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Resistance is Not Futile

This piece from Jamelle Bouie explains why Democrats' partnering with Trump on infrastructure is not okay. God, I cannot abide the unwillingness of the Democrats to play hardball, especially when lives are at stake. Harry Reid is a bad-ass fighter and the man stands up and his approach on this is the right one. Trump did not win the popular vote; to work with him is to thwart the will of the people (as well as basic democratic ideals), and to normalize even further the growing re-normalization of an unapologetic white supremacy.

Some context:

When Barack Obama was elected with over 53% of the vote in 2008 after Bush & Co had fucked the country to hell, the GOP acted in lockstep to obstruct Obama and the will of the people, even if it meant ruining the United States and people's lives in the short term. Obama had run on an explicit platform of health insurance and a stimulus program to fix the economy, among other things, and he won the popular vote and the electoral college. The GOP's goal was to make his presidency a failure -- though to do that, they needed to ensure that he was unable to fix the economy, and they were willing to let people lose their homes and suffer in a recession rather than allow Obama the ability to help the nation, on the theory that his failure would ensure them the White House again in 2012.

When Obama embraced many facets of the popular and successful Romneycare -- the conservative alternative to single payer and/or a public option, and thus a policy goal long-championed on the right, and which the president apparently thought would bring Republicans on board so that millions of uninsured Americans could get health care -- the Republicans opposed it in lockstep. This was their idea and they were for it until Obama was. Then they opposed it with all they had, lying about it and demonizing it, and their raison d'etre became repeal and replace, only they have never had anything to replace it with, because "it" was what they had wanted in the first place (to the extent they were willing to support health care insurance at all). They opposed it because they feared that a success with Obamacare would hurt their chances of retaking the White House, or undermine their attacks on government.

When, in an economic emergency, Obama sought a stimulus, the GOP opposed it in near lockstep (only three Republican senators, and zero House members, supported it).
Do you see how sick this was? The GOP rejected any ideas, even their own, ideas that would have helped the whole country, and indeed the world, because for them ruining the presidency of a Democrat, and in particular of this country's first African-American president, was more important than trying to solve this country's very real problems. This conduct was the essence of placing your party above your country, yourself over your constituents. Thwarting the will of the people, expressed through the clear and decisive popular and electoral win of Barack Obama, became the order of the day for eight years. And there was no legitimate principle -- zero -- behind this unprecedented level of obstruction.

That same obstructionist, partisan, anti-American thirst to destroy Democrats was behind the unhinged Republican response to Benghazi, a relatively minor (in terms of its scale) embassy attack in which, tragically, four Americans died. The GOP turned this tragedy into a weapon to be used against Obama while in office and against Hillary Clinton pre-emptively in the expectation she would run for office, for nakedly partisan gain.

Now, in 2016, we have the wise words of Michelle Obama, telling us, "when they go low, we go high." What I am saying, along with Bouie and others, is that working with Trump is NOT GOING HIGH. Refusing to normalize him and the white supremacist misogynist agenda on which he premised his campaign is going high. Lockstep obstruction of an agenda of hatred and bigotry is required; it is the very definition of going high. And doing so is not tit-for-tat, obstruction for obstruction's sake, as the GOP engaged in under Obama; to the contrary, because Trump's agenda is authoritarian, anti-democratic, un-Constitutional, bigoted, and wrong, opposing him does not represent a betrayal of our own progressive or Democratic or American values; it is standing up for those values.

Critically, moreover, opposing Trump is not thwarting the will of the people, it is furthering that will. Trump did not win the popular vote; only 25.8% of eligible voters voted for him (74.2% of eligible voters did not vote for him); and of those who did vote, 53% voted for someone other than him. He has no mandate. DO NOT LET HIS STOOGES OR THE PRESS CHANGE THIS NARRATIVE. Do not give in to this narrative. If the GOP could obstruct a popular president who adopted part of their own agenda to try to achieve good for all, even though that obstruction likely extended the recession, the Democrats can and must do all they can to stop Trump's racist and misogynist policies from becoming law. The Democrats also have a Constitutional obligation to ensure that all are treated equally before the law.

