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.
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