(not sure if this belongs in Great Debates or elections. Mods please move if appropriate.)
Okay, so now we can see that we have the president Trump we feared, and not the president Trump our neighbors hoped for. And it seems there is potential for abject disaster.
What should we do?
Calling Trump names and quoting inspirational sayings to our friends may feel good, but it’s not going to accomplish anything. What will help?
Trying to elect a better congress in 2 years is a nice idea, but might be too late. I fear it’s fight or flight time.
This is not a thread to bash Trump. It might be a thread to point out that’s he’s not so bad and we can support X that he’s done. (I’m dubious, but willing to consider optimistic perspectives.) It’s probably a thread for calls to action to oppose the worst of what Trump may do.(
I mentioned in another thread donating to the ACLU. Other groups were also suggested, and in another thread many groups were listed. The ACLU in particular is already set up to fight in court in support of the Constitution, and that is one reason why supporting them is my primary suggestion.
The key to everything is the economy. The fickle hordes of rubes who voted for him are meaningless and powerless now that the election is over. When the people with the money and power start to feel effects from Trump’s idiocy is when things will happen. Silicon valley is already against him largely, and controls a lot of the economy, so hopefully they will lead, but as for the actual path, I’m still trying to figure it out.
You’re gonna need to flesh that out a LOT better than that in order to get coherent responses. We’re not of a hive mind so that we all know just what you’re talking about.
Participate in peaceful protests. Trump is very sensitive to appearances, and lashes out about anything that implies he is not the best or biggest or winningest ever.
Write or call your elected officials. They need political cover to oppose Trump, Trump’s policies, and Trump nominees. Betsy DeVos might lose her nomination vote as Secretary of Education because thousands of people wrote letters opposing her. At least 2 Republican Senators have publicly stated they are on the fence about her.
Here’s a web site with all the US Senators’ contact information: U.S. Senate:
You’ll have to find out the address for your Representative, and for your members of the state house. And don’t forget your Governor if the issue has implications to your state.
Senators and Representatives give much higher priority to constituent contacts than non-constituent. So contact your Congresspeople even if the topic is outside of their purview. I wrote to every Senator on the committee about the DeVos nomination, plus my home state Senators, plus the Committee address. I should have written to the leaders (President Pro tem, Majority/Minority Leaders/“Whips”/etc.). And I should have written the White House as well - all next time.
Elected officials consider postal letters the most important reflection of voters’ opinion, particularly if they are not form letters. Postcards from people are only a little less weighted, unless they are form letters from lobbying groups - then they are given much less weight. Next is phone calls - and in this administration there may not be time for letters. A faxed letter might be between post and phone, I’m not sure. Contacts on their official web pages are a distant fourth after post, fax, and phone. Emails are an even more distant fifth, particularly if they are form letters.
As mentioned by bobot, donate money. And time.
Work for candidates that agree with you.
Be willing to compromise and vote for candidates that are better than their opponents, even if they are less-than-deal for you. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Pick 2-3 issues to focus on, and let the rest go for now. You can’t fix everything. Between us all we’ll cover everything.
Take care of yourself (part of #6). Take breaks. Have fun. Laugh. Rest. Do non-political things. 24x7x52 is not even possible for machines, let alone people.
Build a network of like-minded friends (in social media and IRL) to make calls, write letters, take other actions, on the issues of mutual concern. We humans work well in groups, and this shares the burden.
Get involved with religious groups, social groups, business groups that have agendas in line with yours. For example, many business groups oppose Trump’s executive order banning Muslims from entering the country.
I should add one more for an even ten, but I have other stuff to do. There are more resources on the web.
The main thing to do is start working on the next election. A Democratic majority in Congress will curtail most of Trump’s nonsense (and overturn whatever he’s done by 2018). People who despair and give up on politics are just helping Trump and his allies.
Bobot already suggested donating to the ACLU; they’ll fight the worst of Trump’s excesses in court. You might also consider other groups like the Fair Election Legal Network, the National Network on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and the National Organization for Women.
This article suggests that the incoming head of NOAA might not discard the data, or even allow the publication of unwelcome facts
But I don’t take much comfort from Ross’s actual words:
on immigration
Trump has signed an executive order banning any citizen of 7 predominantly Muslim nations from entering the US, including green card holders visiting home, and people who were already issued visas and made plans and paid for airfare based on those visas.
or, unpacked:
If you listen to his speech about it (in the cnn link) he speaks as if all those people are radical Islamic terrorists, lumping people who risked their life to help the US army into the same bucket as ISIS.
Presumably under Trump’s direction, DHS has threatened to ignore the court orders and continue implementing all of the executive order
As I pointed in another thread, I noted how back in September the very close association he got with Sheriff Joe Arpaio pointed at what Trump was going to do to America.
Not only wasting money on petty revenge and in court cases, judgments against him or lawsuits against the state (and the defense of the cad was/will be paid by you and me, the American taxpayer)
But as the last poster noted, there is yet another common thing Trump has with racial profiler (ex)Sheriff Joe Arpaio:
A propensity of defying court orders. And then running into even more wasted money in the courts. The only silver lining? Getting the racial profiler to be judged to be officially in contempt of court. A very good reason to impeach the cheeto in chief.
