I’ve seen some think-piece headlines suggesting that maybe this won’t be so bad—maybe Trump can get something good done with regard to income inequality, healthcare, or infrastructure. I’m guessing the writers of these op-eds are the same people who wrote pieces about “post-racial America” after Obama was elected.
Don’t be fucking idiotic, people. This is terrible. Nothing good will come of this. Trump is an authoritarian populist, an un-self-examined racist and misogynist, a fascist, a demagogue, a narcissist. He cares nothing for other people, much less for this country and its political constitution. He will seek unchecked power and he will break any law or norm to destroy his enemies, whether they be individuals or entire demographic groups. He will traumatize most of us, he will get many of us killed. Immigrants, Muslims, Latinos, African Americans, girls, women will be bullied, oppressed, killed, have their civil rights violated. Our institutions will be hollowed out and perverted.
But we do have a few things going for us. Our constitution is designed to frustrate those seeking change, and this goes for illiberal right-wingers just as well as it does for liberal left-wingers. Anti-Trump Americans win on numbers: there are more of us than pro-Trump Americans; we actually won the popular vote. We are growing: anti-Trump America is much younger than pro-Trump America. And our politics are cyclical: each major change of power leads naturally to a backlash. If we can hold Trump in check until 2018, so that there is some semblance of a mid-term election that year, we can start to undo Trump.
But we have to get to 2018 without Trump grabbing so much power that he can’t be stopped. Here’s how we’ll do that, in five parts.
- No appeasement. No deals. Re-read your history of the Third Reich: Hitler used shrewd political horse-trading, not violence, to rise to power. Authoritarians grab power by making deals with weak-minded, conventional politicians. They charm them, they take advantage of them, and eventually they stab them in the back. Trump’s business dealings show that he exactly fits this profile. We have to be as thoroughly obstructionist of Trump as the Republicans were of Obama. We have enough senators to filibuster, so we refuse to pass his laws and budgets. We do not confirm his Supreme Court nominees for his full four years in office, just as John McCain said he would do for Hillary Clinton. We’ve learned from the Republicans of the last eight years that members of Congress pay no political price for obstructionism. This should be a no-brainer.
- Gen-Xers and Millennials need to own the Democratic Party. Baby Boomer politics is over and it ends with Trump. Hillary Clinton is gone. There are no viable Baby Boomer presidential candidates left. The Democratic Party is there for the taking, but Gen-Xers and Millennials seem not to want it. Maybe it’s got something to do with the indie culture of the ’80s and ’90s (as a Gen-X indie demigod once sang, “We’ll inherit the earth—but we don’t want it”): Gen-Xers and Millennials on the right have no problem embracing the Republican Party (see: Paul Ryan), but those of us on the left seem uncomfortable with a mainstream institution like the Democratic Party. Many of us (including me) have been sympathetic to third parties, but the truth is that third parties under the U.S. Constitution are just a mirage for the young, the gullible and the quixotic. We are forced into broad coalitions by the winner-take-all electoral system, and to drop out of that system is to make yourself thoroughly powerless. Even if you think that we should have a parliamentary multi-party system, you’re going to have to get the buy-in of at least one of our major parties to amend the Constitution to make that happen. Sorry, generational cohort: we are the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party is us. If we don’t use it, we’re going to get fucked by the Trumpists until we die.
- Rebrand and get a policy program: When the Republicans get knocked on their ass they always come back with some new twist on their traditional awfulness: the “Contract with America” or the “Tea Party.” We’ve been knocked on our ass, undoubtedly, and we need a new name for ourselves to signal that we are no longer the Democratic Party of the Clintonian middle way. We need a name for our ethic of anti-racism, anti-misogyny, anti-xenophobia, anti-corporatocracy, and anti-environmental destruction. We need to maintain our generational ethos or we will not do this. Maybe we call ourselves the Anti-Democrats? Moreover, our movements need policy programs. Occupy and Black Lives Matter have strong diagnoses of incredibly important problems, and they have clear goals, but they have a frustrating unwillingness to talk about what laws should be passed to achieve their goals. Why? We’re thoroughly qualified to make laws. We are the best educated generations in history. If we want to see change then we have to actually do something to achieve it. That’s what a party with a platform is for.
- Go grassroots and get out: If we are going to stop Trump then we need to start working on our 2018 mid-term elections strategy right now. My most psychologically healing moments of the last 12 months came when I was knocking on doors with my local Democratic activists. Getting on your computer and obsessing over social media politics leads to Trumpism. We win when we talk to real people, civilly, in person, because we are at base the part of society that is advocating for a civil, equitable, just society. The Republicans are a party that doesn’t believe in letting people vote, doesn’t believe in human rights regardless of race creed or color, doesn’t believe in giving us your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to be free. By all appearances the Republican elite wants nothing less than a slave society ruled by a tiny oligarchy. They only win when people hate and fear the Other that they never meet, but only see (mis-)represented in mass and social media, to such an extent that they're willing to ignore their own best interests. We beat that elite concentration of power and wealth and cycle of propaganda by building civil bonds with other people.
- Don’t underestimate him. Trump has passed through Nate Silver’s infamous “Six Stages of Doom” unscathed. He might look like a blathering idiot, but everything has worked for him so far. Don’t think that this problem is going to away on its own. It’s not anyone else’s job but ours to stop him. Our grandparents fought World War II to stop fascism. Now it's our turn.