Life With and After Trump

How does one take seriously having a vaccine denier in charge of public health? How about having the world’s richest corporate owner in charge of cutting regulatory agencies?  Or having the other foxes in the henhouse, much less Oval office-ing the degenerate ringmaster himself? I would guess all who read this article feel outrage and horror, but also more than a little scared.

Do you go to bed at night or get up in the morning with thoughts, fears, and dread that you want to jettison? Turn off the news. Turn it off. Turn it off. Enough already. Set aside the articles. Stop the flow. Netflix calls. A novel beckons for attention. Go for a walk, get some fresh air. Maybe have a drink or ten. Perhaps throw a fit, or maybe just snarl a lot.

I get all that. And I am not going to tell you that going to meetings or attending them online, reading or writing calls to action, thinking about what to do and how to do it, and urging friends, neighbors, workmates, and family to join you in it will banish the nightmares and bring on only joyous dreams. To fight the power can certainly have inspiring, energizing, and joyous moments, but it will also have plenty of frustrations, strains, drains, and flat out boring moments. It is, however, the only thing that can lead to better days.

In that context, as dreadful as things may now feel, as immobilizing as Trump’s barbarity may feel, the current humane, radical, and/or revolutionary task is to block near-term Trumpian successes while preparing to pursue longer term positive campaigns and agendas. Why? Five reasons.

1) To prevent continued and new Trump-inspired damage at home and abroad.
2) To show that Trump is beatable. He is not someone to start supporting or to double down in support of. Don’t do it. He is someone to usher into ignominy.
3) To prevent structural changes we would have to later roll back.
4) To develop vision we truly desire and means to win it, not just to survive.
5) To contribute to and, yes, to enjoy emergent hope and community.

Trump’s appointments aim to establish a police state. Please read that again. That is our immediate setting. It is not rhetoric. It is not hyperbole. His appointments will seek to trash democracy and participation and increase corporate control. They will try to normalize my-way-or-the-highway rule. Trump’s appointments are not only unqualified and even anti-qualified, they are also shock and awe provocations. They are bludgeons to rob our initiative, but despite their weirdness, each is also smartly attuned to Trump’s perverse, homicIdal aims.

Trump himself is simultaneously a nightmare and a sick joke. As a wannabe dictator, he seeks dominance. As a degenerate clown, he caterwauls toward history’s garbage bin. Which persona will predominate?

As Trump tries to dramatically change society from its horrendously flawed present into a drastically worse future, I believe more than enough people will extricate from his lies, see through his false promises, and overcome their understandable fear and depression to resist both Trump and his appointees. Enough people will resist his border, deportation, spying, coercing, impoverishing, repressing, sickness-inducing, militaristic, misogynistic, racist, and corporatist agendas to scuttle his aims.

Indeed, resistance is already surfacing. But resistance doesn’t automatically succeed. To win, resistance must become a persistent, continuous and unified force. It must attract and retain steadily more public participation. It must manifest increasingly more mutual aid and solidarity. It must raise social costs that elites do not wish to meet. Is that possible? And is it possible before Trump solidifies his support and transforms institutions to his specifications?

Most of Trump’s voters mainly supported what they thought was a positive possibility that he would shake things up so that they might benefit. They wanted change and rightly thought he would cause change. He successfully deflected their realizing it would be change for the worse.

Trump’s voters also secondarily supported prospects of his overcoming problems that don’t exist or fears that are greatly exaggerated but which he will only make worse. And finally, some of Trump’s voters thought he would protect old ways of living against new disorienting trends.

So how do we raise social costs for Trump and more for elites that support or simply put up with his aims?

If we uncompromisingly reach out to many of Trump’s voters while we (and Trump’s own actions) reveal Trump’s true aims and do so while Trump is restrained by fierce resistance, many and we should hope even most of his voters will reject what they come to see as Trump’s negative effects.

On the other hand, if we do not reach out to Trump’s voters and if we do not block Trump in coming months then even his weakly supportive voters will see Trump pull off one programmatic step after another, each of which he will celebrate as serving their interests, as freeing them, and as punishing their enemies, and in that case their tenuous support for him may become deeper and more intense. People who voted for him but voted down ballot for the likes of AOC or for reproductive rights or for a higher minimum wage, or who voted for Trump but would have preferred to vote for the likes of Bernie Sanders, may fall deeper and more intensely in thrall to him. To prevent that is essential.

Activism to block Trump’s agenda needs to welcome and to provide supportive opportunities for participation and leadership to voters for Harris as well as to non voters and indeed to anyone who is already horrified by the specter of a Trump-defined future but who lacks prior experience of active dissent and is thus not already plugged in. Activism should welcome all, but offer suitably different strokes for different folks.

