The next four years

I wrote this the day after Donald Trump was elected again. The discourse was too much and I didn't feel like wading into the bog at the time.

The last time Donald Trump was elected I was just freshly seventeen. I remember my walk to high school so vividly that day, the fog was so low to the ground I couldn’t see three feet in front of my face. I was really scared and I truly didn’t know what was going to happen. The morning after this election felt different and it could be a number of factors: I had a feeling it was going to happen this time, and I’m part of an organization now so I feel significantly less powerless than I did as a teenager. I don’t feel caught off guard, I generally understand what happens politically when people are made to feel lonely, precarious, abandoned, and like their opinion on American-made massacres doesn’t matter to anyone it should. The political system gives so little to regular people — why would they give anything back to it? I, as a human, understand that urge.

The day after the election I got invited along with some of my fellow organizers in Chicago to speak to college students about processing the election results. We were asked how the outcome changes things for us and our strategies. For weeks before the election we poured over what we might do and when we weighed one candidate versus the other, our plans for after November 5th looked identical. When you spend a lot of your time talking to regular people, you start to see the writing on the walls when more people are living paycheck to paycheck, and more people are lonely. Right wing populists are there to wrap disenfranchised and hopeless people in their grips, ready to extort their basic needs for political capital, and ready to give them a scapegoat for their woes. Democratic voters are typically highly educated people with bachelors and masters degrees — why couldn’t they see the writing on the wall? Why couldn’t they know what history has taught us over and over and over again?

I think it’s useless to talk more about why the Democrats failed. There are one million reasons and their supporters only seem to be blaming American voters rather than their party. You can’t ignore, scold, and belittle people for years and expect them to like you. In Michigan, you can’t tell Palestinians to shut up when they cry to you that their families are dying and expect them to like you. That’s just how interpersonal politics work, and the Democrats are either bad at it or don’t care about the outcomes of their elections. I don’t really care which one it is. To people who stay home on election day, it doesn’t matter that you tell them that Donald Trump is “worse” — it just matters that they hate you.

On January 20th we can decide to get the next four years right. Reducing half the electorate to irredeemable monsters doesn’t leave us anywhere to go. Trump supporters who thoughtfully and on principle believe in everything he says certainly exist. But, there are also a lot of people who fell into the trap and their minds can be changed. I’ve met them.

In 2020, I was going door to door in Ames, Iowa on the day of the Democratic Caucus making a final plea for people to come out and caucus for Bernie Sanders. I knocked on a man’s door who almost slammed the door in my face, but then he decided not to. He noticed we were there for Bernie and said he respected the guy, but he voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and was probably going to do it again. My instinct told me to be afraid and unsettled — and I was. But he insisted we come out of the cold and into his living room. After a few pleasantries and small talk, we got on the topic of healthcare. I told him being on Medicaid helped me a lot, insurance wasn’t something I could afford at the time — and I was having a few different health issues that required regular doctors appointments. He told me he considered himself a successful guy, he showed me his business, and then he told me he wasn’t able to afford his daughter’s insulin recently.

I remember what he said, and I can still hear it in his voice. “She’s an adult, a young adult, but I still want to be able to help her. And I can’t.”

Later that night, I ran into him at a restaurant and he remembered me and my friend as the two people that knocked on his door earlier and he told us he was going to caucus for Bernie. He doesn’t represent every Trump supporter, but he represents some — who would respond if someone just heard them out and talked to them like a human being. I’m glad I didn’t walk away from him, and I’m glad I left my fear at the door.

There are people who were conned by a con man or were fairly assessing that their material reality was better some time ago — whether they landed on the correct analysis of things is sort of irrelevant now. In a country where people cannot afford healthcare, housing, groceries, or anything that makes life livable and enjoyable — history would tell us they are susceptible to falling for figures like Donald Trump. In a country where, because of social stratification and needing to pay to hang out anywhere people are lonelier than ever — it’s our task to create avenues of togetherness and community. It’s our responsibility to talk to people, talk to our neighbors even if we have some idea of who they might be, and actually build power. Of social stratification and loneliness and deprivation are the problems then the opposite of all of those things is the antidote. So we have to stop being assholes to people and be a bit more humble. That’s hard for some of us, even me on occasion.

Deep red Missouri codified their right to an abortion, so did Arizona. Florida came really, really close. We’ve known for months that a vast majority of Americans want to stop sending money to fund genocides and wars abroad. The people to organize are there, but if we are too afraid to talk to anyone who doesn’t present themselves as immediately ideologically aligned with us — then we are screwed. But we don’t have to be, we can make it our priority to connect and help people move in the right direction. For principled organizers, it is our only way forward.