Standing In the Breach: Processing, Protesting, and Planning For the Ramifications of Trump's Election

"You don't know why it's such a far cry from the world this world could be
And you don't know why but you still try for the world you wish to see
You don't know how it'll happen now after all that's come undone
And you know the world you're waiting for may not come -
no it may not come
But you know the change the world needs now is there -
within everyone."
- "Standing In the Breach," Jackson Browne

                                                                   ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The appalling election of Donald Trump as US president on November 9th speaks volumes to the depravity of the US, to be sure, but there is a certain logic to the confluence of forces that brought us here. There is a certain way in which this, as much as it is a travesty, is not a surprise.

Firstly, Trump’s election reveals the massive failure of the Democratic Party to address the grievances of disempowered and disenfranchised working class people. After denying Bernie Sanders the nomination, the Democratic Party essentially nailed its own coffin, showing itself to be utterly incapable of fielding a candidate who had any resonance or appeal to swathes of (mainly white) working class people, or to rural people, to southern people, to heartlands people. With the corporate Democratic Party squarely in the center, there exists a perilous vacuum on the left, and without a left alternative to articulate the causes and solutions for the dire economic straits and social alienation that so many US people feel, those people gravitate towards Trump.

The Democrats are seen as elitist, urban, and irrelevant to the lived experiences of many poor working class people -- and rightly so, in many ways. There is no trickle-down progressivism in this country so geographically and demographically polarized. To refer to blue and red states is hugely deceiving. I thought of Michigan and Wisconsin as blue states until this election, but that’s a skewed impression -- like so many places, it’s red rural areas and blue urban, when you take a closer look. To the rural people, looked down on, alienated from the political process, and not sharing in the fruits of many urban liberal policies, there is an unbridgeable gap between the Democrats’ pro-people rhetoric and their corporate, Wall-Street-aligned, elitist policies.

Of course, the people who cast their votes for Trump hoping he will help them will be disappointed. He’s not going to fix things for them -- his most outrageous claims, like building a wall that Mexico will pay for -- are not feasible, and his more logical statements -- like that he will bring back the manufacturing jobs lost to neoliberal trade deals -- are not going to translate into concrete reality and improved quality of life. In seeking an anti-establishment voice, people have elected a stridently pro-business, anti-people, corrupt and deceitful corporate effigy. One need only look to places like Scotland, whose rural poor people were harassed and coerced when Trump wanted their land for a golf course and decided to cut off people’s water and electricity to get rid of them, to understand that Trump’s rhetoric may appeal, but his actions will bring no succor. His presidency will, inevitably and already, bring more stoked anger, more validation of bigotry and hatred, and more violence.

A Trump presidency matters not just at an institutional and ideological level, with how we work to understand, counter, and defeat the paradigms that gave us this result. It matters personally, too. We have to acknowledge the effects of this hatred and fear -- most everyone I know, including myself, is terrified. It didn't fully hit me until late on election night, when friend after friend kept saying “I’m scared,” when people were sobbing in terror because of a presidential election, when my social media was flooded with unironic posts begging for the world to have ended in 2012, when a friend texted me at 2 in the morning terrified of being deported or kept under surveillance or forced to wear identification as Muslim, when it hit home how much danger we are in. When it struck me that as someone who is neither straight nor male nor typically-abled, I will lose rights to my body and my identity, to my story and my life. This is more than ideological; the fear is visceral.

That said, it is necessary but hard, given the fear that I am choking back even as I write this, to remember that even as we fight back against Trump and the racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, xenophobic forces to which he gives free rein, that there are people among the Trump supporters who are not just hopeless bigots and minions of the right, but also casualties of the Democratic Party. To counter Trump’s right-wing pseudo-populism, we need to build a credible and powerful left alternative to fill the vacuum. If we are going to defeat the Trump phenomenon, it will not be through the Democrats that helped give rise to it, through neoliberalism that systematically discounted working people in favor of profit and then allowed the narrative to be steered by the right wing, who lulled those disillusioned workers into complicity with their own suffering, by convincing them that the blame for their situation should fall on the people below them -- immigrants, people of color, women -- instead of on the systems that created the conditions that enabled the crisis of class.

