Right now, it’s obvious there’s a deep rift between us that will take a long time to resolve. Recriminations, finger-pointing, and bitter schadenfreude. We’re ALL hurting right now. Perhaps we will eventually come together if we realize that it all comes from a place of deep hurt. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time for the natural course of healing. We have until Jan. 20th. Rump and the Republicans will immediately begin to RAM through every rabid conservative wet dream legislation they can come up with. That’s what’s at stake. So, we don’t have time to let the natural healing between us occur. BUT, I think there is one purpose that we can unite around that will give us a common goal to work towards.
First, full disclosure, I am/was a Berniecrat, but I voted pragmatically for Clinton. Like everyone here, I’ve been in a very dark place the last 48 hours. I’m usually an optimistic person, who can envision overcoming any obstacle life throws at me. When I envision the future, I can always see some kind of positive outcome for it.
That all changed Tues. night. Seriously. I’m 48 years old so I’ve lived through my share of disappointing elections.
And yet, Tues. night, for the first time, I felt like my entire future was up-ended— my entire internal picture of where my life and my family’s life is SUPPOSED to go... Gone. Today, I can only envision— nothing good. Full stop. I can’t tell you how upsetting and out of character for me that is-- it’s a completely new, alien feeling. I’m untethered. I didn’t even feel this way on 9/11 or during Bush v. Gore. Whether you were in the Clinton OR Sanders camp, you’re maybe feeling the same. Probably.
Can we change the election? No. Will Trump wake up on Inauguration day and suddenly be less of a dangerous maniac, like some people will want to believe? No. But, there’s one thing that has given me hope, hat-tip to Michael Moore for the reminder. I needed it.
Trump did not win the popular vote.
Say it again.
Trump did not win the fucking popular vote.
Why does that matter, and how will that give us a goal to bring us together? Bear with me.
The popular vote matters for a couple reasons. First, the Rump party has already started to call the election a mandate based on the electoral college vote. Fortunately, the EC is all they have. We have the popular vote to call bullshit.
More importantly, it means that a majority of our fellow Americans are in fact NOT complete and utter assholes. Say it with me:
The majority of our fellow Americans saw Trump for the danger he is.
Tues. night, and early Wed. morning, in the depths of my dark place, I hadn’t seen the actual popular vote. For me, at least, there was a huge difference between thinking that the majority of the American voting populace was for shit, and then finding out they were not. It made me hopeful again.
Also, it makes a big difference with regard to the supposed mandate. A MAJORITY of American voters in the election, including 3rd party voters, were NeverTrump. Which means…
THERE IS NO FUCKING MANDATE
But they’ll act like there is. Worse, they’ll try to use that as a cudgel to beat our Democratic representatives over the head with. Hell, we all know they’ll use every brow-beating, bullying tactic they have to try to beat the Democrats into submission. See Jane Elliot’s social experiments on “brown-eyes, blue-eyes” to see how that plays out. And without support, some of our Democratic reps may roll right over like my submissive poodle and call it bipartisanship. History is full of people like that.
FUCK BIPARTISANSHIP. FUCK COOPERATION.
Hat-tip to Kos for reminding me how to be defiant— that we can and should continue to fight. I needed that.
So what do we do? How do we fight Trump’s radical agenda despite the divide between us?
We find areas that we have in common, not just on Kos, but in the entire NeverTrump coalition, and we take action.
We. Take. Action.
We don’t wait around for the DNC or our Congressional reps or Bernie or anyone else to do it for us.
We. Take. Action.
And by taking action, by agreeing that our common goal is to make it PAINFUL, if impossible, for the Rump party to govern, we can come together in a united cause, regardless of our divisions.
So what kind of action?
Not just posting lots of mean tweets, or endless, snarky Facebook posts/Kos diaries about how horrible the Rump party is. Done that. That gets us nowhere.
And I don’t mean protesting either, though, I’m sure that will happen. Protesting is not sustainable, and we need to apply pressure over the long term.
Instead, I suggest we take advantage of our people-powered campaign tactics. Only, whereas during a campaign, we use them to support and fund our chosen candidate then largely dismantle them on election day, now we use them to support our continued campaign against Trump.
So, fair warning, my ideas aren’t fully formed, (and as I re-read them, they seem a bit underwhelming). I hope you’ll brainstorm with me in the comments to flesh out the specifics. But in general, I think we can use them to:
1. Support and/or hold our reps.’ feet to the fire.
See the brown-eyes, blue-eyes dynamic I linked to earlier. If we want our Dem reps to shut down the government as much as they can, it’s not going to be easy for them, if only due to the brown-eyes, blue-eyes dynamic that’s hard-wired into all of us. But, we can help counteract that dynamic by overwhelmingly letting our representatives know that we approve of their defiance, and that we still support them. Or, conversely, that they better not cave, because their constituents are paying attention to what they do. Required tool: phone-banking.
2. Continue the people-powered campaign
One thing that this very long campaign season has shown me is that if people care about their candidate and cause, they’ll get involved for extended periods of time, helping in any small way they can. We need to somehow give people an outlet for their NeverTrump defiance. We need to give them opportunities, again, in small manageable ways to help further a movement to combat Trump’s radical administration.
3. Use DailyKos, Move-on, Meet-up, etc. to organize and coordinate
We have these tools that bring us together all across the nation and the world. Let’s use them to plan our strategy so that we are ready on DAY 1 to start opposing Trump.
4. Leverage people-powered donations
How can we use this critical, important tool to effectively support this fight? One obvious way is to fund existing Congressional reps. How else? I’m not sure. Please help come up with ideas in the comments.
(Yup, I’m still under-whelmed now that I’ve listed them out.)
I guess my point is that we have these tools, let’s come up with ways to continue to use them to our advantage. Let’s use them to take control of our fate as best we can. To bring our power and strength to bear as an enraged, defiant, and unified force.
Someone in another diary mentioned that you can’t run a campaign for Dems based on fear, and I agree with that. But the difference between then and now is that we now have a clear and imminent threat.
I think opposing that threat is something we can all get behind, isn’t it? We need to, because we don’t have a lot of time to grieve or snipe at each other. Trump has no respect for our institutions. He will not play be the rules and will do whatever it takes to consolidate and maintain his power.
Trump, et. al. will steal our future if we let them. That’s not hyperbole.
In a way, he already has stolen mine.
And I want it back.
Let’s get to work. I look forward to brain-storming with you in the comments.