We can’t stop Trump much less move on to win positive change without greater numbers. True enough, you might agree, but you may nonetheless have doubts about succeeding. And I get that things look grim, but does anyone need that point repeated over and over again? To say it will be hard to block Trump and to reverse MAGA and to finally fully rebut fascism’s morbidity is true. But to say that it won’t happen, or at any rate that it won’t happen for years and years, is self-fulfilling unwarranted defeatism. We have to face facts, yes, but not spin them into worse than they are. Defeatism feeds fascism.

Okay, you may feel, but why is defeatism unwarranted? Trump won a big battle. True, but we won many progressive referendums for increased minimum wages, reproductive rights, labor gains, and other progressive results, including in red states. Still, Trump will forever claim a mandate, and will certainly try to parlay his actually narrow electoral victory of between 1% and 2% into some immediate Trumpist gains.

He will try to bludgeon or shock passive acceptance. He will point to whatever early reactionary Trumpian gains he manages to enact to try to galvanize support for more reactionary steps. If in response we move quietly aside or we even jeer in righteous anger while we predict our own coming defeat, we will indeed be defeated.

To resist Trump’s every effort, to start to reverse them and to tirelessly tatter his aura of invulnerability, to reduce rather than ratify people’s fear of him, and to interrupt and then hack away at his level of support and build sufficient active unified resistance to finally replace him is all mandatory. And it will happen. But how fast it will happen, which includes with how little human and social loss along the way, will depend mainly on two things.

First, Trump’s overreach and rate of personal unravelling, and second the pace with which resistance spreads, becomes wholistic rather than atomistic, and reaches out to inspire ever wider activist rejection of Trump’s agenda.

That sounds nice, you might think, but is it real? What about the people who voted Democrat? And beyond them, what about the Democratic Party itself? Won’t they be a dead weight of passive resignation? Or won’t they, however well meaning, drag growing opposition to Trump into Democratic Party let’s get back to business as usual-ism? Will we prevent full blown fascism but return to from where fascism emerged?

Just as Trump’s voters are not peas in a pod, so too for Harris’s voters. Some Harris voters will abstain from resisting Trump, perhaps too comfortable, too scared, too convinced it is futile, or sometimes maybe even donning a red hat. Some will resist Trump but with the express intention of returning to fondly remembered business as usual. Some will begin to resist, including people at higher and higher levels of income and influence, but only the more they feel that Trump’s actions are generating resistance that may come for them next. Not praiseworthy, but relevant. And already happening.

Some will want to return to pre-Trump stability but also to enact some serious and meaningful gains for various constituencies and even regarding sustainability for all of humanity. That is also already happening. It’s praiseworthy but not fundamental. And some will want to move past all of that to prepare the way to win fundamentally new economic, political, and social relations. That is praiseworthy and fundamental, but very far from predominant.

How many people will move toward which new posture will not depend exclusively on peoples’ genes or even their personalities. Nor will it depend only on their incomes or their social identities. It will depend somewhat on all of that but also, and crucially, more on what they encounter in coming weeks and months, including on our words and the scope and effectivity of our resistance, and how welcoming our efforts are to new participants.

The Democratic Party will of course reject fundamental change, and for the most part it will even reject meaningful gains whenever it feels they might expand beyond meaningful to fundamental. The avalanche of essays, interviews, and talks that have recently railed at today’s Democratic Party as an agent of oppressive hierarchy and injustice are correct. It is.

Then again, such observations have been correct even in just my own experience, ever since the mid 1960s. And have been correct from still earlier, way earlier, for people even older. I tend to wonder, therefore, when I read such observations, especially in progressive and seriously leftist venues, who are they written for? Once or twice, as a kind of gentle here’s what we all know reminder, I might understand. But over and over in such venues, as if only the author knows? As if it is some kind of newly discovered wisdom? It seems to me that the people who read those essays in progressive outlets already know what they are being told. So what is the editorial point?

The real world truth is that a very large component of resistance to Trump is going to come from organizations and also spontaneous projects with considerable history and even deep roots in Democratic Party activities. If this is not the case, our prospects for preventing full-on fascism will be insufficient. So rather than disparaging such efforts, it seems to me that to try to discern, describe, and debate what to do next along with but not literally melting into such efforts will be more helpful.