I fear that we will be so battered by the abuse and shock of learning, on a daily basis, that anyone gifted with the honor of the presidency would so willingly abuse it, that some of us will become supine and give up. The press will normalize him, as they already have and are. Obama and Hillary are even doing so, for the the broader end-goal of the peaceful transition of power, and the upholding of other critical democratic norms. I understand this, but the more everyone acts like this administration is normal, the more he and it will be normalized. Don't fall for it. Don't buy into to this notion that that "we" "owe" Trump an open mind. I admire and respect you, Hillary Clinton, but that is bullshit. I and we owe this grotesque charlatan nothing. He serves all of us. He owes us human decency, transparency, and a commitment to try to rise to the level of his office, despite his sordid personal history of sexual abuse, lies, fraud, corruption, cruelty, and racism. And so far, I see no evidence that any attempt to honor or respect the office of the presidency is occurring or will occur. Instead, the debasement of the office has already begun, as it appears he will attempt, and be permitted, to monetize the office for personal gain, and as he looks to shame the White House corridors with an explicit racist and misogynist and anti-Semite, Steve Bannon, or put a spitting, unhinged avatar of anger and resentment into the country's top diplomatic post, or nominate to a cabinet position yet another mediocre man who thought it was fine to publicly call Clinton the c-word.

So, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, I know you want to do good, but you must not do it on the backs of people of color. Listen to the bulldog Harry Reid, a fighter who has gotten more done in Congress than most congressmen combined and then squared. Listen to the voices of people of color, who know, as we all know or should know, that Trump's ideas and platform cannot be, and must not allowed to be, disaggregated from the explicit racialist message on which they are based. Stop pretending it can be, or you will become collaborators, and I do mean it in the 1930s sense. You think you "see" marginalized communities? Well, they sure see you, and they are not fooled. Stop fooling yourselves; fight like living hell for what's right. That is going high.

Gutted

I will never call him President Trump.  It is childish and I know it.  But I cannot and will not.

I understand that he was democratically elected -- with the Wikileaks thumb on the scale, among other disgusting and frightening factors -- and I accept those results as I must.  My candidates have lost before and I have been really upset by those losses. Indeed, each Republican president that I opposed performed far worse in office, and wreaked far more significant and lasting damage, than I even dreamed of when I opposed their candidacies at the time.  (This does not augur well for the coming years.)

In those elections, however, I never once thought that our very system of government was at stake in a fundamental way.  And despite George W. Bush's significant contributions to the erosion of democratic norms and constitutional values that was at the heart of my loathing for him, in 2008, when I supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the primary, I did not think a McCain presidency was a referendum on every value that matters, including basic democratic government, that I believe this one to be.  Back then, I was repulsed by John McCain's feckless selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate; I feared the racism and Islamophobia that Palin so gleefully stoked; and I worried the country's racism would enable a third Republican term -- but I also knew that Barack Obama was an incredibly inexperienced candidate with a shockingly thin resume, on whom the country was being asked to take an enormous chance, and I am not quite sure that I believed at the time that a McCain victory would send a signal that this country was not ready for an African-American president.  If you compared their qualifications, McCain ran circles around Obama,who had only two years in the U.S. senate under his belt when he ran for the presidency, no executive experience, no military experience, etc.  Barack Obama, in other words, was not the equivalent of Hillary Clinton -- he was not the most qualified person ever to run, the minority who had to prove himself 10 times better than the average white guy to even be considered.  Barack Obama had and has something else -- he is a once-in-a-century candidate, of extraordinary oratorical talent, a person whose grace and dignity and charisma and intelligence radiated from him.  If he had lost, I would have been devastated in the ordinary way that I would be devastated if, after what I considered to be a catastrophically bad presidency with terrible global repercussions, the country had stayed with more of the same. 

This is different. 

This is like nothing I have ever experienced.

This race was a referendum on basic human decency, and on who we are as a people. Our country has said yes to ignorance, hatred, fear, resentment, anger, brutality, cowardice, bullying, cruelty, extreme misogyny and unapologetic bigotry. It has also said yes to burgeoning fascism.  It has embraced a man who has promised the beginnings of an authoritarian state.  It has embraced a tax cheat, a fraud, a liar.  A man of unsurpassing selfishness, pettiness, and puerility.  After Barack Obama, who has ennobled the office of the presidency, we have elected a man who will debase it as he debases everything and everyone he comes across.  

I feel filthy, foul, hollowed out, smashed. I am sick in my heart and sick in my soul. 

Because this man has made no secret of who or what he is.  His personal depravity and repulsiveness has been on display from the beginning and as I have said, neither can be denied nor is in any real way, denied by those who voted for him and who have surrounded and enabled him. And he has won. 

He has surrounded himself, moreover, with the absolute detritus of the Republican Party, people, like himself, nearly wholly without personal decency or values, and the newly ascendant alt-right, a sickening hate movement whose foundational premise, like Trump's very campaign, is the denigration of others. 

