As the Dust Settles
The day after the election I went into work, a large media company with a policy advocacy branch I’m a part of. There was a company-wide meeting and you could see the devastation across the faces in the room. Anguish flowing freely alongside tears as parents described what it was like telling their children what was happening. Several former Obama campaign staffers, and those that worked on the Clinton campaign were crushed, simultaneously overwhelmed with shock at the outcome, and horrified by what would come next. In only hours, an entire political party’s power evaporated, and the destruction that has resulted is clearly seen on the faces of my coworkers. The attempts at reassuring everyone rang hollow. Any good feelings about winning on several of the California ballot initiatives felt hollow as a shroud engulfed all of America.
It was tough standing there, embroiled in a fiery anger that could shoot off into a thousand different directions at a thousand different people like an unstable volcano. Intertwined with my anger, fear was flowing through my veins. Like a poison, It drained at my energy and was enflamed by the silent inferno around me. There’s never been a time that I’ve felt more powerless. The past year has been like watching a massacre unfold on the battlefield, unable to take up arms myself. All the shouting falling on deaf ears as if my vocal chords were ripped from me. Only in that moment did I feel like I could speak again. Vindication and “I told you so’s” were ringing in my head, but that moment of grief was neither the time nor the place to rub salt in the wound.
There are so many who are hurt, angry, horrified, and feel confused and unsure of what to do next? Wondering how the hell did this happen? After being reassured that he would lose, the biggest political upset occurred before our eyes. What do we do next? First, we must take a breath. Then, we must take a hard look at how we got here, and what the path forward is. Whatever those answers may be, we must not fall into despair. To do that is to surrender our future and our fate.
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What happened? are two key observations that are essential to understanding the election: First, this was an anti-establishment election that took precedent over all the horrifying racism, xenophobia and sexism. Second, Hillary Clinton ran a terrible campaign and was an awful candidate. A sizable portion of people, specifically the white working class, switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, they wanted to throw a grenade through the establishment, regardless of the consequences. This country was built on white supremacy and it is impossible to separate that from Trump’s victory. Despite every disgusting thing Trump said, almost the entire Republican Party got behind him, and a portion of voters ignored what a disaster Trump could have been because of how much they hated the establishment.
Hillary Clinton is the face of establishment politics, and representative of everything people don’t like about politicians. In a year with rising economic and racial inequality, the representation of the status quo was at the top of the Democratic ticket. She’s been hated by Republicans more than any other politician, much of it for completely absurd reasons. She’s also consistently under fire from the left for a variety of legitimate reasons related to mass incarceration, Wall Street, NAFTA and TPP. She took advantage of loose FEC laws and coordinated with Super PACS. She conspired with the DNC and media to bring down Bernie Sanders. And while one it was the least issue related flaw, the fact she was under FBI investigation, an agency that has shown itself to be right wing and reactionary throughout history, should have been a red flag from the beginning.
These are all critical flaws debilitating to a campaign. It’s not just that she wasn’t perfect, it’s that she was the exact opposite of the candidate the country needed. Despite those flaws, this was a winnable election because of how awful Trump’s campaign was. It was unexpected for him to win, but to those on the left, unsurprising. Clinton spent more time fundraising in the Hamptons, trying to win over so called ‘moderate Republicans’ and neoconservatives, than campaigning in states like Wisconsin. The response to ‘Make America Great Again’ was ‘America is Already Great.’ She flipped back and forth between calling herself a moderate and a progressive so much that the words didn’t have meaning anymore. She belittled bold left wing goals and told us to settle for less.
The Clinton campaign emphasized character over policy, and tried to convince Republicans that Trump was temperamentally unfit, that his racism and sexism were so horrifically obscene that the sensible Republicans would pick country over party. 9% of Democrats voted for Donald Trump and 7% of Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton. Instead of trying to shore up their deficiencies with the white working class, they assumed they would easily make up for it by winning over suburban women. Over 60% of white women voted for Donald Trump. What little gains they made in more affluent demographics was wiped way by massively underperforming Obama’s 2012 vote in county after county in the rust belt.
The Clinton campaign focused on arguments that appealed to many former Bush administration officials who were the architects of the Iraq War, or responsible for the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression. They ran ads that emphasized Trump’s dangerous potential with nuclear weapons. They rehashed the exact same ad from the election of 1964 where a Republican talked about how Goldwater no longer represented the party, like Trump today. They touted letters of known neoconservative thinkers and war criminals like Henry Kissinger about how dangerous Trump was for the world even though they were largely responsible for the Middle East being set on fire.
At the DNC, several speaking slots were given to celebrities, Republicans, and generals. Michael Bloomberg, loud proponent of stop and frisk and spying on mosques during his time as mayor of New York City, had a primetime spot. Union leaders, activists for economic and social justice, were not given this time. Obama’s speech spent more time on how Trump didn’t represent “true conservatism” and less about how he took advantage of his workers. Turnout for Democrats was down by millions and millions this election, and the white working class defected or chose not to vote.
