SNL points out that many of Trump's nominees want to wreck the agencies they'll head.
In the wake of the Trump victory, progressives are disconcerted and disconsolate, but they shouldn't be, and here's why:
Reason # 1 for progressives to take heart: This is not 1988, when the Democrat won two states and Saturday Night Live ran its famous skit, "Run, You Liberal, Run!"
And it is not 2001, when progressives stood by helplessly as 9/11 gave carte blanche to a Bush White House calling themselves the Vulcans, who believed in a concept they called “National Conservative Greatness,” and pursued their agenda with the nation's blessing, of using American military might to subdue the world. Progressives were powerless, and could only watch in horror as the Vulcans set a torch to the Middle East.
In stark contrast to these moments of progressive weakness, the Democrat didn't just win the popular vote – she won it convincingly. Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote has now passed 2 million, and it continues to grow.
That meant, in turn, that the electoral college vote was heartbreakingly close: in state after state, the margin was a percentage point or less, in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and a flip of just two of those states would have changed the outcome.
Again, reason #1 to take heart: progressives are not a woeful minority this time; we are a majority that’s going to grow.
A second reason progressives should take heart is that Unthinkable Progressive Thoughts have been thought. Progressive issues have been raised and validated in this election that have never been spoken at this level before. Credit Bernie Sanders, of course, for raising the issues of the rancid, reckless wars of the 21st century, our hemorrhaging manufacturing sector, and the buying of American politics by Wall Street and other plutocrats. But then credit the canny Donald Trump, who knows a winning issue when he sees one, and used these progressive issues to trumpet down the blue wall of the suffering upper Midwest.
Democrats should take stock, and understand that in a post-'08 world where the country is screaming, “We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more,” focusing the party's money power on a candidate with a lorry full of neo-liberal luggage, including trade deals and Wall Street cozies, is not the way to win back the working class.
But again, the bottom line is: the range of thinkable thoughts, sometimes called the Overton Window, has widened. Make no mistake: Hillary's loss was, in a real sense, a win for the Left. Progressives can now legitimately claim that future Democratic candidates should only go into battle armoured with a history of standing up for working people.
A third reason to take heart is that demography is still destiny, and this election data shows how it continues to gnaw away at the aging, church-going, rural white base of the Republican party, and how the young, college-educated, single, minority base of the progressive movement has continued to grow.
While the US’ Hispanic population grew by 43% over the last decade, the white population increased by one percent. Minority births now outnumber white births, and by about 2040, whites will be a minority of the US population.
Young voters too have gone blue in the last few elections at a rate of 60-40. As the elderly voters who supported Trump die, they’re being replaced by Progressive young people.
And by the way, the last time we had what’s called a “critical election,” the one that created the New Deal coalition which put Democrats in power for the next fifty years – it didn’t happen because voters changed their minds. It happened because immigrants and young people came into the electorate heavily on the Democratic side – exactly the same thing that is happening now.
As that continues to happen, America becomes a different, and more progressive country.
The granddaddy of all reasons to take heart: Righteous Anger. It's a better mobilizer than satisfaction. Unprecedented demonstrations against the president-elect are already underway and being planned, and no wonder.
Americans generally, and progressives in particular, have good reason for high dudgeon. The corporate takeover of politics that began forty years ago has been a cascade of social atrocities: S&L scandals, Enron implosions, Deepwater Horizons, a Wall Street-greed induced world-wide economic catastrophe, and inequalities that would have made the Robber Barons blush. Now a man who proudly embodies that greed and those policies is our president.
Add to this anger the strong suspicion that the election was, in a real sense, stolen. Vote suppression is tailor-made to work in razor-close elections, and, ruthlessly, it worked in this election: photo id laws, voter caging, disappearing polling places, vanishing early voting days, seizures by law enforcement of low-income voter registrations, offers to vote by mail that sent your vote nowhere, non-compliance with court orders to stop the suppression, Rudy Giuliani's NY office of the FBI and their fellow partisans in the KGB all conspired to make crucial differences in states with achingly close margins. Add to that the gerrymandering, the stealing of the most crucial Supreme Court seat in modern history, the electoral victory despite popular defeat, and yes, Virginia, this election was rigged, to perfection, in favor of Donald Trump.
Then add Trump: a moral cipher, rape culture on the hoof, who boasts of being a serial sexual assailant; a deeply unethical business man, a demagogue specializing in the politics of hatred. The American presidency is not a pantheon of angels, but nothing quite like Trump has sat in the Oval Office in a long time. Trump himself will continue to be fuel to progressive fire.
And finally, add to this anger what is about to happen: If Trump is true to his election promises, a lot of people will be hurt, badly. Their anger might take a leaf from the Tea Party. In the summer of 2009, Koch-fueled buses carried misguided but genuinely angry Americans en masse to Town Hall meetings with Congressmen, taking place during Congress' summer recess, to scream that Obamacare was going to kill their grandmas. Congress and the press were cowed by this “genuine grassroots uprising.”
Let's make the summer of '17 our own tea party, though Progressives might want to call it “Freedom Summer II.” And let's start with those Town Hall meetings, where this time genuinely aggrieved Americans can express their anger: the millions of newly uninsured if Obamacare is repealed; the gay couple whose marriage is under threat, the children of the immigrant whose law-abiding life in America is over, the woman whose right to choose is so abhorred and diminished, the elder whose Medicare is vanishing.
Trump's appointees so far are the just the kind of thing that will tap this righteous wrath: they are a murderers' row of progressive nemeses: an Education Secretary who is public education's worst enemy; an EPA head who is a climate change denier, and fossil fuel's best friend; an attorney general who fought for years to keep Alabama's schools separate and unequal; a HUD candidate who says Fair Housing is “communism;” a Labor Secretary who hates the minimum wage; an Interior Secretary with a lifetime Congressional voting score of four percent on environmental issues. All we need now, Andy Borowitz adds, is for El Chapo to be appointed head of the DEA and the picture will be complete: Welcome to Trump’s bizarro-world Washington, where the public good is public enemy number one, and Progressives are likely to be a riled-up force to be reckoned with.
And one final reason to take heart: the bracing challenge of history. Let us make no mistake: this election was a historic cataclysm that calls up the challenge of Ben Franklin. As he emerged from Independence Hall in Sept. of 1787, having drafted the Constitution, a woman approached and asked him, “Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?” He replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
For over 200 years, Americans have kept the republic in some fashion. Now it’s our turn. Let me put our obligation in the apocalyptic but true words of Neal Gabler. “In the wake of Trump’s victory, we are not living for ourselves any more in this country; now we live for history.”
Progressives, this is not a time to despair. This is a time to take heart, and make history.
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