1. No Empty Whining
Win or lose, nobody likes whiners. And right now especially so because the stakes are truly too high for us to tolerate people who only bitch and complain without any meaningful (or at minimum politically useful!) follow-through. Case-in-point: Electoral College. Of course, the Electoral College is antiquated, benefits Republicans, undemocratic (small d), we got burned in 2000 by it etc etc. That's all fair and true.
Now the question is: Where's your amendment/gameplan/proposal to abolish it? If you complain that’s fine, but you better also be agitating like crazy people for votes EVERY SINGLE DAY in Congress like the Republicans did on Obamacare. If you don’t have political will (or the political opportunity) to do that then otherwise drop it and go find a popular & winning political issue, not a whining political issue.
OMG is Trump a lying hypocrite? Is it blatantly obvious from two separate tweets that the goddamned President-Elect is banging at 8am when he should be studying how to run the Federal government? We know that. He sucks.
What are you going to do to kneecap him and take his toys away? Advocate to get him banned off twitter. BE FUNNY. Don't get so bent out of shape because our opponents are nasty lying bastards. (I assume you were breathing during that campaign— they are nasty lying bastards.) No empty whining.
WE REALLY need to work on this one, and I’m confident that 80% of the people who started reading this have tuned out because their sensibilities have been horrifically offended. Stop catastrophizing & keep reading.
2. Learn from Methodical Republicans
Ever wonder why there’s so much shit named after Ronald Reagan everywhere? (First, give the guy credit where it’s due— he was indeed a President, some people liked him, and he photographed well. That’s fine. A library and an airport will do it.) But if you go driving through any of the states you read about in some bummer NYTimes profile of rust belt misery, there is AT LEAST one “THING” named after Ronald Reagan. Who were these fawning North-Koreans-in-training who named everything everywhere after their Dear Leader? They were members of a group called the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project (real thing: www.ronaldreaganlegacyproject.org) and they very patiently, methodically, and nerd-ily went to city council meetings and filed petitions and got all sorts of things innocuously named after the Gipper. Before you knew it, you’d hear George Washington mentioned in the same breath as Reagan, which was shocking. How did they do this? IT WAS BECAUSE THEY WERE PATIENT. We don’t need to waste time doing this for Obama, but we need to follow their example.
You know why Republicans seem to have a death-grip on Congress? They are methodical and patient about it. Not only do they get their people to vote in their mid-term elections (SOMEHOW they're able to mobilize voters without having to break the emergency glass & enlist the services of Beyonce) but they get them to do it in increasing numbers. Republicans have done an excellent job of capturing Congress but also governorships and state legislatures. Those lines are not going to change until after the census. You get ten year windows to reposition the electoral map. The democrats have been structurally outmanuevered in slow motion. They’re surrounded and they don’t even know it.
We need to be that methodical. (Congress » voters » districts » power » legislatures & governorships » support tipping-point obscure state legislature races, etc etc)
3. Getting Creative
We will NEVER in our life see the come-to-Jesus moment when Republicans will look to the ground and admit “yup. We used voter suppression because we think it’s easier for us to stop someone from voting altogether than to vote for us.” That is the sentence we all yearn for, but we’ll never hear it.
Reality: A lot of them are voter-suppressing fucks who will never admit to it. In light of that, let’s bust their chops.
I propose the 2017 Republican Congress Voting Disenfranchisement Act wherein blah blbah blah if you are on our special list of voter suppressors we won’t let you vote on the floor of Congress. Bring it up incessantly in every single committee hearing with a gerrymandered/voter-suppressing chairperson (maybe someday even to the floor). They’ll have to explain their commitment to voting rights on record and they might get the feeling that this voter suppression might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Even if that doesn’t happen, do it anyway. People should know about it and they should be confronted.
This whole goddamned situation sucks and I’m reallllly pissed to see that the us secret service protecting such a douche right now in a garish gold apartment.
But some shit went down, and he will 100% be the President. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why we got here, but I don’t care. It’s not important. What is important is to continue playing by the rules (but playing MUCH harder) and giving this smug asshole and his retinue of stupid smug assholes what’s coming to them.