It has been a year since we all woke to a weird new world, and to sum it all up: We have met the enemy, and it is us!
For we, of the so-called resistance, have slid into a dark place where disgust has replaced politics, and the resistance to the Trumpian juggernaut has devolved mostly into a contest over who can most eloquently express that disgust.
Because take a look around, my friends, Trump and Trumpism are not losing. A year after the election the best plan to remove Trump seems the hope the GOP will do it for us — by Congressional investigations or impeachment. Or, that a special counsel appointed by Trump’s own people will do it for us. That is, we confuse Trump’s legal problems with political ones. And we will rue the day we let Trump be defeated legally rather than politically.
But there seems no unified idea of how to defeat him politically ourselves. Trump seems to have a lock on about one-third of this nation’s electorate, and that support has not really lessened, if you consider that no other single politician can come close to matching that kind of rock-solid base.
So lost are we in our disgust-fest that even George W. Bush can be rehabilitated if he mouths a certain level of that revulsion. He has of late been touted for his cagey remarks about Trump without naming him. George W. Bush? Another Republican president installed after a shady election (Bush won by one vote on the Supreme Court, don’t forget.) The man is a literal war criminal, who for no good, God-fearing reason invaded and destroyed the nation of Iraq. Bush is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Bush, the grandfather of ISIS, and all this is forgotten or forgiven because he jumps on the “Trump Disgusts Me” bandwagon?
I think one way to understand this is to analyze how the two camps look at politics. To liberals, politics is a noun: a person, place, thing or idea. To conservatives, politics is a verb: an action to be taken.
For no matter how much our expression of disgust escalates, the liberal left is in some ways still not ready to take power. And taking power — at the state and national level — is the only issue on the table.
Yet, even now liberals balk at the rawness of the deed required. Taking political power, among other things, requires three basics the liberals/left is uncomfortable with: organization, hierarchy and uniformity of purpose. Not unity, mind you, but uniformity. But this path is obstructed by the common belief on the left that we must be the change we want, so our attempts to take power have to be mediated, or some would say, weakened, by a central need to avoid hierarchy to ensure a power imbalance does not arise between men and women, or black and white, or gay and straight.
So the liberals/left looks at uniformity of purpose with a jaundiced eye — seeing a potential enemy in the very vehicle to take power away from the right-wing extremist minority that threatens everything. The left must posts guards to watch that no power imbalance takes place, while the right just takes power.
So we get Occupy Wall Street and the Women’s March, while the Right gets the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus in order to establish the absolute control of this country by a minority party. That minority has taken control of our electoral politics, the GOP and thus the nation.
The left/liberals and Dems get what? A new book by Donna Brazile reveals what we all knew: The Democratic Party threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton long before the primaries were over and we the people had had a chance to vote. Why?
Because of the nouns. The Dems went with the centrist liberal woman who could break the glass ceiling, yet even that cheat could not push Hillary over the finish line. In doing so, the Dems missed a chance to actually be infused with the energy Bernie Sanders brought to the election. There were two candidates that completely fired up the electorate in 2016: the GOP went with theirs, the Dems did not.
And this is what we got: Not only did the Dems not win, they failed even to lose the right fight. For while Sanders might also have lost to Trump, he would have been the right person to lose to Trump. As the popular vote winner/Electoral College loser Bernie would have been immediately able to take over the resistance as the leader of the movement that lost.
Now all we have is another fight on the left between those of us who wish HRC would just go quietly into that political good-night, and those who cannot let go that she was the wrong candidate.
Snafu, anyone?
One year after Trump’s election we find ourselves almost powerless to stop Captain Chaos. The danger is that we mistake our disgust over the man and his every utterance, with resistance, or even actual politics.
There are hopeful signs, but they are not in our marches or protests. Tuesday’s election results did convert two governorships from red to blue, but they were in the purple states of Virginia and New Jersey.
And the Democratic winner in Virginia was pilloried by the “noun” liberals when he made a tactical shift to the right on sanctuary cities in his state. He did so to secure his right flank and it helped him to a significant victory. If you agree with that decision, you have joined those of us who see politics as a verb. If not – you get to keep all your nouns safe, but you don’t get to necessarily participate in winning.
In these times of great danger (Bush only burned down the Middle East, Trump might burn down the world) to “be the change that you desire” means to make the change from identity politics to movement politics.
That change is the only path in America right now for taking political power away from right-wing, which is so much more than a mere man, no matter how disgusting he may be.
Joe Gannon, novelist and teacher, lives in Northampton. He can reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.