Disbelief is not a strategy
At each step of this cycle my first reaction to Donald Trump’s rise has been some version of “there’s no way.” I don’t have a plan yet this morning, but I am certain that growing to understand the reality that Donald Trump is our President-elect and why is the starting point of finding a new path.
I’ve heard so much of my disbelief echoed back to me from friends and colleagues on both sides of the aisle. We believed the system would reject him, even late last night (and very early this morning) the idea that some intervention would keep him from being elected persisted — he’ll never get inaugurated, he’ll get indicted, we’ll end up with President Pence. What is most important to me about that reaction is that I was, in that moment, more comfortable with a leader whom I find even more ideologically offensive than one that isn’t of the system. Even in seeking to understand and learn the lessons from this cycle, I was doing it within some very firm, very problematic assumptions about our system.
Our next President is Donald Trump. We must seek to understand what exactly our country is demanding. Fundamentally, the system is what was repudiated — the entitlement and the narrow cast understanding of what is acceptable or possible. The aloof distance and inability to respond to the pain of the American people. Our assumptions about “how it works” need to be inspected and mostly abandoned. Has his rise been categorized by making a new level of racism, sexism, and bigotry an acceptable part of the Overton window? Yes. Is there a deep-seeded sexism implicit in the rejection of Secretary Clinton we witnessed? I believe so. But we cannot allow our entire response to fit into those truths — it is bigger and more complicated than that. Our future is not a return to the path of our past: it is not a rebuilding that we need. This is a repudiation of the entire elite approach to power and leadership. The world is different — we must be different. Our leadership, our ideas, our campaigns must be rethought, and we cannot settle for convenient excuses that allow us any version of the “system will save us.”
Time to stand and face ourselves and imagine a new path forward. We cannot just “wait for four years” or accept a new dichotomy of us versus them. That is ultimately just us versus us. There is work to do, and our country needs all of us more than ever. It is easy to join in and battle when we were skipping down the hope and change yellow brick road — now is the hard part. Now is the moment to involve yourself, to participate, and to engage in the movements that matter to you, to redouble your commitment to each other and our country — start small with whatever that looks like for you like making a donation to the ACLU. We must be deeply active citizens and demand our leaders lead. Opting out means ceding the ground to the movement Trump has led. And that’s not acceptable.
