This is for those 15-20 year old Millennials out there, from a fellow Millennial who is about to turn 34.
I am at the vanguard of the millennial generation, born in 1982. I was a senior in high school at the time of the 2000 election, and turned 18 about a week after the debacle. 9/11 happened as I was in the first week of college. Like many of you may be feeling now with respect to Barack Obama’s presidency, I realized at that moment how sheltered I was by the 1990’s economy and the Bill Clinton presidency. My political consciousness essentially woke up to George W. Bush, and all of my decisions since have been shaped by my experiences resisting him and the catastrophic policies he put in place or attempted to put in place.
Today, you are waking up to the reality of Donald Trump. I am here to tell you that the next 4 years will define you politically, that you should prepare yourselves for what is about to come down the pike. I hope to provide you with some advice on being a young, inclusive, progressive person living under a government that is stuck in the 1950’s.
You have been sheltered for the last 8 years by Barack Obama, who himself rose to the Presidency in part as the product of years of efforts by people like me. Because you may have been 10 years old or younger when George W. Bush was President, you may have no idea how to react, how to live in this regressive world we are about to enter. Here’s some advice.
1. DON’T FREAK OUT AND DON’T DESPAIR
You may think the apocalypse has hit. You may be right. I’m not telling you to avoid the grief that we all feel. I believe that some mourning is healthy. In fact, I stayed in bed for an entire 24 hour period the day after George Bush was re-elected in 2004. I came out of my college dorm the next day to articles in news magazines proclaiming a permanent republican majority. I was chair of my chapter of the college democrats at the time. I had no idea what to even say to the others. It’s hard. We all need to deal and feel bad for a while.
But now is not the time to wallow in it. We have two years to ruin Donald Trump and his entire party. And let’s be clear, that is the goal. At this point, our high minded policy prescriptions only happen somewhere down the line if we tear Trump down into the gutter every single day. Every moment counts, and every moment spent mourning is a moment we could be tearing into the people who are about to make us and our friends suffer.
You need to do whatever it is that you need to do to get to a stronger mental state ASAP. For me, in 2004, I found this stupid little Livestrong rubber bracelet online shortly after the election. It was blue, and said “Hope”. I resolved that I would hope, and not despair.
You may recall that, in 2004, an up and coming black legislator from Illinois won a Senate seat and spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Four years later, we ran the GOP out of the White House with the byword “Hope”.
Moral of the story: cry, mourn, feel bad. But then get up and start fighting.
2. GET USED TO FRUSTRATION AND WAITING FOR THINGS TO GET BETTER DOWN THE ROAD
We are now witnessing Donald Trump staff his administration. To the surprise of no one, it’s a house of horrors — lobbyists, cranks, freaks, imbeciles, and the like. The fox is back in the henhouse as industry insiders staff agencies that are supposed to regulate them.
George Bush, by and large, did the same exact thing. Oh, Donald Trump is undoubtedly going to be worse. But you should know that you can still find places to move the ball forward on causes you care about. Local races/initiatives, state level experimentation, etc. Pay more attention to what is happening down ballot. You will accomplish more that way.
That said, you will need to prepare yourselves for the fact that we may just be relegated to waiting for Donald Trump to fuck things up. His approval ratings will likely rise around the time of inauguration. With George Bush, the country seemed completely oblivious until a bunch of disasters occurring in 2005-06. Katrina, Harriet Meyers being nominated for the SCOTUS, attempting to privatize Social Security, and the Mark Foley scandal all turned what should have been an impossible climb from a “permanent republican majority” into democratic control of all of congress in 2006. It took the american people essentially 5 years to wake up to the bullshit that George Bush was selling. And it was a long 5 years.
I suspect that Donald Trump will not make us wait that long to royally fuck things up. He, and the tableau of horribles he is expected to bring with him to the White House, are far dumber, far more corrupt, and far more open about their corruption that George Bush ever was. We will have ample opportunity to drive his approval ratings into the gutter in the next 4 years, and the nature of american politics is such that he will bring the entire GOP into the gutter with him.
But you should know that will not happen right away. We are going to have to resist, of course, but it might take a while to see the fruits of that resistance. We also may need to be strategic — sometimes protests push the people we need on our side away, for example.
3. WE ARE THE FUTURE. NEVER FORGET THAT.
I had friends serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. I came out of law school in the middle of the Bush recession. My student loans were at high interest rates, and I had far fewer protections than you have right now against financial ruin. I had none of the policies enacted in the ACA to get me health insurance for years. These were all very big problems, with real negative effects on my life. At times it seemed like no one cared about young people in this country.
