Meanwhile, what is left after this disastrous election?
- First, some perspective. Clinton did after all win the popular vote by a lot (2.5 million? The number keeps going up), and though she hardly ran a 'Left' campaign, that's a lot of folks who didn't want Trump. They're still out there, many of them waiting to catch the next progressive wave.
- Furthermore, the primaries showed a startling turn to a genuinely Left Bernie Sanders, who would have won a more open primary, and buried Trump in the general. A lot of the populist anger out there is left-leaning, or at least amenable to arguments about reducing inequality, using government constructively to reshape labor markets, and building a stronger social safety net. Sanders is very much still standing, and his Our Revolution movement is too.
- Even more in view, as the apparent leader of a 'wing' of progressive senators, is my own favorite, Elizabeth Warren. I'm ready to sign on to her 2020 campaign (with her reelection in 2018 as an appetizer). Watching her (with Sanders, Brown, Merkley, and others) spar with Trump's Deplorables may be one of the few pleasures left in the political sphere for the next few years.
- Another front: I read that President Obama and Eric Holder are intending to work for institutional reform around the question of redistricting after the 2020 census. I don't know what they plan to do, or what can be done, but the debacle of elections where the progressive majority is systematically excluded from power--presidential, congressional, and judicial--has become a demoralizing pattern, thinly disguised by the exceptionalism of Obama. Most of any progressive agenda will depend on a remedy for this intractable problem bequeathed to us by James Madison and brilliantly exploited by our retrograde cousins in the Republican party. This battle must be fought and won.
- Most importantly, there are the grass roots movements, thousands of them gathering up millions of good folks around immigrant rights, energy transformation, civil rights and protections, and all the other movements that will be all the more voluble as Trump and his colleagues put them under siege.
About that latter group: these activist cadres are the token of something much deeper, and ultimately of the greatest importance. History progresses. It does not run on nostalgia and delusion. The concentrations of Democratic, progressive, diverse, modern, forward-looking, hopeful, often young people, of many colors, preferences, and persuasions, in the metropolitan centers where Obama, Sanders, and even Clinton got the bulk of their votes, is the social reality of our time, and of our future. That's where new enterprises are launched and good jobs created. That's where the formidable difficulties and contradictions of our global, post-industrial society will be addressed and perhaps resolved. That's where our nation will grow into its new identity.
.With the help of an antiquated misallocation of voting power, of skewed and mendacious media and outrageous tactics, of phony promises and blinding glitz, Trump and the Republicans have turned their backward-facing, poorly educated, blinkered minority of voters into a stunning electoral coalition. The implications of that turnabout are hard to predict. They may be sweeping, even catastrophic. But if a democratic system prevails, the progressive social forces I have tried to identify will gain power--the political power that matches their social dominance. Let's hope there is something left of the environment, of our republican institutions, and our diplomatic standing in the world when that moment arrives.
I intend to post here once more, to consider what's left of the Left in Europe. They of course must live with Trump as well, but the specific dynamics of their foundering Union, their rudderless Left parties, the series of elections that may produce results as dismaying as ours ... that's a topic for another post.
And finally, if there's anyone out there reading this, I'd love to hear what you think. Click on the comment button, please, and share a word or two.
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