I actually hope you were joking when you made that post, because if that is the takeaway you get from this election then there is no better evidence that bourgeois social liberalism is not merely dead but a rotten, putrid, stinking corpse in a charnel house. Last November, a majority of white college graduates voted for the Democratic candidate for the first time in sixty years. Hillary won-often by enormous numbers-places like Fairfax County, VA, Fairfield County, Connecticut, Orange County, California. Hell, she even had massive swings in Sunbelt exurbia from Atlanta to Phoenix. She won Darien, Connecticut (where the average family income is nearly 200k) by 12 points. Legions of Silicon Valley tech tycoons and Hollywood celebrities marched behind her banner. And you know what? In the end none of that mattered a single fucking iota. Trump won over the America that’s been bleeding for the last decade if not more-your “hordes of rubes” and against practically every prediction, got himself into the White House.
Instead of having a strategy for victory that involved not just winning over working-class America but organizing them politically so that they are no longer “meaningless and powerless”, you suggest we double down on the Democrats have been doing for the past half-century and once again prostrate ourselves before the false, dumb Baals of corporate capitalism. Instead of having a solution and a positive agenda to the crisis of Middle America-income/wage stagnation, declining labor force participation, deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic-it’s more of the same political beancounting, where a little bit more money and more corporate backing for the Democratic Party will somehow usher in the Millennium. Instead of doing what virtually every political formation that even made a pretence to being democratic and left-wing did, which was to organize the mass citizenry and build a culture of democracy where ordinary people can exert themselves politically against the advantages of wealth and privilege, you simply dismiss them as a nonfactor as some Chinese Mandarin or 18th Century French aristocrat would have done. Instead you embrace antiquated “Great Man” concepts of history, hoping that some oligarch will deign himself to descend from his Bay Area bungalow to save the ignorant masses. I can at least respect the neoreactionaries who embrace an actual “Great Man” like Charlemagne or Frederick the Great as their heroes, but that isn’t even the case here. Instead your concept of the hero is some generic upper middle-class twit who managed to have one or two bright ideas about a social media website or app to strike it rich and then do little but give anodyne TED talks which serve for sermons in our postmodern culture. If the icon of contemporary American liberalism is not Huey Long but HL Mencken, we are well and truly fucked.
Shaming and belittling people who disagree worked for the religious right until it didn’t. More recently it had been working for liberals now it doesn’t.
I explicitly said nothing about social anything. I was talking economics. And Trump Hijacked the old platform abandoned by the Democrats promoting trade protectionism to build American jobs. But there is no way two republican houses are going to let him push through anything that strengthens Unions by making them the only game in town. Those guys want Trump out as much as any one else, but dumping him in a coup would destabilize things a hell of a lot more. But if the and when they decide the keeping him is costing them more than getting rid of him, he will be gone. The Kochs et all are not going to stop manipulating everything they can for themselves.
It’s an unfortunate American habit that only Culture War issues are considered “social” as if bread and butter economic issues don’t affect society. But social liberalism refers broadly to a particular political ideology.
This is true, which is why the left should heighten these inherent contradictions in the Trump administration by either forcing him to enact pro-worker policies or else expose him as the the ally of oligarchic interests that he in reality is. In the meantime, they should be organizing the working-class in trade unions and other political organizations to prepare for the next elections.
Why should we depend upon our one segment of our enemies to remove the other? Even if that were to happen, it would merely mean Trump would be replaced by some more blatant hireling of Cosmopolitan Capital. Better to seize power for ourselves in our election.
Make sure people show up to vote in 2018. If the dems can get 45 million people to the polls (they will probably get a baseline of about 40 million) then that could shift the house to democratic control. That’ll make it harder for Trump to pursue his agenda.
Basically, of the 66 million people who voted for Hillary, about 26 million will sit out the election in 2018. If that number can be brought down to 20 million sitting out instead, that could flip the house.
Part of the problem is that many working class whites subscribe to the GOP narrative. The GOP tells them they are the morally superior backbone of America, to blame their problems on immigrants and minorities, that they are too intelligent and responsible to need welfare and only those morally inferior others use it, etc. That is a powerful narrative that a lot of them agree with.
Not only that, but what if the problem is that they know what the dem narrative is, they just don’t agree with it?
High school educated whites preferred mcCain by 14 points in 2008. They preferred Romney by about 28 points, and Trump by 39 points.
Democrats do not need to win high school educated whites, but if we can go back to losing them by 25 points, that should be enough to flip the white house. So if the end result is 64-36 or something in favor of the GOP, that is enough to help the dems win again.
The right has been shaming and belitting people who live in big cities, people who live in blue states, blacks, latinos, atheists, the poor, liberals, etc. for years and it hasn’t hurt them.
Use the chance and opportunity to exploit the differences between Trump and the GOP. There are some areas where those of us on the right who are horrified agree. Don’t limit the opposition to strictly partisan lines or you weaken it. Especially don’t try to paint everything Trump does as strictly the party position.
John McCain’s twitter feed is a good place to identify some of the issues where Trump is getting pushback from senior GOP members of Congress. McCain seems to be in “I’m 80, just got elected to a 6 yr term, and can say what the fuck I want” mode. He’s come out against torture, lifting sanctions on Russia, the immigration executive order, renegotiating NAFTA and withdrawing from TPP. Less directly (linking to an editorial critical of Trump’s self inflicted Mexican crisis saying it’s a “Must Read”) he’s gone after him on Mexico. Lindsey Graham seems to be marching in lockstep opposition by frequently issuing joint statements.
Yesterday the Washington Post ran aneditorial based on a leaked audio recording from a close door session discussing what repeal/Replace of ACA should look like. There’s a number of Republicans who have serious concerns that echo a lot of liberals on this board.
There are real opportunities for bipartisan effort against Trump. Especially with the tiny majority in the Senate, those become areas where opposition is relatively easy. Don’t ignore those areas just because there are issues that do break cleanly along partisan lines. To borrow the Democrats convention slogan from last summer, the Trump opposition is stronger together.