This shunting of blame is a key dynamic to examine. I consider it the use of toxic masculinity to defend capitalism: the threat of social equality is offered as a scapegoat for the ruling classes’ real fear, which is socialism. I would argue that what comes off as a bunch of misogynistic white men outraged by the threat of social advances made by women, people of color, and queer people is intimately linked to far more than traditional gender and social norms or personal bigotry. The myth of the powerful self-sufficient man, head of the family and the voice of authority, is so appealing and so heavily marketed to working class white men because it gives them one immutable thing to hold onto. It gives them a story to tell about themselves in which they star as a hero, not a downtrodden victim of an economic system that gives little but takes and takes. It gives them a place in the narrative of our victory culture, and it also, crucially, gives them a stake in defending the status quo, by portraying the advance of oppressed minorities as the downfall of manhood, because it threatens to take away the one illusion of unquestionable power that capitalism has always assured them. Therefore, toxic masculinity is toxic capitalist masculinity, because what is toxic masculinity without the deification of the man as breadwinner, as provider, as valued based on his wealth, as innately suited to competing in the profit game, that rough, cutthroat hazing of capitalist society? How could Trump, as a businessman, a “winner,” and a raving misogynist, be more perfectly suited to being the idol for toxic capitalist masculinity?

There’s a similar story with white people in general, of any gender. In the early days of the US, the ruling classes recognized an unavoidable threat to their power: as long as workers identified first and foremost as workers and could name the conditions of their economic exploitation as their chief grievance, the ruling class was in danger from that solidarity. So in order to divide and conquer the working class, white people, no matter how poor and fucked over, were offered the consolation of their race -- a false consolation, in some ways, because they were still materially suffering under capitalism, but decidedly not false in that being accepted in the construct of whiteness did and does give concrete privileges, even as it also provides a false security and a false enemy that prevents many white people from understanding the system around them and how it is not built to serve any working people.

To write off Trump’s blatant racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia as “telling it like it is” is to reify the constructs of race, deepening the divides among working people by intentionally presenting an easy “enemy” that deflects attention from the real enemies, the capitalist powers that be. To write off Trump’s “locker room talk” reifies toxic masculinity, justifying his violent speech as a legitimate reaction against what's considered the coddling and unrealistic PC culture, which is at odds with the ideals of toxic masculinity. Some of these dynamics reflect the problems inherent to identity politics -- enforcing nicer vocabulary and policing how we interact at a surface level will not undo entrenched bigotry, and without confronting systemic and historical causes of the oppression which PC culture is supposed to push back against, demands for tolerance can admittedly come off as uppity, petty, and superficial. Tolerance is not good enough. Tolerance is my uncle reluctantly putting up with my dogs after expressing his dismay that they have not died yet -- it demands nothing of a reevaluation of deeply rooted beliefs. Like any paltry reform, it demands no justice.

Meanwhile, other ways of responding to the election, like third-party-blaming, also only buy into the system that enabled this result. Sure, writing in Harambe is something that at this point, I just cant rationalize as funny or effective whatsoever, no matter how benign one’s intentions may have been. But third parties did not cost Clinton this election. She did that herself. The media did a great deal of the legwork, but fundamentally it is the last decades of Democratic Party failures that set the stage for this catastrophe.

This history of liberal weakness is something we will have to contend with. The Trump ripple effect is already spreading unnervingly -- I live in white liberal suburbia and already at school yesterday there were kids in Trump hats threatening to beat up me and my friends because we’re queer. One of them also followed my friend around, harassing and filming her with his phone camera, and then reported her to the administration. Another friend heard the n-word said twelve times in one class period. And this is a place that’s constantly choking on its own self-righteousness over how liberal and tolerant we are. Well, fuck tolerance. I don’t want to be tolerated and threatened at the same time; I want liberation and justice.

