Subject: Thoughts about the recent election
Dear Children,
This has been an awful week, and you may be angry, scared, worried, or more, about the outcome of the presidential election. If so, this is understandable and reasonable. The result of the election is shocking. I personally couldn’t have been more wrong about what I expected to happen. I was physically sick when I woke up Wednesday morning. Now, as you may have heard, I am mostly avoiding the news, as well as Skittles, Tic Tacs, the phrase “believe me,” and the color orange. I will not speak a certain name that begins with the letter “T.”
I hear you are worried about me, and it is true that I seem to get emotionally invested in these things to the point of physical illness. It is true that the reelection of the younger Bush in 2004 seemed to result in my getting both Shingles and pancreatitis in the same half a year. Why this is the case is a bit of a mystery to me, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it and have some tentative answers. More about that later. For the moment, I want to assure you that I have learned that I need to take care of myself, and I expect I will be fine soon enough.
I am writing this to share some of my thinking over the last few days, in the hope that it may help you start to figure out how to deal with all this. As Greg Brown wrote in a recent song, “I got a tiny little future and a great big past.” A bit of an exaggeration for me, I hope. For you, I hope, it is very much the opposite and that your future is long and bright. So, in the interest of trying to be useful, let me share a few relevant, personal memories. My experience of the recent election is colored both by my own formal study of history and my personal experience of having lived through the last 60 years of it, and this is the subject of much of what follows.
I was 7 years old in November 1963, when JFK was assassinated, and I remember that day vividly. The world suddenly came into a little boy’s focus. Everything seemed to have suddenly changed for the worse. Yet, in the two years that followed, we got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, major steps forward born from political protest and courageous political activism in the face of racist, segregationist, and violent opposition. I vaguely understood at the time that tragedy was being followed by progress.
When I was 12, in 1968, Nixon was elected president, following the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the riots that followed over racial injustice and the escalation of the war in Viet Nam. People were dying in SE Asia and at home. Nixon was a crook, yet he won reelection by a landslide against George McGovern, who was a hero to me, in 1972 when I was 16. By two years later, Nixon had finally been exposed and nearly impeached, and he resigned in disgrace. That was a great day. Yet, under Nixon, we got the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (which created the EPA), the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act amendments in 1972, and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. In hindsight, those achievements seem remarkable. This progress didn’t happen on its own. The major environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s owed a lot to a single book, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1962, and the popular movement that grew out of it and led to a movement and votes for change.
By the time I graduated from high school in 1974, the voting age had been lowered from 21 to 18. The country’s first and only unelected president, Gerald Ford, got the country out of Viet Nam. We survived the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 (which followed the 1973 Arab-Israeli War), and the energy and economic crises of the 1970s.
In 1976, I voted in my first presidential election, and I voted for the only real option, a conservative southern Democrat I didn’t like or trust. He promised (falsely) to shrink the size of government instead of defending the necessary work that government does and the people who depend on its services. He also directed military support to a group of Afghani tribespeople resisting a Soviet invasion and who grew up to become Al Qaida. By 1980, I was beginning law school and Ronald Reagan was on the verge of defeating Jimmy Carter after Carter’s first term. Carter was not a very good president, but Reagan was an ignorant clown, a “B” movie actor who had become a corporate shill and then governor of California. It was awful. He didn’t know reality from fantasy or from the roles he had played in movies. He hired criminals to run the government, committed crimes involving selling weapons to terrorists, and was considered a national hero. During his two terms, mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes expanded. His government invented a crisis in the Caribbean to justify invading a small island in order to revive the use of the U.S. military (largely dormant since Viet Nam) to project U.S. power abroad.
By this time, we had also been living under the threat of instantaneous nuclear holocaust every minute of every day for my entire life, and it was considered normal that life on earth could end without warning at any second. Reagan increased the threat of nuclear war (Kennedy almost started one in 1962), getting Congress to pay for an enormous build-up of nuclear weapons and military spending in the 1980s that included a dangerous ballistic missile fantasy known as “Star Wars.” At the same time, a million people gathered in Central Park in 1982 to demand a change of direction and tens of thousands did the same elsewhere. Public opinion supporting a nuclear freeze grew. Eventually, Reagan presided over both a freeze and then a reversal in the growth of nuclear weapons. It was a ray of hope in a dark time.
