I had only felt fear once since Donald Trump descended, “diabolus-ex-machina” into our political lives: during his acceptance speech at the RNC, when he laid out his dystopian view of a world peopled with dark villains and white victims, his vision of an America at war with itself, and nowhere to turn but back to your most elemental tribe to dig in and prepare for battle.
I felt it a second time, not when Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, but rather when Sen. Elizabeth Warren called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the appalling images of children ripped from their parents’ arms as part of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy.
The choice of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court has liberals rightly worried about abortion rights and gay marriage, for example, being overturned. The right wing is gleeful, anticipating their many lawsuits they hope will nibble away at our liberties — and in the name of liberty too.
The calls to resist Kavanaugh are thunderous, but with three or four red-state Democratic senators up for re-election in November, his ascendance should be expected.
And as ever with Trump, the mission becomes clearer: America is in a battle for its soul. But it is not a battle the liberal/left has been good at recently. It is a battle for raw political power and to answer the question: Who will govern? The fact-based, knowledge-based, all people are created equal, E pluribusunum, minority in this country? Or the knowledge-is-fake-news, we don’t need no stinking government, white-nationalist, right-wing minority?
They are both minority poles, and the right wing’s delirium over Trump and his now two Supreme Court picks shows that they do not have faith in their minority position, and so have latched onto the strategy that with POTUS and SCOTUS they can maintain control as a minority party.
For the rest of us, as Frederick Douglass once famously, if wearily, said at the end of the Civil War: “Verily, the work does not end with the abolition of slavery, but only begins.”
And it has only begun: the inevitable, inexorable, unpredictable work of beating Trump and Trumpism in elections. Not via indictments or impeachment, nor impeachment from indictments. Liberals and progressives too, as recently as Barack Obama, relied on having POTUS and sometimes SCOTUS to work our agenda. Now we must either take back the Congress and state legislatures, or retire from the field, beaten and demoralized.
There is no other option.
The only brake on Trumpism will be a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. And there’s the rub. Trump’s outrages are like fireworks — impossible to ignore and damn difficult to talk over. If the opposition continues to be led by the nose by these outrages, we will be ill-prepared in 2018 and 2020.
So it comes down to retail politics and that brings us to the call for the abolition of ICE. And it has nothing to do with ICE nor the inhuman zero-tolerance policy Trump unleashed on the tired, poor huddled masses yearning to breathe, if not free, at least easier.
ICE is like a hammer — it can be used by those who wield it to build or to demolish. As it was by Obama, and is by Trump. To call for its abolition now, is to invite it to be a plank in the Democratic Party platform in 2020, and nothing — nothing, dear reader! — will get Trump re-elected like that will. And a Republican Congress with Trump after the 2020 census will gerrymander a GOP majority for the next 10 years, at least.
And nothing threatens families, workers, immigrants, students or any vulnerable community like that nightmare will.
No matter how humane your argument, abolishing ICE will successfully be spun by Trump and Co. as a call by the Dems for open borders. And the Dems are terribly vulnerable on the question of immigration. Not only whites agonize over it, but African-Americans, too, share the worries and fears.
In recent polls they are pretty evenly split — meaning there is no clear majority anywhere for a radical move now on immigration. End the inhumanity of separating children from families? Yes. We already won that one. Abolish ICE? There is no way to win that.
And not just here, but around the world, immigration — crushing numbers of the most vulnerable fleeing terrible violence and poverty — is reshaping political coalitions. There is zero consensus in this country about what a humane immigration policy even looks like anymore, let alone abolishing ICE.
And yes, the Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in New York was impressive and had ICE abolition as a part of it, but her big, wonderful win was a local affair, true retail politics. It is not a harbinger of 2020 and how to beat Trump.
The danger that Trump can win re-election is so real, that we must consider setting aside our outrage, our fear, our anger at all he has wrought to focus on beating him.
Outrage at the lamentations that have risen up from our borders like the weeping of the women of Troy can lead us to demonstrations and civil disobedience, as it has. But it will not necessarily lead to electoral victory.
In fact, Fox News has begun spinning it exactly as that. If they’re prepping for 2020, we sure as hell better be too.
To be led by our outrage only is almost to follow the playbook of Steve Bannon. It was Bannon who said the best strategy was to stick it to liberals’ consciences, and keep sticking it to them to keep them outraged, because our outrage tempts us to overreact. And that overreaction will lead to electoral defeat as two minority parties battle for the future.
And when the devil talks about temptation, we should listen.
Joe Gannon, novelist and teacher, lives in Northampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.