Keep the Faith!

As anyone who reads my writings with any regularity knows, I have been predicting that yesterday’s election would result in a blue tsunami. I have been saying from the very beginning, and with full confidence, that Democrats would win the presidency, the House, the Senate, and even make inroads into some highly gerrymandered state legislatures. Sadly, but plainly, I was wrong.

The primary reason for my optimism was that I could not believe that Americans would elect the spitting image of the fascist dictator Adolf Hitler, the person who ordered the murders of 6 million Jews and as many as 500,000 Gypsies, among others. Why would any American vote for a monster like that?

I could not believe we would desert the heart and soul of the cause that nearly 290,000 of our fathers gave their lives for during World War II so that we could live free from tyranny. Go back 250 years to the American Revolution and more than 646,000 of our fathers have given their lives on battlefields so that we could live free. They saw tyranny up close; many of them lived under it. They died so that we may enjoy the freedom we have today, and I could not believe we would betray them.

I especially could not believe we would give dictatorial powers to a person who is an adjudicated rapist, a convicted felon, a persoon who is legitimately charged with many more felons, a racist, a misogynist, a super-nationalist, a pathological liar, a criminally mentally ill person, a person whose physical and mental health are obviously declining, an employer who regularly cheats his employees, and so much more. We Americans simply would not do that.

And we absolutely would not give such a person a get-out-of-jail-free card for any crimes he may commit while in office. That would be sheer madness. There was no possible way any American would do any of that. Or so I thought.

But we did. Last Tuesday, we did. We irretrievably did. We elected a Hitler to be our next president.

It is not an exaggeration to say we elected a Hitler. In 2019, civil liberties lawyer Bert Neuborne showed 20 naked ways how Trump was strictly following Hitler’s advice for anyone who wants to become a dictator, and five years later Trump still is nakedly following his advice. As Hitler said do, Trump blames others and divides them on racial grounds, demonizes his opponents, embraces extreme nationalism, makes closing borders a centerpiece, embraces detention and deportation, entrenches his rule by enriching elites, attacks the judiciary and rule of law, proclaims unchecked power… and 12 more (for the whole list and details, click here).

So yes, of course Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler personified. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s, well, you know.

How could I have been so wrong? How could we have allowed ourselves to let a monster like Trump lead us away from hope and into fear, away from love and into hate, away from democracy and into despotism?

One of MAGA’s answers to those questions, argued by Vladimir Putin and other dictators like him, is that Democracy has failed, that it no longer works in the modern world.

But democracy has not failed. We have failed democracy.

For democracy to work, all citizens must pay attention and vote. But we didn’t do that in this election, not to mention elections past. Although this election was plainly the most important presidential election since 1860, a full one third of our eligible voters did not vote. That’s more than 93 million people who did not vote, and that is far more than the 73.4 million who voted for Trump. There is no way to tell how those people would have voted, but it clearly means the majority of Americans did not vote for Trump. They put him in office anyway because people who do not vote always elect bad politicians. They should hang their heads in shame.

But, regardless, here we are. The only question in our minds now must be what is next? Where do we go from here?

It might do us well to remember that the Chinese see crisis and opportunity as being the same thing. In other words, wherever there is chaos, there is opportunity – in our case, opportunity for a new society and a new response to Trump’s assaults on our political, economic and psychological lives.

We must remember that we are not powerless. We didn’t quit during Trump’s first term and we will not quit now. We will never quit. We will never surrender to tyranny. Never! Our motto in these early days should be the words made famous in “The Handmaid’s Tale”: No ute te bastardes carborundorum — Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

There are no simple answers, but there are silver linings to this dark cloud that can help us keep together and return our nation to sanity.

For one thing, although Republicans won the trifecta – the presidency, Senate and House — not every Republican is necessarily a MAGA Republican. Some sitting GOP members of Congress already have expressed severe warnings about Trump. And since GOP majorities in both houses are slim – as I am writing this the final numbers are not in — it will take just a small handful of those Republicans to show courage and slow Trump’s progress.

My hope is that many of the electors who voted for Trump will realize they do not like being ruled by a dictator, do not like his major policies, and will have the guts to admit they were wrong. If that happens, and especially if we can awaken those nonvoters, in two years we will return control of Congress to Democrats and they will do whatever needs to be done to thwart Trump’s madness, de-corrupt the Supreme Court, and balance the lower courts.

That is not an unlikely pipe dream. After all, many of Trump’s promises are unpopular even among – even especially among — many Republican voters.

His promises to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal budget would decimate food programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and supplemental nutrition programs, all of which are extremely popular in rural areas that support Trump.

His promise to encircle the nation with tariffs will become a tax on consumers that will especially hurt his own supporters.

His promise to deport up to 20 million undocumented immigrants would cost up to $315 billion a year, and since much of the U.S. economy depends on tax-paying undocumented immigrants, Republican businessmen who support Trump will certainly recoil at losing their workers.

Meanwhile, Democratic state lawmakers are already on record as letting it be known they will not cooperate with any Trump policy that is illegal, immoral, unethical or unfair.

Furthermore, Trump’s advisers have promised that he will take power over the nation’s finances by removing members of the Federal Reserve Board in his next term. But when reporters asked Fed chair Jerome Powell for his thoughts on that, he replied simply, “Not permitted under the law.”

So, since Trump will enter the White House as a lame-duck president – the Constitution prevents him from ever running again — it is possible and even likely that he has only the next two years to wreak any havoc, if indeed he even has that.

We have two years to regroup and prepare for that. We must, and we can, use that time wisely. It’s too early to make definite plans because we’re all still in a state of shock.

But as we recover, we must remember that democracy is about more than one person, more than a single election. Democracy is not dead. We have been through tough times before and we came out whole. We are wounded now, but we are alive. We’ll come out whole again.

Each one of us, no matter how insignificant we may feel, must pick our own priorities and marshal our own resources to do whatever we can.

We can, and should, reach out to the LGBTQ people in our lives who are the targets of hate and bigotry by MAGA people; to Black and Hispanic people who once again have been the subject of voter suppression that denies them full participation in our democratic processes; and to immigrants and their family members, who fear that they may be the subject of extrajudicial arrests and deportation. Just let them know we care.

Above all, we must remain unified and positive if we are to successfully resist the worst that Trump plans to implement during his second term. We must resist. Resist, resist, resist!

Things will probably get worse before they get better, but they will get better if we stay the course and provide a unified resistance to Trump’s efforts to override the rule of law and ignore the Constitution. He has no superpowers unless we surrender.

As others have said, these are the times that try our souls. But we must persevere.

We’re about to see what we’re made of.

---