Then we got Reagan’s vice-president, George Bush the first, as his successor. That was the time of the first Gulf War. Your mother and I marched in protest in Portland with our first baby girl on my back, to try to stop the first U.S. invasion of Iraq. There were many such protests across the country and they didn’t work. Bush became a national hero. It was also, coincidentally, the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Beginning the year the first of you was born, communist governments in Eastern Europe fell, mostly peacefully, including the government in Russia. Peaceful, popular protest resulted in unprecedented freedom and democracy in the former, Stalinist dictatorships. The Berlin Wall fell. It was remarkable. Bush’s greatest contribution to the whole thing was to stay out of it. Bush also signed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. More light in the darkness.
It was a small surprise (at least to me) that Bush the war hero was defeated for reelection by Bill Clinton. Clinton was considered smart but was already surrounded by scandal. But the economy was a mess, and a wealthy, inexperienced, nutty third party candidate named Ross Perot, running for president to oppose free trade agreements cost the Republicans votes. Clinton came to power riding on high hopes for competent intelligent government. It started going downhill fast. He put his wife Hillary in charge of getting universal health care enacted, and she was hung out to dry as it failed. He also invented “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military, expanded mandatory minimum sentences, gutted federal habeas corpus rights, and got impeached. In hindsight, he is apparently considered to have been a good president.
Then in 2000, the Supreme Court stole a close presidential election and made the younger Bush president. He was a playboy and a clown. He hired criminals and cowards to run the government, ignored intelligence warnings of a coming terrorist attack, and ended up invading two countries, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and semi-legalizing torture. He was a national hero (“Mission Accomplished”). Then he was re-elected, but his incompetence and criminality eventually became too obvious.
After all this, when President Obama was elected in 2008, it was like a miracle, an exception to what had become the rule in my own personal experience of national elections. Intelligent, politically liberal people of my generation were used to losing. Then, under Obama, wonderful changes were made in the face of racist, ignorant, evil, and dishonest opposition. He really did rescue the world economy from disaster and another Great Depression. Access to health care expanded. Legal discrimination against gays and lesbians was ended, and the right to marry became a constitutional one for all people.
Now we have yet another ignorant, evil clown coming into power, maybe worse than the ones that came before. It is too soon to tell. But having ignorant, evil, dangerous buffoons running the government has been the rule, not the exception, for most of my life. So far, we survived and have even seen progress on important things that have helped many people live a better life.
I am not telling you not to worry or that nothing bad is going to happen. Bad things happen every day. We, you, are mostly lucky compared with the rest of the world. We are white, affluent, educated, and live in progressive states, in even more liberal cities, where Democrats control most of state and local government and the majority of our neighbors are not ignorant, sexist, racists. The poor and vulnerable in the South and Midwest, many of whom voted for the winner in this election, are probably going to suffer the most. Refugees and the vulnerable in other parts of the world may suffer more than they already do. Climate change will probably be officially denied in the U.S. Who knows what will happen with health care?
What can or should you do? How can the evil be opposed?
For starters, remember that a president is not a dictator, at least never has been in this country. A president has enormous power, but it is not unlimited. New legislation or the repeal of old legislation has to get through Congress. You have 48 Democrats in the Senate plus a handful of Republicans who opposed the orange one. Democrats in Congress are traditionally political cowards. The only backbone they will have to oppose evil will come from the voters they depend on for their own re-elections. They have staff whose job it is to take phone calls and read email, and they count them up. In the Senate, it only takes 41 votes to stop most legislation or political or judicial appointments.
Second, the power of the national government is not unlimited. Maybe we will need to look to and pressure our own state governments to step in and enforce civil rights, protect the environment, and provide for access to health care at a state or local level. In the 1980s, when Republicans ran things, Oregon was one of several states in which the courts started recognizing their own state constitutions as an independent source for protecting individual rights to a greater degree than the U.S. constitution did. As I said, people in other parts of the country are not so lucky. On the west coast, we are in a better position. As one such example, in the case of environmental protection in the 1960s, it was the state of California that led the way.
Third, you can expect groups organized around issues like health care, reproductive rights, the environment, immigration, and voting and other civil rights to turn more than ever to the courts. Even when unsuccessful in the long run, litigation can slow down the pace of destruction and buy time for political organizing until the next election.