We need to care, though. We need to go forward with the confidence that we will win. The people who put Donald Trump into office are by and large older and richer than us. Every year, we get stronger and they get weaker politically. Unlike in 2000 and 2004, they had to go into hyperdrive suppression mode this year just to keep us down, and even then, just by virtue of about 100,000 votes spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The reality is this: with our skills at organizing, social media, and social cohesiveness, we millennials can find 100,000 voters in a matter of hours. I wish we had done so last Tuesday, but that’s water under the bridge now. We need these skills going forward. Donald Trump’s people used OUR technology against us. We can’t let that happen again.
When I woke up the day after election 2004, my despair was slightly tempered by the fact that we millennials would not be held down by conservative, out of touch elders forever. Then, in 2008, we upended the Iowa caucus for a man named Barack Obama and played a major role in putting him into the presidency for 8 years.
So, buck up. We are among the most diverse, educated, and cultured generations of Americans ever. All we have to do is reach out and take the political power that is waiting for us. We’ve done it before. We will do it again. And in the meantime, we need to be confident and not let them turn us into something ugly.
4. IT IS UP TO YOU TO RENEW THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
This year has shades of 2004 to me. I didn’t see it before, but I see it now.
In 2004, I made my first ever political donation and volunteered for my first political candidate: Howard Dean. He came onto the presidential political scene like a thunderbolt, declaring himself to be from the “democratic wing of the democratic party.” Among other things, he had a health care plan that looked awesome at the time but would be castigated as small potatoes today. He ultimately flamed out in the primaries (I’ll leave the explanation for why out of this diary). But he inspired me, and many of my cohort—he planted the idea that the Democratic party could be something other than it was at the time (far more Third Way/DLC than it is now). This is around the time that blogging began to make its mark and disrupt traditional media sources.
The man that Dean lost to, John Kerry, was not an inspiring presidential candidate. He was a good man, but the wrong man for the time. It was a very close election regardless, lost by a small margin in Ohio.
There are obvious parallels to Hillary Clinton/Bernie Sanders. I was on the Clinton side this year. I’ll be writing a mea culpa to Bernie supporters later.
Anyway — while the GOP was out on the news everywhere proclaiming a permanent republican majority, that the election was an epic mandate to dismantle the social safety net, and formulating plans to privatize social security, we in the Democratic party had another fight on our hands. The party needed renewal.
Long story short, we put our guy in the DNC chair, Howard Dean. He promised a 50 state strategy, putting resources into districts that had not received much before. Two years later, many of those candidates and districts flipped blue. I won’t pretend that it was all Howard Dean, because a lot of it was a backlash against Bush. But we were ready to catch the wave with good candidates in part due to the promises of resources in districts that should not have been competitive.
Now is the time for you to renew the party. Put someone you want in the DNC chair, someone who inspires. Someone who will recruit good candidates in districts that seem out of reach today, because even gerrymandered maps aren’t a barrier in a very good democratic year. If that’s Keith Ellison, so be it. It will give us something positive to build on, and successes often stack on top of each other.
5. IT’S NEVER AS GOOD AS IT LOOKS AND IT’S NEVER AS BAD AS IT LOOKS
I may be 100% wrong on this. In fact, as I write, I see a post on Twitter saying Laura Ingraham is being considered for press secretary. I’ll admit that this death-of-the-republic feeling I am getting looking at the cast of horribles that Trump is assembling seems much worse than the Bush administration at first blush.
But you should know that 2006 and 2008 looked pretty damn good politically for us. 2004 looked pretty damn good for the GOP. Nobody knew we’d be thrown out of Congress and a ton of statewide offices in 2010, and nobody knew we’d throw the GOP out on its ass in 2006.
One could argue that, politically, the GOP was in a worse spot in 2008 than we are today. They came back from it not by moping, but by making hard choices. Things change, and things change fast.
Trump is walking into the transition with a 60% disapproval rating. That will go down (temporarily, IMO) in part due to press and the inauguration, but let’s not pretend that even 2/3 of his own voters love him. He lost the popular vote and won the electoral college by virtue of approximately 100k midwestern, blue state votes. And he now no longer has Hillary Clinton, the other most disliked politician in the country, to hide behind. Now, nobody can say to us, “yeah, he sucks, but Hillary is worse.” He is weaker politically than he looks right now.
Oh yeah, and let’s also dispense with the fiction that the country has any confidence in Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and their single-digit-approval houses of congress.
I believe that, before 2018, we will likely be in recession (I think we would have been regardless of who is President). In the meantime, the GOP will overreach. Bad stuff will happen when this all combines together in the next couple of years. It pains me to even think about it. But the american public is already primed to hate them. We have material to work with, here.
That’s the best I got right now, fellow millennials.