Also, we have to address the liberal relativism dynamic. Saying “oh don’t complain because you could have it much worse, be grateful you’re here instead of elsewhere” is really just a way of shunting away the responsibility for dealing with the actual bigotry that exists even in liberal fucking snowglobes. Also, it just reduces the Sad People struggling in those much more Oppressive Places to pity props in the story self-righteous liberals tell. Also it’s a reminder that what “tolerance” and “progress” we’ve got is a concession from above, a privilege that could be revoked, so we should be quiet and act thankful and not push for more.

Liberals, you can stop telling marginalized people to suck it up and be grateful, just as you can stop offering superficial reforms or rhetoric or vocabulary adjustments -- Trump’s election speaks volumes to the failure of the Democratic Party, meaning maybe I wouldn’t be writing this if they had actually fielded a candidate who wouldn’t put my and so many others’ lives at risk.

There are massive lessons to be learned from this election, and those lessons will be translated to the streets. This presidency will not be one to pass the time with idle petition-signing or trying to play nice with the corporatocracy. Trump and his cronies, the entire state apparatus, are not accountable to us. We must be accountable to each other. Existence is resistance, and our struggles will straddle both the personal and political, and we must cultivate our strength for both. It is our imperative to build massive grassroots movements, to try to bring that energy to the ballot box in future elections as a workers’ party while not losing sight of our action-based strategy -- we cannot hope that the next time around the electoral process will deliver us from hell. It is also our imperative to reevaluate how we relate to one another, how we live deliberately for justice, how we conceive of human nature and our place in this imperiled ecosystem, how we structure our narratives and our strategy to be the least alienating, jargon-y, elitist, exclusive, harmful, or inert. We are going to lose a lot during this presidency, but we must not lose resilience and we must not lose conviction or hope. Placing different value on different lives, dividing people by petty difference, leftist sectarianism or self-righteousness -- none of this helps us be effective.

I believe that the revolution we need will come through smashing the state, sure, taking control of the massive corporations and redirecting our economy in order to save ourselves and this planet, but in the meantime, there is value in building from the very bottom up in order to survive. Solidarity is more than just a word -- it must be a force and a faith in the networks we build and the ways we love and defend each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains -- no, we have much more to lose. We have a world to lose, or a world to gain. We have a crucible of a country -- as we would have had under Clinton, too, but so clearly and perilously under Trump -- and we have the strength as the people to determine in which direction we explode. As goes the quote at the beginning of this piece, we are more than ever standing in the breach. In these bitter, dangerous times, what we have to rely on most is each other.

Question the Political Binary, Even if Settling For the Lesser Evil

For the past several months, as soon as Bernie Sanders was out of the race, I’ve seen a lot of fear politics playing out on liberal social media turf. Any left wing voter who questions their vote, who considers an alternative to both Clinton and Trump, who even impugns Clinton too loudly is aggressively shut down by people desperately propping up the Clinton side of the election binary. The Clinton defenders--as much as some of them insist they don’t like her either or wish there weren’t this broken two-party system--are shunting the blame for her potentially losing the election onto third-party voters, rather than acknowledging Clinton’s own significant weaknesses as a candidate or the general inability of the center-left to field a candidate who truly addresses and reflects the concerns of disadvantaged and disillusioned people in this country.

This disproportionate attack on third-party voters finds a parallel in those who claim that they would love to champion stronger left-wing policies--just not now. “Third parties are a nice idea and we’d love to have something other than the Democrats and Republicans to choose from,” people say, “but this is too high-stakes an election to risk it.”

Perhaps it’s not so easy to be glib and high-minded about democracy and the importance of freely voting your conscience when a presidency as toxic and concretely dangerous as Trump’s is a possibility. This is a valid opinion, and so instead of grounding the anti-Clinton-pressure argument in the principle of democracy and voting, consider it in the context of policy and pragmatism.

Many people contend that voting third party is an impractical and harmful privilege only available to people who would not be directly and negatively affected by Trump’s horrific policies, but this argument can silence the experiences and voices of people who would also be directly and negatively impacted by Clinton’s imperialist neoliberalism. The left is not naive to the danger that Trump poses, but neither can we afford to be immune to the threat that is Clinton. Trump would be disastrous domestically, for rights and safety at home for marginalized people. And his foreign policy is...not much of a policy, as far as I can tell. But Clinton’s foreign policy promises increased US military entrenchment in regions where we only do more damage and engender more blowback, and from her talk of no-fly zones to her direct brinkmanship, she is stoking tensions with Russia to a height not witnessed, according to the New York Times of all sources, for three decades. There are practical and safety-based arguments for strongly opposing Clinton--yes, even and perhaps especially if you also vote for her. And it is a privilege in itself to express concern for the people who will suffer under Trump while ignoring the non-US people who will suffer under Clinton.

