Photo by Leon A. Perskie, Hyde Park, New York, August 21, 1944. Gift of Beatrice Perskie Foxman and Dr. Stanley B. Foxman.
As we all try to grasp the full impact of last night’s election results, emotions and thoughts run through our heads. We awoke this morning realizing that we as a country now face of future of a GOP President working with GOP majorities in both the House and the Senate. A Supreme Court that will not be shifting to the lift. Our own party seemingly impotent across a large swath of the electoral map.
In the short term, this bodes poorly for our nation. The last time our country was aligned this way politically (absolute GOP control) was in 1928, and what we endured afterwards was the Great Depression. But out of those ashes our country was delivered one of the greatest leaders in our history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We must keep that in mind. We must look within and ask ourselves what kind of party we are going to be. Among progressives, the temptation for us in the heat of the moment is to be vindictive, to be “I told you so”, to just up and run the corporate friendly masters in New York, DC, Beverly HIlls and San Francisco who delivered us a losing candidate out of our party.
But the reality is, we can’t build a winning coalition among ourselves that way. Internally, the losers were the elite players, and the winners were the Main Street progressives. But we all need to come together. But we must do this with the acknowledgment that average people matter more than bundled donors. That person to person, effective GOTV operations matter more saturation television advertising.
One, of many, weakness of the Clinton campaign was what seemed to be an absolute reliance on identity politics, which ignored the reality of the electoral map, and ended up biting the Clinton team in the ass. We’ve entered a new landscape, and we’ve got to come together to figure out how to navigate this new terrain. Third party candidates will continue to appeal to millenial voters who have no loyalty to either major party. The political favors the party bosses at the ward and precinct level used to deliver are now given to all by municipalities. We can’t recreate the past, but we must hold true to a larger vision, and figure out how to best deliver that come election day.
Tempting as it may be, let’s not ridicule the Clinton supporters here and hope they leave, taking their flags with them. Let’s be gracious in victory and encourage them to stay here, engage in open and honest debate on how best to move forward. We’ve got to gird ourselves for a tough four years going forward, but at the same time, look beyond that and hope we can find our next FDR.