College educated whites voted for Trump in high numbers.  So did women. Women were not Hillary's fire wall -- women of color were not enough to save us from the white women who vote like white men -- even college-educated white women in the suburbs who were supposed to secure her victory, broke for Trump.   33% of Latino men voted for Trump. 13% of African -American men voted for Trump. The hateful comments, rejection of Black Lives Matter, promises of deportation, abuse of women, pledges to violate the Constitution -- people voted for this.  Whites in particular voted for this, and 54% of white women voted for Donald Trump, a gaslighting abuser of women.  

I can't watch him speak.  I can't listen to his voice.  I am not even a rape victim and I feel assaulted when he speaks.  I feel silenced and obliterated and attacked and erased.  When I think of the survivors who have been traumatized by him during this election, I want to curl into a ball in solidarity with them and their pain.

All I heard last night on MSNBC is that this result is the scream of rural America against the "elites" on the coasts, or against "Washington."  Not a word about misogyny or racism. Not a word about why those suburban people doing so well financially were willing to risk the tanking of their 401ks, the reversal of Roe v Wade, and other outcomes, to put a sexual predator and pathological liar in the White House, a person whose words and actions they cannot ask their own children to ever try to emulate. These people are not roiled by trade agreements and opium addiction and lack of financial prospects -- they are doing well and they did very well under Obama.  They voted for Trump.

Clinton looks like she won the popular vote, but barely -- by maybe 140,000 votes.  Stein got 1.1 million and Johnson got 4 million.  I haven't seen a breakdown by state, but I would bet you the Johnson voters would break 75/25 Trump/Clinton had he not been in the race, whereas the Stein voters would have not voted or gone maybe 50% to Clinton.  If you distribute this across the states I doubt highly that the third-party vote made any difference and without it he might have done even better.  Not scientific and I'm sure the pundits will have something to say.

I say this because in going through my stages of pain and grief and despair and shock, I wanted to someone to lash out at and third party voters were a natural target. But it does not seem fair to me.  The returns show that in our deeply, deeply, deeply polarized country, the left-leaning went for HRC and the others went to Trump. There were also democratic voters who crossed over to Trump; I met several knocking on doors in Philadelphia.  

Last night, driving home from Philadelphia where I was a legal observer at a polling place, I was listening to MSNBC and I heard how close the race was in VA.  In that moment, I knew the election was lost. I had to pull off the road to a rest stop because I began hyperventilating with anxiety and fear.  (The night before, I had slept fitfully, awakening before my alarm to a nightmare that I was watching the returns and states projected to lean blue were each being awarded a red check mark for Trump.)   Throughout the general election I had had a deep, abiding fear that white people were lying about who they would support, that suburban voters would secretly vote for him and the polls would be wrong.  But at the same time, I also couldn't believe in my heart that the country that elected Barack Obama twice would elect a man who is in effect Obama's antithesis, and would elect someone so manifestly and unapologetically despicable, so flagrantly unfit to hold office, so dangerous and unhinged, so ignorant, so hypocritical, so vile.  It is not as if he hid these traits. He ran on them.

I called my husband sobbing from the rest stop. He told me I had to pull it together for the kids and get home.  He was right and I did.

When I opened the door to our apartment, my 14 year-old daughter rushed to the door to hug me, crying, telling me she was afraid he would win (at the time there were still 14 or so undecided states -- but I knew in my gut we were done). My son, just turned 13, could barely speak.  My husband was nearly catatonic with tension, frantically tallying each possible potential path to 270 as the path got narrower and narrower.

I slept on and off last night, waking up multiple times in despair.  I awoke to a feeling of black numbness with a pit of pain in my stomach. I have never felt like this after an election before. 

My husband and I did not sugar-coat things for the kids this morning.  They are in 8th and 9th grade.  They understand what has happened, and while they are well aware how lucky, how privileged, they are to live in the liberal enclave of Brooklyn, they are feeling fear for the first time in their lives.  Fear for their friends and for those who are not so lucky, and for what this means for us all.  They understand that the world as they know it is going to be under assault, including the very planet they live on, by forces of ignorance and bigotry, by denial of basic facts.  So we talked about the measure of character when times are difficult; we told them that it will be harder, but even more important, to resist bullying and stand up for what is right, and to do all we can to promote justice.  We are still reeling, and so are they.

I am not in a position right now to regroup.  I am gutted.  

