Category: Donald Trump

Do We Deserve Trump?

Do We Deserve Trump?
A friend posted his horror and anguish this morning at the ongoing national humiliation of the Trump presidency. He then argued powerfully that we deserve Trump:
“we” … The people of the is country – as a whole. We… the people… are pissed off at the guy at the bus stop at 5am going to his first minimum wage job. Worse yet… we hate him for it – he’s a leach. We…. the people… convince ourselves we are the victim. We… the people… are mad at the guy in front of us while driving simply because he is there, and as we fly around him give him the finger. Not even caring that he is probably just lost and finding his way. We… the people say “don’t tread on me”…. “screw the other guy (even if he is our neighbor)”….and “me first”. We the people… value the kind of man Mr. Trump is. “he says what I want to say…. he acts like I want to act.” Yes… we. IMO…We.. as a whole… are not good people. And we… the people of this country… got exactly the kind of man “we” really are.

I emotionally identify with my friend’s sentiments but I respectfully disagree. To quote Barack Obama: “This is not who we are”. To go one step further I agree with Dr King’s insight that the United States is an inherently just society which is simultaneously the home of intolerable injustice.  He then understood that if you can force America, or at least the just middle to bear witness to injustice then you can awaken the conscience of a just society and create the political reality necessary to overcome injustice.  The complication is that the republic was born with a huge cancer inside it of injustice, the injustice of the dehumanization of the other and the development of elaborate philosophical and semantic frameworks to justify stripping the dehumanized other of every right that accompanies humanity.

To put it in different terms, we created a republic in the name of “We the people” but never defined who the people are and have continuously used, in law and in relationships between individuals, the mechanism of excluding “others” from the “people”.  Although we have progressively decreased the manifestations of that injustice we’ve also learned and taught each successive generation to avert our gaze unless we are absolutely forced to see that injustice straight in the middle of our vision.  There is a also an unreachable segment of the population that Trump speaks to directly who will never be able to see some people as anything other than “other”.

The real tipping point though in the story of how we ended up with Trump is that those of us who should know better got lazy.  News turned into entertainment.  “Quality news” pretended to be journalism while actually degenerating into a “he said / she said” soap opera of false equivalence which placed no value in objective truth.  If objective truth was discussed it was placed in the ghetto of “fact checking” rather than being treated as the central purpose of journalism.  Smart educated people who should have known better went along with this degeneracy of journalism and refused to say that the emperor had no clothes.  To allow ourselves to excuse our complicitness in this decadence we label the ugliness we see now as “Trumpism” so we can say it is something new. The “newness” of Trumpism gives us an excuse for not calling out the decades long slide of mainstreaming of othering and authoritarianism into the mainstream of one of the two great parties. The concept of “Trumpism” allows us to label this as something new which we can denounce as opposed to something that has stared us in the face all along that we refused to call out. The concept of “Trumpism” allows us to make ourselves believe we are genuinely surprised when we, as people who should know better, are forced to stare at the ugliness beyond our fortresses of privilege and ask “How can this be happening today?”

Reagan was right: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation”.  We got lazy as a polity and we got the predictable outcome.  On the other hand, I’m getting somewhat optimistic: It is unavoidable that when we look back at this period we will regard the Trump presidency as a period of national shame and humiliation. However I think we will also see that we got lucky:  Trump and Bannon do not appear competent enough to establish an authoritarian regime and overturn the republic.  We may regard them as a painful warning that caused us to engage in a period of renewal of the intuitions of the republic and and a re-education in the obligations of citizenship. (The word “painful” should not be taken lightly though. This “warning” has and will continue to destroy many, many lives).

We’re only a month and a half in so a lot can go wrong but I’m feeling optimistic that we will get through this.  The press seems to be re-learning the role of journalism. We are re-learning the skills of civic engagement, we engage in acts as solidarity with other communities as a matter of course and most importantly we are relearning the core imperative of engaged citizenship in a just republic: bearing witness to injustice.

On the other hand I chose to be American so I would look for a cup half full perspective.  Maybe the right perspective was Jon Stewart’s on Colbert’s show a few weeks ago which was that if we survive this with the republic’s institutions intact we will prove that America truly is great.

Trump is just the latest obstacle on the zigzagging course of racial progress

Margaret Burnham

“Clearly this will not be redemption redux, and one would hope that the rule of law would hold, but it is also true that, notwithstanding the horrors of the 20th century, we don’t really understand what persuades ordinary people to butcher their neighbours and co-citizens. Americans are just as human as Rwandans, Germans and Serbians; no more, no less.

The first reconstruction opened, for an exhilarating moment, a window through which former slave communities could envision a new political life. The post-reconstruction counter-revolutions suggest that such instants of transformation can be quickly subverted, and that the challenge of recapturing what was lost is arduous and protracted.

The myth that racism is dead has been variously styled “separate but equal”, “colourblindness” and “post-racialism”. Whatever the term, it is the duty of all of us who fear for the US to remember that though racial attitudes are not unalterable or homogeneous, race will always register and resistance will always resurface. Revolutionaries holding alternative understandings of what ails America as a nation – “it’s the ‘class struggle’, stupid” – who want to win elections, or transform power relations more fundamentally, would do well to examine the politics of the redemption – and that 95-year gap in North Carolina.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/19/trump-zigzagging-course-racial-progress-american-civil-war-civil-rights

“Citizens, United:  What should Democrats in Congress — and Barack Obama, and you — do now?”

