supporters voted for Obama at least once in the last two presidential elections.
We must, rather, offer them a viable left-wing alternative. Workers need leadership from the left that can realistically improve their current economic circumstances. The left must offer a vision of a world where workers have complete control over their economic, political, social and even spiritual lives.
The road ahead is no doubt quite ominous. I cannot say with any certainty that we will succeed in pushing back a Trump presidency and their agenda of hate. Never mind our prospects of preventing humanity’s very extinction from a rapidly warming planet. But we are doomed if we do not attempt to resist in every way possible.
“I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win,” writes Chris Hedges. “I fight fascists because they are fascists.”
1 Comments
Jerry Bruce
‘No, our goal for the next four years should be to make America ungovernable.’
Adam, I’m struck by your odd language – what you are suggesting here is awfully similar to the ‘…sentiments of fear and hatred…’ that earlier in your piece, you have accused Trump of propagating.
The difference between protests and your ‘goal’ of ungovernable is the lives of millions of ordinary Americans, regardless of their political leanings.
You may call it ‘hyberbole’ – many others may call it chaos.