When some left writers seem to carelessly dismiss every elected or appointed Democrat much less every voter for Harris as abettors of genocide, misogyny, racism, and corporate domination, they are wrong in the same way as when some left writers seem to carelessly write off all of Trump’s voters as lunatic fascists. These narratives not only ridicule and reject people who are needed for resistance to win, but even people who are already hell bent on resisting.

So, yes, the Democratic Party is part of the repressive, oppressive society that has spawned Trump, produced Trump’s voters’ warranted alienation and anger, and also manipulated and distorted some of the perceptions of Trump’s and indeed of all voters. So of course we don’t want to swear allegiance to the Democratic Party. We even want to keep it in our minds and not forget that it is, as a whole, very much not our ally, but the opposite. But, at the same time, to prevent Trump implementing gain after gain and increasing his support by himself touting his every gain will depend in large part on how many Harris voters resist and, indeed, on how many Democratic Party affiliated actors and organizations resist.

But in that case, a question arises. As we fight to reveal and reject Trump, what do we who aren’t about returning to business as usual seek instead? What do we desire for life after Trump? Is it premature to even ask? After all, we know we have to remove Trump before we can construct better than what we had before Trump.

Indeed, this was one of the costs of a Trump victory. If Harris had won we would now be able to fight for positive and even fundamental change toward a much better future. With Trump having won, we have to first fight against vicious negative fundamental changes that would impose a much worse future. It is also true that on the road to life after Trump Republican majorities in the Senate and House will need to be erased. And then Republican ownership of the White House will need to be erased as well. That is another price of Harris losing. But that isn’t our final goal. Of course not.

It is true, however, that to work to remove Trump can tend toward, can welcome, and can even celebrate and enforce business, government, culture, and households as they were before Trump—or it can begin to inspire desires for and even develop means to win gains toward implementing gains that go fundamentally beyond yesterday’s normal. For that matter, the wherewithal to resist fascism will thrive better if it is fueled and oriented by positive desires for more than restoring the conditions and circumstances that earlier led us toward fascism. We all know that, don’t we? We all know that getting back to everything being broken for us but working fine to serve power and wealth is not our ultimate aim, don’t we?

But if the whole goal isn’t only for the Democrats to win midterm elections in two years so the House and Senate become Democrat dominated, and only for Democrats to win the Presidency in four years so a Democratic Administration replaces Trump (or Vance), then what do we want? If those interim steps are important but not defining, then what do we want for life after Trump?

My answer is, I want Life After Capitalism, After Misogyny, After Racism, After War, After Ecological Denial. What’s your answer? But I am not delusional. We are not going to do all that in four years. What we can do, however, while we stop Trump, is to also think through our aims and methods and begin to implement new approaches able to keep going forward after Trump, even as they are also essential to defeating Trump.

Sanders, AOC, Michael Reich, maybe even Gavin Newsom, and plenty of others whose work I don’t know are saying something halfway similar. They are saying that they in the Democratic Party need to jettison the practices and commitments that their Party has been emphasizing for decades. Those folks are not revolutionaries the way I, for example, prefer. But the odd thing is that they do appear to be self critical of their team. They are saying they have failed. But they are not saying they give up, Trump wins. They are not saying to Trump, go ahead and trample everything. They are not saying they will just try to survive until Trumpism runs out of energy.

No, they are saying that they are not only going to fight, they are going to change their ways, or at least try to. They are going to try to reach out more widely and more aggressively to people who work and not to people who own workplaces, or in some cases, those who boss those who obey. Okay, I won’t belabor that some of them, yes, some of them in the Democratic Party, even if saddled by not yet fully rejecting such basics as private ownership and patriarchy, are sincerely taking stock and seeking to change their ways. But I will merely say that we need that and should welcome that, and not ridicule it and them, and call it mere manipulation.

And I will add, can’t we do as much regarding our team? Our movements? Our organizations? To blame Harris, Democrats, mainstream media, social media, widespread ignorance, rampant apathy, malignant cynicism, all past American history, and even in some degree the whole population is all true enough. It may even be an important part of usefully understanding our emerging context. But what about our own faults? What about the problems we have, within our team.

There is going to be resistance. A whole lot of resistance. What are some things we might want to consider about how our resistance unfolds? Maybe that growing in size and scope and not in verbosity or outrage is the primary measure of success. Maybe that each perspective welcomed as part of the whole needs to respect and welcome and even support and nurture and certainly not rail at and reject every other perspective welcomed as part of the whole. Maybe that to tell ourselves things we already know is not near as important as to find ways to constructively communicate with those who we don’t know and don’t yet agree with. Maybe that to raise social costs for elites is our only road to success and for that it needs to be all willing hands on deck, in turn reaching for unwilling hands too.

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