This is really, really hard

 

“We’re standing with Standing Rock – city by city; block by block” (street chant)

Remaining optimistic in the face of the Trump cabal’s determination to regress is challenging indeed. He intends to “unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves.”

He also wants to “streamline the permitting process for all energy infrastructure projects, including the billions of dollars in projects held up by President Obama.”

In the face of statements like these, resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock is looking like a metaphor for hopelessness.

However, on Monday the US Army Corps of Engineers put further digging on a temporary hold citing the need for more analysis and discussion with the Standing Rock Sioux. On Tuesday thousands of people came out in support of the Sioux and their allies in 300 rallies across the country. Mni Wiconi – Water is Life– is what the placards and banners say in both Lakota and English. While I can’t comment on people’s optimism, their resistance grows daily with each alarming bulletin emerging from Trump headquarters.

Here in New York City the atmosphere of defiance is palpable – from the street through to the commentariat. New Yorker editor David Remnick, in a post election article that ‘went viral’, described the result as a “sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy”. John Oliver put aside his sense of humor to angrily denounce the normalization of the Trump victory.

Masha Gessen, a Russian journalist with extensive experience in the field of authoritarian rule, provided guidelines to readers of the New York Review of Books. “Rule # one. Believe the autocrat, he means what he says.” For Gessen, both Clinton and Obama’s response to the election result lacked the resolute defiance needed in the face of autocracy. And Trump has certainly been clear about his intentions, even if he does waver around the edges.

There is no one way to characterize the thousands who turn up to demonstrations – no way to know the sacrifices of time, sleep, career advancement and job security that are being made to resist what must be resisted. One thing seems clear right now though – many of those in leadership roles are women. Young, middle aged, and elderly women are organizing, providing legal services, making themselves available to be arrested, training newcomers in non-violent resistance, and opening their homes to supporters from out of town.

A psychiatrist friend has just told us that he spent the week since the election dealing with its impact – marriages breaking up, families divided. A therapist told us the same thing – she had spent the week ‘picking up the pieces’. A Park Slope block meeting to discuss people’s response to the result was inundated with distressed progressives looking for support and a meaningful response.

It’s still sinking in, but it really happened that 61 million Americans voted for Donald Trump – and the fact we cannot blame a low voter turnout for the result just makes it all the more startling. That’s an awful lot of ‘deplorables’ to take account of – and they’re spread throughout the population hiding, as one commentator put it, in plain sight. They’re not ‘the other’ at all, neither should they automatically be identified with the extremes of Trump’s rhetoric. As Jon Stewart said on Charlie Rose it’s the same America that voted for Obama. They are, many say, motivated by a similar anger (and fear) that drove the very successful Bernie Sanders insurgency. How that anger plays out is what is at issue.

The variety of analysis is dizzying. Are we on the edge of an anti-democratic abyss – or will Trump get with the Washington program once he’s installed there? Did Clinton’s real shortcomings legitimately kill her appeal to voters all along the political spectrum – or was her defeat further evidence of the misogyny that guides much of public and private life? Does this spell a disturbing end to a functioning neo-liberal consensus, or was it the brutal impact of neo-liberal economics on so many that brought this about? There are cogent arguments to support all of these positions, and others as well.

One common theme is that the rout was a revolt against the liberal elites. This is often framed as the Democratic Party’s betrayal of working class Americans through its embrace of an inequity-producing ideology. Working class is an uncommon expression in the US nowdays. Obama’s customary description was “the middle class and those trying to get into it.” Whichever language you deploy, incomes (and hopes for a comfortable future) have been stagnant or declining for many in both these categories.

Bernie Sanders was an insurgent BECAUSE he addressed those people directly. He laid blame on a self-serving nexus of Government and finance that ignored, disempowered and dispossessed them. How many of Trump’s 61 million just wanted a President who was on their side, not Wall Street’s – and would have happily voted for Sanders and a progressive future?

Was Trump’s victory a result of something darker in the electorate – or did it just enable that darkness among a few? The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported a spike in hate crimes. “If you weren’t born here, pack your bags” shouted in the classroom is just one example. Most of the attacks have been against African Americans and people perceived to be immigrants, with the third most common form of attack anti-Muslim.

However, 7 out of 10 voters polled believed that immigrants in the US illegally should be able to apply for legal status, and most opposed building a wall along the border.

The over one million popular votes favoring Clinton notwithstanding, this country is split down the middle. The rest of the world looks on nervously. Is Masha Gessen (with clear agreement from many others) right in her assessment that, “We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half”?

If so, how can this message get through to the other half of the population – whose children and grandchildren will also have to live with the current and downstream impacts of all that Trump has said and demonstrated?

This is where it gets really, really hard. Will the common economic ground uniting the 99 percent of people whose prospects can only worsen under a Trump-led plutocracy start to come apart under pressure from base prejudice and hatred given free rein by this new ‘leadership’?

While the liberal elite (a term that appears to be code for moderate Democrats) stand accused of overlooking the situation facing many Americans, and inadvertently facilitating this catastrophe, they are also a group heavily associated with progressive values in this country. A substantial illiberal elite, also with little apparent interest in the above problems, may explain Trump’s success in banishing his many competitors in the primaries.

We face the risk that, rather than galvanizing resistance among themselves, the Democrats and their supporters will find it more comfortable to normalize Trump. It will be easier to gloss this situation as a freshly elected President deserving of an open mind and a fair hearing in a democratic system – from which they have always managed to derive benefit. This is already under way and historical precedents for that are certainly clear.

They deserve to be embarrassed and appalled by what has happened, but they also have an opportunity to mount a clear challenge. The American Civil Liberties Union has already thrown down the gauntlet in a full-page letter in the New York Times.

Maybe 800 people are set to spend winter under canvas in North Dakota in a historic stand as water protectors. For the 300 Native American nations putting aside their differences to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, this is an historic resistance. There are uncounted African Americans, immigrants, and Muslims who could use allies in a world where white people, statistically speaking, appear to have slammed the door in their faces. They need all the support they can get, and so the liberal establishment, however we define that category, has a job to do.

Just as wholesale rejection of Trump’s constituents can only lose potential converts to a genuinely progressive candidate in 2020, so dismissing a category that includes David Remnick, Masha Gessen, John Oliver and many, many other individuals and organizations preparing for battle, risks throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.