If there is any certainty in these hazy, wobbly, loopy post-election days, it is this: not only has the Campaign from Hell not ended, it has only just begun. Yes, the electoral maps have been colored adnauseam, and with far too much red. Hillary conceded. Donald accepted. Michelle went high and shared low tea with Melania. But this battle for the heart and soul of America is no more resolved than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It may never end.
Early on that post-election morning of despair, when visualizing the word “President” in front of “Trump” induced projectile vomiting and sudden support for the physician-assisted suicide movement, I frantically searched for something good about this train wreck. Whenever anything bad happened to me as a child, my mother told me to look for the good. It struck me, even when I was 10, as a dubious proposition, something they must teach in mom school. But I was desperate now and would grasp any ray of sunshine I could find. All I came up with was that those annoying daily fund raising emails and phone calls would stop now that the election was over. WRONG!
The first one came from an outfit called “Courageous Resistance,” along with a logo of a black bear and a gold star and, of course, an Armageddon-like plea for cash to stop this “hateful demagogue (who) has risen to power in the United States.” Then came Democracy for America, citing the Trump administration’s threat to our values and ideals, with a red “DONATE” button to click that would conveniently bill the same credit card I used to contribute to the Clinton campaign. They called it a “seamless transition,” clearly the only one of its kind to emerge from this fiasco. I heard from the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, Move On.org, Our Revolution.com, the conservationists, abortion rights advocates, gun control supporters, two LGBT groups and a guy named Marcus who asked if I would install a button on my webpage so folks could donate to a Trump impeachment fund. Clearly Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief have expanded to include a sixth: fundraising.
Yet, once I shook off my initial cynicism over this solicitation inundation, it occurred to me that, just maybe, my mother was right: there is a silver lining in this tragedy. No, it doesn’t lie in emptying out my bank account for progressive fundraisers. Those donation requests, however, combined to offer an important and powerfully hopeful reminder that our democracy is more than one election. It’s a continual, fluid process and, as such, subject to being shaped by mass movements of agitation, resistance and, yes, sometimes revolution.
That’s not to deny the darkness of this moment. For many of us, no political moment has ever been this bad. A disgustingly divisive, hateful, hurtful, bigoted, bloviated buffoon is about to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. What we have to remember, once the tears dry and the self-flagellation wanes, is that this is only a moment. There are new moments coming every day and we have the ability and the power to affect their outcome. To be sure, there will be significant losses in the days ahead. We who care about those in the shadows, and yearn for more diversity and a redistribution of wealth and power, were dealt a really lousy hand last Tuesday. But that doesn’t mean we throw in the cards and call it a night. The challenge is finding the best way to play the hand we were dealt. The groups I heard from are doing just that. They are gearing up to fight in every way they can, just like the protesters who’ve taken to the streets every night since the election.
It’s easy in our malaise to reject such responses as foolish and ineffective, retreating instead into a cocoon of despair. There may be some emotional comfort there, but it is a venue that offers nothing to protect the values we care about. Look, there are really only two givens for Donald Trump right now. One is that he symbolizes everything we despise. The other is, as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz wrote today, this complete uncertainty over what Trump will do as president. It is impossible to predict the future moves of a pathological narcissist, with no semblance of a genuine political philosophy. Less than 48 hours after he won, Trump started backing off some of his campaign promises. Hillary voters aren’t the only ones feeling anxiety.
This election was one of those rare occurrences that instantly guaranteed a dramatic sea change in the course of our nation’s history. In terms of its role as a change agent, It was on a par with Pearl Harbor, President Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11. As with those other seminal events, all we know immediately is that profound change is coming. Just exactly what it will be depends entirely on how everything plays out. Therein lie the moments we can affect, the ones that offer genuine opportunity to make a difference, to write the rest of the story. The immediate thinking in November of 1963 was that hopes for meaningful civil rights reform died along with Kennedy. Yet, thanks to relentless agitation, street protests and the cunning tenacity of a newly installed southern president, a landmark civil rights law was passed nine months later. Nobody in Dallas on November 22, 1963 would have predicted that outcome.
Of course, the partisan politics of that analogy doesn’t hold. Donald Trump is no Lyndon Johnson. The movement politics, however, does follow. It means building a campaign with the embers of our election loss to salvage as much as possible in the not-yet-defined skirmishes we know are coming. Remember Mitch McConnell’s election night pledge of 2008? His number one legislative objective was to deny President Obama a second term? With an effective mass movement built on the visceral passions of the voting majority, we ought to be able reach much higher than that and find effective ways to mitigate as much Trump damage as possible during the years ahead. I think I have just persuaded myself to go back to some of the fund raising emails and make a donation or two. Four years is a long time to go just being sad and angry.