Jonathan Chait:

“And so the man who thought he was through with politics has, it turns out, one more essential role left: Beginning next year, Obama needs to rally the opposition, to community-organize his coalition, and to exploit his celebrity to make the case for saving his legacy. His visibility alone would serve a vital function. Trump’s election has sent a statement to Americans and the world about the country’s identity. It has been received viscerally, by bullies abusing minorities as well as by fearful allies overseas. Obama is a powerful symbol of rationalism, thoughtfulness, and pluralism — the ultimate anti-Trump, both ideologically and symbolically. Women, religious minorities, immigrants and prospective immigrants, transgender people, young Africans with iPhones, the beat-down opposition in places like Russia and China, and the people who bully all the preceding groups and more — the whole planet, really — need reminding that Obama’s version of America has prevailed before and will prevail again.”

. . .

“Trump’s election is one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worth recalling, however, that history is punctuated with disasters, yet the country is in a better place now than it was a half-­century ago, and a better place than a half-century before that, and so on. Despair is a counterproductive response. So is denial — an easy temptation in the wake of the inevitable postelection pleasantries and displays of respect needed to maintain the peaceful transfer of power. The proper response is steely resolve to wage the fight of our lives.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/how-the-loyal-opposition-will-work-in-trumps-america.html

“Alarmism saved my family from Hitler: Why I won’t tell anyone to calm down about Trump”

Hugo Schwyzer:

“My grandmother’s fear saved the family. My grandfather’s sweet confidence and optimism would have killed them.

So when you tell me, a noted soother and calmer of others, that I should tell Muslims and women and people of color that they have nothing to fear from Trump, I think that perhaps you want me to be like my grandfather.

And I think that perhaps for once in my life, I am not going to counsel calm and preach perspective and rally the kids for sixteen comforting verses of Kumbaya.

People are scared. They have every right to be. Trump’s words speak of an intent to violate fundamental liberties; Trump’s words inveigle violence; Trump’s words abrogate a social contract that says that we should quietly respect election results.

Perhaps Trump will be a better leader than we thought. The burden is entirely on him to prove that his campaign was an act, and that he and his followers pose no threat to women and minorities. Until then, suspicion. Until then, fear. Until then, anger.

Until then, I’m thinking like Elsa, not Georg.”

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/alarmism-saved-my-family-from-hitler-why-i-wont-tell-anyone-to-calm-down-about-trump/

“Rule #6: Remember the future.”

Masha Gessen:

“Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.”

http://www2.nybooks.com/daily/s3/nov/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival.html

Protesters outside Trump Tower the day after the election, New York City, November 9, 2016

love-trumps-hate

Harry Reid on the Election of Donald Trump

“I have personally been on the ballot in Nevada for 26 elections and I have never seen anything like the reaction to the election completed last Tuesday. The election of Donald Trump has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America.

“White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trump’s victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear – especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America.

“I have heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics. Hispanic Americans who fear their families will be torn apart, African Americans being heckled on the street, Muslim Americans afraid to wear a headscarf, gay and lesbian couples having slurs hurled at them and feeling afraid to walk down the street holding hands. American children waking up in the middle of the night crying, terrified that Trump will take their parents away. Young girls unable to understand why a man who brags about sexually assaulting women has been elected president.

“I have a large family. I have one daughter and twelve granddaughters. The texts, emails and phone calls I have received from them have been filled with fear – fear for themselves, fear for their Hispanic and African American friends, for their Muslim and Jewish friends, for their LBGT friends, for their Asian friends. I’ve felt their tears and I’ve felt their fear.

“We as a nation must find a way to move forward without consigning those who Trump has threatened to the shadows. Their fear is entirely rational, because Donald Trump has talked openly about doing terrible things to them. Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African Americans. Their fear is legitimate and we must refuse to let it fall through the cracks between the fluff pieces.

“If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try.

“If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.”

http://www.reid.senate.gov/press_releases/2016-11-11-reid-statement-on-the-election-of-donald-trump#.WCfaAXeZO-b

“I do not respect this president-elect. Count me among the resistance”

Charles Blow:

“We need a Trump presidency to succeed to some degree — at least to have it do as little harm to the republic as possible — in order for America to remain safe, steady and strong during his tenure.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe Trump to be an abomination, but rather that I honor one of the hallmarks of our democracy and that I am an American interested in protecting America.

That said, it is impossible for me to fall in line behind an unrepentant bigot. It will be impossible for me to view this man participating in the pageantry and protocols of the presidency and not be reminded of how he is a demonstrated demagogue who is also a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and a bully.

That is not a person worthy of applause. That is a person who must be placed under unrelenting pressure. Power must be challenged, constantly. That begins today.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/opinion/america-elects-a-bigot.html?_r=0

The Next Election

News update for everyone who is saying that we will make sure that we win in four years time: The next election is in TWO years time NOT FOUR. Forgetting that is how we ended up with a gerrymandered republican congress in 2010. Forgetting that is how they managed to slow down the recovery so that it still had not reached everywhere by 2016.

If we’re going to take back our country and save our republic the first thing we need to do is to get it in our heads that we cannot sit out the mid-terms. They never do.