After shock comes anger. I don’t think I’ll move on to negotiating – anger seems about right, particularly with the news emanating from President-Elect Trump’s transition team. His closest adviser will be the spiritual leader of one of the alt-right’s most popular web sites, Breitbart, so you know this is going to be a volatile time from the standpoint of those issues Breitbart tends to report on. Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, perhaps? That would certainly put black people’s minds at ease. I think Trump may be considering Cap’n Crunch for secretary of the Navy. Sounds like a good pick, though he’s rumored to have a crunchberry problem.
Okay, so what will Trump’s victory mean from a policy standpoint? Well, if he’s anything remotely true to his word, we are likely to see the most reactionary policies ever advance in our lifetimes passed through congress and signed into law. This is not just about Trump – this is about a extremist Republican party that becomes even more virulent every time it returns to power. We had the Reagan-Bush cycle, which was far to the right of anyplace we had gone politically since the Great Depression. Then there was the George W. Bush presidency, shot through with neocons and a decidedly more autocratic approach to governance, powered by the disaster of 9/11. Now: a Republican electoral trifecta – president, senate, and house, all in the hands of an even more reactionary strain of this very destructive party.
What will that look like? Well, we have a pretty good idea. Look at Wisconsin when Blind Scotty Walker took the reins. Look at North Carolina when Pat McCrory was elected (though he may have lost this year, we’ll see). Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Trump will do something very similar – put together a pre-baked raft of reactionary programs into a series of bills, pass them over any objections, and sign them into law in the first few weeks of the ass-clown in chief’s administration. They will also do everything they can to lock in their gains, passing voter i.d. restrictions, confirming ultraconservative justices at various levels, and attacking the remaining institutions of the liberal-left: public sector unions, Planned Parenthood, and so on. That’s what we’re looking at, and judging by Ryan’s various activities over the past year, they are likely to use budget reconciliation on a lot of this legislation. My guess, too, is that the filibuster will be disabled or destroyed quite early on, as well.
So hold tight, people. We are going to have to fight like hell to preserve what ground we can. Elections have consequences, as we will soon see.
What would light a fire under these voters? Well, a more determined and effective candidate, for one. The Democrats have a good platform, they just need to push it harder. But there’s also clearly identifying and characterizing the opposition, not in terms of the singular problem of Trump but rather the broader Republican party as it is currently comported. Trump is a bombastic idiot and a hypersensitive man-baby with tiny hands, but his xenophobic rants reflect the core of the party that nominated him. Clinton should make that clear.
I don’t get choked up very often listening to NPR, but I heard a story on Memorial Day weekend that did it – about the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, talking about how he’d planted sunflowers near his son’s gravestone because the young man liked them so much, and how the father went to Iraq and saw his son, he claims, and the apparition asked him what the f**k he was doing there, told him he should go home, and said that it was all right, he was in a better place. We’re on year ten of stories like this. Jesus! Time to shut it down.