Kafka said: "There is hope, infinite hope in the universe--but not for us."
After Friday's disgraceful revelations, Saturday's upheaval, Sunday's debate, there is hope, more than before, that Donald Trump will sink like a rock in these troubled waters. And as Republican party operatives and officials agonize over what looks like his inevitable defeat, some abandoning Trump, others hoping to hold on to his rabid supporters, there is even some hope, more remote but real, that Hillary Clinton will take office with Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress. Unlikely still, perhaps, but no longer a fantasy. But would even that outcome give us hope?
Would President H. Clinton make use of this historic opening to move the country in a progressive direction? In certain ways, yes: she would be likely to break the deadlock in the Supreme Court with a liberal appointee, perhaps adding others within her term, thus preserving gains in LGBTQ rights, protecting Roe v. Wade, and sustaining efforts to preserve minority voting rights, among other pressing issues before the court. She would no doubt reinforce Obama's limited but important executive orders on energy conversion and climate change--the most urgent policy imperative of our time. These are not small matters for hope.
She might also act on the broader agenda sketched out in the Democratic Party platform--shoehorned in by Sanders supporters in some cases--, an agenda that would be dead on arrival at a Republican-controlled Congress. But even if she had a congressional mandate, would Clinton spend capital to implement a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition, expansive wealth taxes, and other elements of a progressive, anti-inequality fiscal program? It would take constant pressure from more progressive agents inside and outside the political establishment, but these things are not inconceivable.
More broadly, will Trump prove to be the last gasp of intolerant, racist, nativist reaction to the transformations at work in American society for more than a generation? I saw a map, produced by Nate Silver and his colleagues, a speculative electoral map of what a real Clinton landslide might look like. The bands of blue stretch from Maine to Florida (possibly skipping over Georgia and So. Carolina but just barely), from upstate New York to Minnesota and Iowa (missing only Indiana), and from Washington state to Colorado, hooking across from California through Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico: a permanent progressive majority. Delusional? Not really, just very, very hopeful.
And what would that large majority consist of? Two rising elements in our population: the metropolitans--modern urban people who accept the new realities of the LGBT revolution, of new technologies, of essential transformations in energy systems, social systems, wealth distribution--and cosmopolitans--the rising tide of immigrants, Spanish speakers, global citizens, internauts, people whose horizon extends much further than America's. What this electoral map suggests--if not now, soon--is that the majority of Americans dwell in metropolitan areas, along the coasts and borders, where innovation and heterogeneity are increasingly the rule. The remaining red states are clustered in the middle, in the depleted zones of the lower midwest and old South--a dwindling remnant, dangerous as Trump is dangerous, but no longer able to conjure up a national majority.
Is there hope? Possibly, in the short to middle term, if this visionary electoral map produces a workable Democratic administration. Otherwise we will face more legislative paralysis under a mediocre, conservative Clinton restoration--with more, perhaps worse Trumpery to follow.