One prevalent scare tactic is the story that’s been going around since that fateful 2000 election, the story that says that Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was responsible for George Bush’s (s)election as president by suctioning votes away from Al Gore.

While it is true that had 30,000-odd Democrats voted for Gore instead of Nader, Gore would have won, it is equally true that if even a small fraction of 190,000 Democrats had voted for Gore instead of George Bush, Gore would also have won. Furthermore, if people formerly incarcerated for felonies retained their voting rights in the state of Florida, Gore could also have won. It’s the same story for if there had been no butterfly ballot in Palm Beach county, deceiving people into voting for far-right candidates when they meant to support Gore.

But potential third-party voters take all of the heat, which could just as deservingly be distributed to Democrats who voted Republican or to policies that disenfranchised ex-felons and employed misleading ballots. In numbers alone, it is plainly shown that Democrats voting for Bush deprived Gore of far more votes than did Democrats voting for Nader. Yet it is people opting out of the binary electoral system who are blamed for Bush’s presidency. (Not to mention the vast ranks of Democrats who did not vote at all, who could also be credited, if we want to play that game, with Bush’s presidency.) (Not to mention either that the lament over Gore losing the election is ironic when his policies and statements are critically examined and reveal imperialist and hawkish positions on Iraq, for example. Gore would not have been Bush, but let's not kid ourselves--he was no saint either.)

Also, consider this: although Trump garners a fairly sizable percentage of the popular vote, the electoral college is likely to grant him far fewer votes--some polls indicate that he could lose the electoral college by hundreds of votes. It is not impossible that Trump will become president, but it isn’t highly likely, and the votes people cast will do relatively little to sway that, since it comes down to the Clinton-friendly electoral college in the end.

Fear is the biggest commodity the US both exports and consumes at home, and it has never done much good. As Jill Stein has said, “The politics of fear have given us everything we’ve ever been afraid of.”

We might have learned by now that the status quo is not the safe choice, that toeing the line of our binary traditional system will not produce a better or just outcome. But by refusing to think outside the boxes of Democratic and Republican, we relegate ourselves to begging for the powers that be to throw us a few more crumbs, rather than working to advance an alternative party for which protections of the rights of people and the planet are not concessions, but cornerstones.

And to those who say, “Well, I have to vote for Clinton to stop Trump, but I do want a third party!” -- well, all right: vote for Clinton, but you better be there working for that third party as she reneges on her promises. We can’t afford to keep on choosing the option that makes us less safe, that whittles away our social programs, incarcerates us, sends us to war, sends our jobs overseas, deepens inequality, and treats the public ever more as a menace to be suppressed and controlled--no matter which major party these policies trickle down from. We can’t afford to say we wish there were better options even while we strap ourselves onto the same Democratic dead horse.

In the Gulf South, people have suffered the failure of the Bush administration to help affected communities recover from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and subsequently, the Obama administration’s similar failure after the BP deep-sea oil blowout. People witnessed Bush’s $700 billion stimulus plan during the economic crisis followed by Obama’s ($800 billion), both of which bailed out industry and Wall Street while leaving people to languish. The Everyman of the United States has spent years learning that working people are eternally lodged between the proverbial rock and hard place, the two corporate parties, which have screwed people over with impunity and regardless of pseudo-populist rhetoric.

No matter who you do vote for: the real fight and the real change will come not from who you vote for to occupy the White House, but how you act afterwards, whether, knowing that neither party presented an appetizing option, you work to build an alternative you can feel confident voting for next time, or whether you fall back again into fear, defending a candidate you weren’t thrilled about because you believe still that you must throw your weight behind the lesser evil, hoping it might deign to act someday as a mediocre good.