I am gutted by this rejection of an immensely qualified woman, a rejection carried out by a majority of women themselves, and I believe this rejection is a combination of massive misogyny and racism, intertwined, which those who are engaging in it will never see, and never want to see.  There will be no reckoning with implicit racial and gender bias now. when we have elected a man who engages in open, unapologetic racial and gender bias.  My FB friends all think I love Hillary Clinton so much, when, in fact, this election long ago for me ceased to be about Hillary Clinton per se.  It is about Hillary Clinton as Everywoman, Hillary Clinton as avatar of what women are put through and how we are still not full members of the human race.  It is about the successful demonization to which she (as Everywoman) has been subjected, in combination with a repudiation of the legacy of our first African-American president,who is one of the finest presidents this country has ever seen or ever will see, that this is about.  That is, at least, how this feels to me.  It also feels like an embrace of ignorance and rejection of competence, the bully over the nerd, brute force over decency, blind emotion over thought, wishful thinking over rationality.  It hurts really badly, and it isn't about her. It's about what she and this election represent.  

I can't look for silver linings today. 

But I can try for context.

I know that the suffragettes, the civil rights leaders, lost major battles before they achieved progress. We have more rights now than those activists and martyrs for their causes ever had.  They were never fully human in the eyes of the law or the white men who made those laws, and they did not give up.  The suffragettes were opposed by many women; they had to convince men to change the Constitution and they did.  Even after the Civil War the rights of African-Americans were impeded and thwarted at every turn and still they rose, albeit slowly and in the face of the Jim Crow system -- a system of terror through which the black population was kept down and murdered and raped and defrauded for a hundred years as if slavery still existed, and they did not give up.  We live with the legacies of this history every day.

This is a very, very dark time for us and for progress -- especially for the LGBTQ community and Muslims and women and immigrants and POC, all of whose rights will be directly under attack. The majority of Americans' rights will be under assault -- and yet a majority of Americans voted for that very outcome.

We will have to fight and organize like never before.  It will be a harder road than many of us have had to deal with in the past.  Defeats are more likely.  We do not have the luxury of giving up or giving in to despair in the long term.

And in the short term, I cannot even feel anger toward the Trump supporters any more, at least not the regular voters -- I feel anguish at their support for him, a baffled revulsion and a heartsickness at their lack of empathy and their jettisoning of basic values, at their acceptance of his hatred, at their willing participation in the demonization of an eminently qualified public servant who, with a majority to support her, could have done so much for the country.  I want to feel anger at all those people who did not vote at all -- people who I need to believe (without proof, it is true) don't support Trump and if they had it to do over again would vote for Hillary to stop him. But I can't even do that either -- if they didn't vote in this election of all elections, that shows just how broken our politics is and just how awash in ignorance and disaffection people are that I can scarcely process it.  This is not something that can be fixed with a WPA type program, the way poverty and other problems were addressed under FDR.

Trump painted a picture of a dystopian hellscape that does not yet exist.  Those of us who opposed him know that his election will bring us far closer to that point than any president has ever willingly taken us.  In addition to the potential descent into fascism, the country's credit rating, our role in the world, the Iran nuclear deal, the climate change treaty, our trade agreements, the economy, the reactions of terrorist groups, Russian aggression, the return of the FBI to Hooveresque abuse tactics, the loss of health care for millions, the crushing debt and loss of jobs Trump's massive tax cuts for the rich will cause, the drying up of revenue to fund social security and medicare, the rollback of environmental protections and regulations on the financial industry......We have all this to look forward to.  Read this New Yorker article and you will see just what we are in for, even beyond the campaign promises that are too horrible to contemplate.  These are major sources of fear that aren't even related to the attacks on our collective civil rights, the inevitable rise in hate crimes, the unleashing of unvarnished hatred as part of legitimate national discourse (such as it is) again.

Well before last night, when I tried to think about a Trump win, I knew that I wanted to be able to at least say, if he did win, that I had done what I could to stop him.  That my children would see that I fought and I tried and I put my money where my mouth is, and I called out not just him but those who saw him for what he is and helped him anyway.  I thought that if I woke up the next morning staring at the abyss, I would at least have that.  I knew that it would be cold comfort, and I was right. I wanted, this morning, to rail at the people who didn't do anything, or barely did anything, and for a minute I did lash out about that, but my attempt at self-righteous rage collapsed in on itself in tears. It doesn't matter.  We are where we are and we must regroup and go on.  Recrimination gets us nowhere.  

It's an ugly and uncertain future we are facing.  All we can do is our best.  I just hope more of us will do our best going forward.  Because we are stronger together, no matter what happened last night. 

I Am Beside Myself

Link to a rant I published on Medium, rather than here.

I've been working on a few longer pieces; they keep getting overtaken by events.  I hope to post of few of them soon.

In the meantime, please vote for Hillary Clinton.