Trump won, and we have woken up to a new world: an all-too-real unreality.
Nearly every poll out there was wrong, and we are understandably bewildered. The psychic blow alone of the Trump presidency is unprecedented. As someone in the public health and medical anthropology fields, I’m all too aware of the fact that Trump’s presidency will undoubtedly result in an increase in death and disease — just as the Reagan and Bush presidencies did — in ways that we cannot fully predict or understand at this time. The reports of a spike in calls to transgender suicide hotlines have already made this terribly evident.
Like others, I take some small solace in the fact that Trump clearly has no mandate. Nearly half of eligible voters did not vote in the 2016 election, and Hillary actually won the popular vote. But this does not change the circumstances we face. We still have to ask ourselves: how did Hillary lose the electoral college vote?
Was it because Hillary is a woman? Absolutely, at least for some voters. Was it because Hillary would have, in the minds of conservatives, represented a continuation of Obama’s “liberal” policies? Certainly.
Was it because the odds were historically stacked against a Democratic Party victory? The record does show that most of the times that an incumbent party has run a non-incumbent candidate (usually because the incumbent termed out) they have tended to lose to the challenger party. Was it because narrow-minded upper middle-class voters are so concerned with their taxes being raised that they automatically vote Republican regardless of who the candidate is? Yep, there are those folks. Was it because WikiLeaks damaged Hillary’s reputation in the eyes of voters? That’s likely. Was it because people are watching too much Fox News? Hell yes.
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And yet, we must wonder how Hillary could have lost to such a remarkably disgusting person as Trump. We have to wonder why the things that we find so completely unacceptable about Trump are those things that his voters actually liked about him. On the one hand, there is of course a huge segment of his voters motivated by his sheer hatred, xenophobia, racism, and misogyny who see themselves fighting a crusade against a stifling “political correctness.”
But, there are also those voters who understood Clinton to represent the status quo and that Trump, as an outsider, would shake things up. In this regard, the election was an also indictment of the Democrats' inability to offer any substantive alternative to politics-as-usual, leaving that space wide open for Trump. We at least need to absorb this as a possible lesson if we are to move forward.
Michael Moore’s “Morning After To-Do List” is getting a lot of attention right now. Moore provokes us to “take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people.” Many older and wiser radicals have recounted to me their efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to “infiltrate” the Democratic Party with their progressive ideas. But many of them were left wondering who infiltrated who in the end. While there are certainly many instances and places where the Democratic Party have been pushed toward truly progressive stances and candidates, it has also become abundantly clear that the national leadership of the party has made themselves resistant to any semblance of political idealism.
I do agree with Michael Moore’s contention that the Democrats “failed us miserably.” But they failed us long before this election. They have failed us by limiting our metric of what is politically possible. Moderates and the Democratic leadership to which they are beholden fail us when they accuse leftists (those of us with more systemic critiques of our capitalist economy and society) of being too unruly, naïve, self-righteous, or overly idealistic. They fail us when they tell us to just be pragmatic, even when that pragmatism is so patently flawed. Trump is simply the most grotesque symptom of problems in which Hillary and the Democrats are all deeply implicated. By offering no solutions, they simply perpetuate and legitimize these realities as unchangeable.
One thing is clear. We can’t go back to the old way of doing or imagining politics.
Make no mistake, Trump’s political project is to make what seems currently politically impossible possible. Making the impossible possible has to become our central orientation and task as well. People will certainly fight to defend and expand their material benefits. Indeed, defending any current benefits that we’ve gained will be a primary feature animating the coming phase of struggle. But, what really motivates people to move is a vision that something else is possible and that we do deserve so much more than what is being offered by the Republicans or the leadership of the Democrats. In other words, we need to rebuild our political imagination and horizon.
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The Obama presidency clearly cannot stand as our marker of what is politically possible. And the Democratic Party cannot continue to be the primary base from which we struggle and build something different. I am not necessarily calling for everyone to start building a third party with an expectation that such a thing would have tangible power at any point in the near future. Our electoral system is in fact rigged against this. I am saying that we can no longer ignore the need to build something(s) independent of the Democrats. We can no longer rest easy and depend on the national Democratic Party to reflect our vision or represent us in any way. We need our hope and vision to stand independently on a different and stronger foundation.
But first, we need to stop engaging in foolish magical thinking. While calls for #Calexit or notions that Trump might get impeached upon entering office are certainly heartwarming, we need to move beyond our denial as quickly as possible and accept the reality that Trump is, in fact, moving into the White House and nowhere is safe from this, not even California. Of course, accepting the reality of it and accepting the legitimacy are two very different things, which is what the establishment progressives in major media outlets and government have already started to do. It will be stunning, perhaps more so than the electoral outcome itself, to see how quickly this sector falls in line with Trump’s presidency. This will enrage us, as it should.
But let’s not despair and buy into the idea that this is Trump’s America. We do have agency, and we will make it clear that it is not his country. This is not the time to let isolation and hopelessness drown us. Fortunately, political mobilization is not lacking. Thousands are already taking to the streets. But before the protests diminish, we have to find ways to continue gathering and collectively resisting.
This can only be done with a political home. What is that you ask? Political homes can look very different, but generally, they are groups or organizations of people with whom you dream and build together what you cannot achieve alone on an ongoing basis. The drastic reduction of unionized labor since the 1960s has left the vast majority of the working class politically homeless, which has forced many of us to rely on the major parties as the only expressions of our political vision every four years.
If you already have a political home, you are probably beginning a collective process of considering how to respond to this crisis. If you don’t already have a political home, it is time for you to find or build one. Granted, this is easier said than done. But, the alternative is to continue to feel isolated and helpless. Now is the time to form groups and make inroads into the institutions where we spend most of our time, such as our workplaces or educational institutions, whether that be universities, hospitals, WalMart, McDonalds, etc.
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Let’s build insurgent spaces, not just safe spaces. What does that mean, and how do we do that without experiencing repercussions? That’s hard to say, but I think it means that we have to be open to social experimentation. Let’s not treat the world as an unchangeable static reality. Trump’s supporters certainly are not. They are unfortunately pushing their boundaries, so we have to push back. As we work toward transforming our experience in this new world, we will build our political muscle and transform ourselves.
We are now living in unreality. Trump is going to bring a whole lot of craziness, so we have to up the crazy quotient too. But, our crazy of course has to be grounded in reality and solidarity. This will be the challenge. How do we push forward our practical political agendas aimed at meeting people’s immediate needs, while lurching toward a common dream of something far greater and almost otherworldly from our current state? That’s a question that can only be answered collectively and in motion.
At this point, spend time with your people, prepare to build people’s defense committees against growing white supremacy and misogyny, and invest time in serious collective political education. This is the only way that we can begin to narrow the gaping chasm between our political reality and imagination. Perhaps more importantly than anything else, we have to be sure that the Trump presidency becomes grounds for developing and learning from the young generation coming up in this mess.
Carlos Martinez is a PhD student in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UC Berkeley. He was formerly a coordinator at the Bay Area-based Center for Political Education, a movement-building organization providing activists and organizers a space for developing theory and strategy. He is co-author of Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots, a collection of interviews with members of Venezuela's grassroots social movements published by PM Press.