Fourth, perhaps other countries will have to lead the way for a while on issues that transcend national boundaries, especially on the issue of climate change where it is in their own interest to do so. Europe has already been way out in front of this country on the rights and welfare of refugees from Africa and the Middle East.
Finally, this brings me back to my own personal outlook and how I can both take care of myself and be useful and how you might, too. In my job, I try to help people fight injustice one person at a time. I see that work as political work and hope it has, over the years, made a difference in some people’s lives. But my job is also limiting. I am legally prohibited from being active in partisan politics, short of giving money, and I think this has produced a feeling of helplessness. In the national elections of 2000, 2004, and this one, I have felt like a bystander watching a catastrophe unfold without being able to do much if anything about it. I plan to find ways to change that. I think I will continue to avoid the news for a while, but that will change soon. I also plan to wait to see where, after January 20, the worst damage is likely to be done and to see how I might be able to get involved in doing something useful. Maybe I can put some of my legal skills into environmental work. Maybe something around homelessness or health care or reproductive rights, and, when I retire in a few years, I can then do more. I think it will be better for my emotional and physical health not to continue to be such a bystander, and I suggest that, if the outcome of this election concerns you enough, you too should not just stand there. Do something positive and meaningful, and take the long view.
As I’ve been thinking about and writing this, I came across this in an email from Nicholas Kristoff:
As I write this I’m in Philadelphia, having spent the afternoon in the American Philosophical Association Library, handling documents by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and others. To think of Donald Trump inheriting control over the country they created is heartbreaking….
Yet one point I make to reassure friends who are sitting on the ledge is that I think this was more of a “change” election than an ideological one. For example, there were five ballot measures around the country on raising the minimum wage, and all five passed. Important gun safety measures passed as well. I don’t think voters were endorsing the G.O.P. platform as such.
Also worth noting that Donald Trump received fewer votes than Mitt Romney did in 2012. The problem wasn’t an outpouring of people supporting Trump, it was more that Democrats didn’t vote — or didn’t vote as expected. Trump actually had a higher share of the black and Latino vote than Romney did.
One caution for Democrats: I’d be wary of protests against the idea of a Trump presidency. Think how you would feel if Clinton had won, and Trump supporters were out on the streets denouncing her: You’d mock them as poor losers, and you would feel firmer in your convictions than ever. I’d suggest saving your powder for policy fights — about Obamacare, about Supreme Court justices, about immigration, about carbon emissions, because those will come soon enough and will define our country for years.
Lots of readers have been furious at my last column, which said that we lost and have to accept that elections have consequences. Indignant readers say that Germans got in trouble when they accepted Hitler’s rise within the political process. First, I’d say that I’ve heard Hitler analogies made about virtually every recent president, and much as I despise Trump as a bigot I don’t see any evidence that Trump is planning a genocide. Second, if you’re alarmed about the dangers, then it’s even more important to be effective, and unfocused rage and protests seem to me to be much less likely to be effective than honoring democratic institutions and organizing to defend crucial policies. We lost, and we have to deal with that and look to next steps.
Kristoff is a smart guy, and I think these are wise words.
Another smart guy, President Obama, when he was first running for president, liked to quote Martin Luther King, Jr., who had said in a 1967 speech, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” When King said that, he was actually quoting a 19th century abolitionist minister named Theodore Parker (an amazing person, look him up on Wikipedia and be inspired by his life!). Among other things, he gave Abraham Lincoln the phrase “of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.” He also said, and this is where King got his words, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” Parker, a devoted and active abolitionist who assisted fugitive slaves, never got to see the outcome of his work. He died from TB shortly before Lincoln’s election, the beginning of the Civil War, and the end of slavery.
As you find your way forward, think about the above and also the words of that song I used to sing to you at bedtime. Build that ladder to the stars, build your strong foundation, do for others and let them do for you, have busy hands, know the truth, see the light, and be courageous, joyful, and strong.
Love, Dad
Postscript to DK community: I wrote this for my three adult children because we’ve all been feeling pretty sick about all this. I am posting it here in case, before it drops into the abyss of recent posts, it might be helpful to anyone at DK who is trying to make sense of the current state of things. If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and good luck.