NORTHAMPTON — Over 100 people squeezed into the Friends Meetinghouse Tuesday for an election postmortem led by a diverse group of progressive thinkers.
“I think what we are shocked about and depressed about is that (Hillary) Clinton lost,” said panelist Stellan Vinthagen, a University of Massachusetts professor. “But I would say what we should be hopeful about, and what is the crisis and opportunity here, is that Clinton lost.”
Vinthagen, who studies nonviolent direct action and civil resistance, was joined by Uditi Sen, Hampshire College professor of South Asian studies and history; Amherst College student and writer Marc Daalder; and Vijay Prashad, Trinity College professor and writer. The panel, organized by the American Friends Service Committee in Western Masschusetts, offered insight into how Donald Trump won the presidential election and how progressives might move forward following his defeat of Clinton.
There are two sides to the Trump victory coin, Vinthagen said, because while Republican policies will now be the norm, the election of populist Trump revealed something about the American electorate — and how many were failed by the Democratic Party.
“I think the success of Trump was more the failure of Clinton,” he said. She failed to get votes because she represented the political elite that both Trump and Bernie Sanders railed against.
Populist fervor is spreading across the globe, he said, pointing to Brexit, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour party, and the rise of the Spanish Podemos party.
Vinthagen said the feeling of being left behind transcends traditional left and right political identities. It’s important that the American left wing appeal to the working poor, unemployed and rural voters.
“That should be the left or the liberals that are actually mobilizing these people,” he said. “It has (been) in other times in history and it could be again.”
But for Sen, who described herself as “usually an optimist,” that all may be wishful thinking.
“In this situation, I’m finding myself breaking ranks with optimists who are hoping Trump’s election is an opportunity or possibility to bring back to the fold of progressive politics people who have once voted for Democrats and have now voted for Trump,” she said.
The reason being, “people have mobilized against large groups of people,” she said. Nativism has grabbed hold of many whites, who believe that other ethnic groups are wrongfully taking opportunity from them, Sen said.
“As long as there is a segment of the population that legitimately believes they were owed more, somehow that they were not meant to suffer — as long as this idea exists, talking about economics will not allow us to stop the war being brought home,” she said.
Liberals are displaying a sense of desperate optimism that the Republicans will “do our work for us,” she said. But the truth is that that is accepting the idea of “collateral damage.”
Under a Trump presidency, that could include forced registration for Muslims, Sen said.
Daalder agreed.
“I think one of the dangers of optimism in regard to Trump as president is normalizing what shouldn’t be normalized,” he said.
Following Trump’s “60 Minutes” appearance Sunday, Daalder said, many of his friends were expressing happiness that the president-elect scaled back some of his rhetoric. It’s a situation where good is “anything else” but people’s greatest fears.
Prashad, who covered the election for two periodicals, said Trump’s campaign was full of dog-whistle politics, in which neither candidate spoke of the real reasons for deindustrialization or economic insecurity felt by so many.
“Rather than talk about what actually made this happen, there was a great deal of winking and nodding about the value of your skin,” he said.
And now, Trump’s economic agenda has the potential to cause even more devastation to that group of rural whites if he enacts large tariffs on Chinese goods and attempts to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“Wal-Mart will go out of business,” he said. “People (abroad) will stop buying Boeing, they’ll buy Airbus.”
For Prashad, one solution is a local one. Progressives cheered when Kshama Sawant, a socialist, was elected to the Seattle City Council.
They’re elated by the election of one far-left politician on one American city council but are satisfied with “decent people” leading the rest of the country’s left-leaning cities, such as Northampton, he said.
“Northampton has zero socialists on the City Council, Amherst zero” in town government, he said. “Why don’t we run at them from the left, push them further.”
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com