I’ve been following/watching a lot of the comments, protests, news stories for the past several days, and like many of you, I’m angry, depressed and frightened all at the same time. I feel compelled to fight back against what just happened, and to demonstrate to the world that many – really, most – of us know this isn’t right, or normal, or just. I’m concerned, though, that our initial response, while powerful and I think necessary at the moment, can be used as a foil against our side over the long term.
It has been mentioned both before and since the election that we now have our own version of Silvio Berlusconi. We could debate whether Trump is more of a Franco, a Mussolini, a Pinochet, or insert-autocrat-name-here, but for now at least, Italy in the 90’s and 00’s seems like the closest analog. Regardless of who we’re comparing Trump to, though, it's worth noting that most of these regimes were almost always voted out of office – not removed through some technicality, not disposed by force, not scared off by the opposition having bigger protests. They were, for the most part, sent packing because enough people united against them at the ballot box.
An economics professor named Luigi Zingales penned what I think is a very smart op-ed in the NY Times called The Right Way To Resist Trump and I think you should take a moment to read it. An important passage about Berlusconi’s success:
Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters. Mr. Trump is no different.
This thought hits the nail on the head of something that’s been bothering me about our response for the past several days. To wit, there’s a movement afoot now among major city mayors to declare theirs to be “sanctuary cities”. No doubt they have good intentions, but doesn’t that imply that there are refugees that are desperately running to get to those places? Try to imagine this from the standpoint of some middle-of-the-road voter who pays more attention to football than politics – what happens when he hears language like that, turns on the TV, but then doesn’t see UN tent cities being set up in the middle of Central Park? Makes the rhetoric seem a little hyperbolic, no?
It’s true, the majority of Americans don’t want Trump as president. Hell, even some people who voted for Trump didn’t actually want him to win. He’s going to be the president, though, and he needs to be dealt with on those terms – on policy. So when a group of Democratic congresspeople, like the one led by Ruben Gallego of Arizona, say they’ll refuse to work with him under any circumstances, does that not make them look intransigent and reactionary, like the Republicans have been for the past 8 years? And what happens when a policy decision by Trump comes along that someone among them decides to support? Well, three things, to my mind: it’ll of course make that congressperson look weak and hypocritical, it’ll give cable news pundits kindling for their much-loved and longstanding #DemsInDisarray meme, and it’ll give Trump an opportunity to run around screaming and tweeting that he was right all along.
I’ve seen people here and elsewhere express dismay that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have said they’re willing to work with Trump on some policy, as if that means they’ve surrendered and are now colluding with Trump on everything. Of course they’re not! They’ve both said that’s not the case and anyway it should be obvious.
What they’re actually doing, and what I hope we consider more here, is that they’re genuinely investing themselves in policy that they believe will benefit the public . . . and they’re picking their battles. By announcing which economic positions they’re willing to work with Trump on, they’re putting him in a box – either he can really improve the “rigged” system he’s railed against and work to ameliorate people’s economic hardship, or he can go back on his populist campaign promises. By a Trump “promise” I of course mean the spittle-flecked generalities he spouted, but let’s again not quibble – there were some things he was at least somewhat consistent on.
Those decisions are up to him and his cabal, though, and as of now, he hasn’t made a lot of them. I’m not naive – I can make some reasonable guesses about how much he’ll stay committed to “benefiting” the little guy, but what downside is there to waiting to find out more so we have an actual policy to give specific opposition to, or to point out what campaign “promise” that he’s gone back on?
We can always contest and demonstrate against the Republicans on things where the differences are clear as day – abortion rights, civil rights protections, etc. – and to that end, I think the million-women march scheduled for January is a good idea because it addresses a focused range of issues. To simply say we’re automatically opposed to Trump no matter what and then run out to the streets to protest, well, you tell me – everything but nothing in particular? – will only aid Trump, in my opinion, just as the columnist pointed out doing so only aided Berlusconi.
Let’s use this time to challenge the media to do their job, and to challenge the congresspeople we do have to set some clear markers on policy that we know are third rails, like Medicare and Social Security. Josh Marshall at TPM is doing exactly that. As of this writing, I haven’t heard back from my own congressman on these last two items, which is worrying to me because, frankly, he should have a clear, unequivocal stance promising to defend both. Perhaps in your own neck of the woods you can do the same.
At the end of the day, we’re playing on an un-level playing field that significantly advantages the Republicans. A lot of the white voters that gave Trump his margins may be full of shit about their current economic status and deep down are really just racist xenophobes, but a lot are in genuine trouble, too, and when the next vote comes around, to get outside the vote margins lost to suppression tactics, lost to misleading narratives drooled out by an acquiescent media, lost to meddling by Russian hackers and the KGB… sorry, I mean FBI, we need to bring a lot of those people into the fold and we need to give those on our side specific things to fight for. Not discussed very much here – in blue states like Illinois and Minnesota where there wasn’t any vote suppression, the Dems turnout wasn’t as good as before, either.
We can also use this time to take a deep breath, knock off the finger-pointing, and put yesterday’s battles behind us, because there will be more than enough new ones to come. Doing the “see, toldya so” and “how you feeling about that vote for insert-name-here now?” nonsense isn’t going to help any of us win a damn thing.