The clouds may be gray, but today we begin the struggle to fight against regression into the past.
Post-election grey clouds. Public domain image.
It is a gray overcast day in upstate New York. No sunshine. But the clouds continue to drift, the birds are flying, cars and a school bus pass on our road, the subdued remains of our fall garden are soothing.
Life does go on for all of us even in the midst of profound political/social disaster. The racists and haters of women, and those who are intolerant of immigrants and refugees and Muslims and Mexicans, the KKK and the neofascists and the nativists, the supporters of the ruling class and neoliberal capitalism — all have won the election.
This is evidently what it takes to “Make America Great Again.” When was America last great? I think they believe it was In the 1950s. Before the civil rights revolution, before the defeat in Vietnam, before the uprising of American women ended some of the worst aspects of male supremacy, before Roe v. Wade, and before much else that has served people in recent decades.
Now, today, begins the intensive struggle to fight such regression. There will be many thousands of fight backs over the next few years, starting soon. The left will mobilize quickly, but just behind them will be millions of Democrats, Bernie supporters, Blacks, Latinos, and others. Our various movements will grow and support each other.
There will be a large anti-Trump protest in Washington on Pennsylvania Avenue in January as the president-elect rides to his inauguration.
We will not allow our country to go back one day, much less several decades. Each of us has a part to play, whether it is through conversations critical of Trump to those who support him, or joining protests or offering civil disobedience and other actions that promote the cause. For the sake of all our families and the American people, the people of the world and future generations, we must all fight back.
So buck up, friends, there’s work to be done to defeat the racist forces of the far right and their exultant neofascist friends. Dump Trump!
Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.
[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian — for decades the nation’s preeminent leftist newsweekly — which closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter.]
lots of rhetoric about Trump’s election.
No mention as far as I can see about the motives behind it, and the problems (catastrophes) ahead. The America people have been conned on many levels by this, but few realise the ultimate swindle.
They have been persuaded that prosperity can be voted into office.
There is little or no awareness that America, and by definition the rest of the developed world, does not have a crisis of politics and politicians, it has a crisis of energy depletion.
Trump himself is unaware of this, nor are any of his supporters who voted him into office.
So what comes next? It could be that Trump is the unexpected sideswipe I’ve been forecasting; hard to say yet—but very likely.
The American Dream , insofar as it ever existed, was a construct of cheap hydrocarbon fuel. Nothing else. From that derived all the products that kept millions of people employed. It was a fuelburn that continued after WW2, until 1970 when the USA went into oil deficit.
Employment in any real sense is impossible without fuelburning and heat dissipation. (hence global warming).
Unfortunately all the cheap fuel has gone, but Trump is promising to kickstart the economy (job creation) by using expensive fuel, of which he has convinced himself there is literally unlimited amounts—there isn’t.
We are in a closing vice of falling employment and rising energy extraction cost, and no political leader is going to change that. (the current glut is a short term anomaly).
But Trump has made promises. He cannot possibly keep those promises. He cannot make America great again anymore that Great Britain can be made Great again. We too burned our energy stocks, and simultaneously our nation’s greatness.
So over the next 4 years, when the steel mills of America do not reopen, and the jobs do not materialize, the American people will realize they’ve been had—and get very annoyed. Especially as more and more of them get poorer and poorer.
So by 2020, when things have got infinetly worse, and the economic system is in a tailspin, (or maybe well before then) civil disorder is highly likely as it becomes obvious that things are worsening.
So the reaction to civil disorder will be increasing militaristic response. Trump is undoubtedly of Fascist inclination, and will respond in that manner—violently. He will have no option. His successor in 2020 certainly will, and I’m guessing will be of a theofascist persuasion. (Pence maybe—after impeachment perhaps? Trump is obviously mentally unstable already) Dictators with god on their side are the worst kind.
But with energy depletion, the United States will be ungovernable and uncontrollable, and will begin to break up into 5 or 6 disparate regions.
Welcome to the (dis) United States of America.
Poor Jack.
I have observed with a bemused look the left leaning punditry toss out explanations for Trumps victory: bigotry, hatred, stupidity, intolerant, fascists. The list could take paragraphs.
I humbly thank you. As someone who organized hundreds of Trump supporters and for the millions more like me, your arrogant elitist attitude, deified in DC, helped us frame this election for the voters who don’t follow politics as closely as I do.
You seem too self absorbed to even consider that this election was a repudiation of your worldview, your policy view, your values. …. you.
Far easier to cast aspersions and insults at the electorate in fly over country than to embrace the collective failure of globalism, open borders, progressivism, and Anti Americanism as experienced by the average working class family in middle America.
The closet Rag Blogger to “getting it” is the estimable Ms Katz. She at least viewed her loss through the lens of a working class family.
– Extremist2thedhs
You’ve never understood what the so-called left, readers here or others elsewhere, want or work for. Your comment here again proves that. Yet you gassify onward as if you knew a damned thing about people you disparage. There is no shame too humbling for you to suffer, yet you think you are insulated from such because you have your imaginary perfect knowledge which is nothing but a null set and valueless gloating, which has continued unabated for many years in the guise of dissent, when all you really do is voyeuristically piggyback off the ideas and actions of others, whomever they may be. I pity you and your wicked glee. May you never be separated from it. It is punishment enough.
I have never been insulted with such fabulous prose and language before. Who else can work gassify, “imaginary perfect knowledge”, “valueless gloating” and “voyeuristically piggyback” into the same insult? I ask you … who? I applaud you Arn. I am sure they will tell stories about your smackdown of me for years to come. Can you write some more insults please? I might like to make a collage out of them.
– Extremist2thedhs
Trump and Sanders were the only two candidates that would admit that the economy is unraveling. Its the elephant that Hill ignored. We have now only to look forward to resistance to Trumpism.