The Clinton campaign’s voter turnout operation was paraded as being so expansive that there was no way Trump could win as his own ground game was in tatters. Even I was reassured that this would be able to counteract every awful strategic mistake they made. However, their data was horribly wrong and turnout plummeted for Democrats. Some stories have come out that they reached out to an unusually high amount of Trump voters, something that should not happen in a campaign. They had almost no offices that were outside of cities and suburban areas. Mayors and lower level legislators made comments before and after the election about how the Clinton campaign’s outreach to African American and working class whites was insufficient or nonexistent.
The seemingly formidable Clinton campaign was a paper tiger. It failed on three fronts: Winning over disaffected Republicans that may never have existed in the first place, turning out the Obama coalition to vote, and maintaining working class white voters in the Rust Belt. While there were certainly other factors that led to this result, voter suppression and the existence of the electoral college, there should be no doubt in my mind that the Clinton campaign lost this election much more than Trump won it.
The Clinton campaign, its surrogates, and many liberals that were ardent supporters of Clinton from the beginning are completely oblivious to this. Clinton and her campaign have immediately blamed the FBI and Comey’s letter as if they didn’t think the FBI investigating their candidate for a year would have any effect on the campaign. They have refused to acknowledge their own potential faults and inability to assemble the Obama coalition. In response to arguments Sanders would have won, surrogates and pundits that told us there was no way Clinton could lose, now act as if the white supremacist candidate couldn’t be stopped by anyone. Only days after the election results, a story came out that Chelsea Clinton was being groomed for a congressional run in New York. They have learned nothing and their audacity is appalling.
If we ever hope to recover as a country, and beat the forces of Trump and the white nationalism that has rose with him, we must learn the lessons and make the changes necessary. If Clinton and the elites that supported her refuse, then they must be ejected from any position of power they hold.
What’s next? The Democratic Party hardly exists anymore. Republicans control 32 states at the legislative and executive level. They have the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. The Democratic party devoid of leadership, and what leaders it did have proved themselves to be utterly incompetent. For the past 6 years, the Democratic Party has lost everything and there must be new leadership. Now is the time, for the left to organize and build the party back up with the vision it was supposed to have: A multi-racial middle and working class coalition. This work can and should be done within and outside the party. At the state and local level, new people must get into the party and change it. Outside organizations like Fight for 15, the Democratic Socialists of America, Black Lives Matter, Occupy and more need new members to pressure our institutions.
First, there must be a full house cleaning of the establishment in all our institutions. If there isn’t, they have to be abandoned and new ones must take their place. Their failure is widespread and clear as day. Whether it’s Donna Brazile at the DNC, those who staffed the Clinton campaign, or all the members of the media who hyped Clinton’s electability and diminished and slandered Bernie Sanders, they all must be shoved out of power and influence. They all had their shot and they lost badly. Every person who took part in orchestrating the Clinton campaign or those that were sideline cheerleaders should be ran out of politics for the rest of their lives.
The moment Clinton left the Obama administration in 2013, the entirety of the Democratic establishment got behind her. Almost every current and former elected official, NGO or left-leaning political organization, and major media outlet was supporting Clinton before the race began. They do not get another chance. Anyone that doesn’t fully cede the future of the Democratic Party to those like Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison should be quickly discarded. You should stop watching MSNBC and CNN. You should stop reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, and Slate. Turn off the liberal comedians like Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee. You should ignore whatever celebrity endorsements are being thrown at you.
Go watch The Young Turks and the Majority Report instead. Read the Intercept, Jacobin, Current Affairs, and follow investigate reporters’ individual work rather than big media companies overall. Find the people who were sounding the alarms months and years in advance, but were ignored. Follow the activists on the ground, and support their organizations with your time or money if possible. Regardless of the direction the Democratic Party or the media goes, alternatives must be supported in response to our failing institutions.
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The dust has settled and the carnage is laid bare before us. Our leaders and institutions led us into a battle swearing that it would be a quick victory. Instead they were routed swiftly, and now we face an unprecedented far right white nationalist regime that will not only undo whatever little progress we’ve made over the past 8 years, but pass policies that will hurt the poor and minorities more than they ever have before. Do not despair, or think that this war is over. The long struggle begins now, and we can still claim a better future for ourselves. But do not expect those that failed us this time to come around and learn. The Democratic Establishment, Obama, and Clinton can’t stop them and all the media, pundits, celebrities and liberal comedians can’t stop them.
Now more than ever, we must make politics a pillar of our lives so we learn, grow, organize and fight against the injustices we face now and in the future. We can win, change is possible despite everything you may think. Trump lost the popular vote, and his coalition is fragile. He is not some unstoppable juggernaut, but an incompetent demagogue who stumbled into the presidency because of the failure of arrogant elites and a country built on white supremacy. You may not feel like you’re ready for the responsibility that has been thrust upon our generation, but guess what? No one is ever truly ready. I believe in you, and all of us, to rise up like never before and bring equality and justice to America.
