Like more than half the American electorate who voted this past week, I was deeply dismayed to learn Donald Trump will be our next president. Although I respect the call for unity made by Hillary Clinton and President Obama, I believe it’s limited to accepting the outcome. If we oppose the laws and policies Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress will try to implement or repeal, then we have an obligation to become an honest and passionate opposition.
Accepting the outcome also means the Republican Party and those who voted for Trump acknowledge he was not popularly elected. He won only because of the Electoral College that he called a “disaster for a democracy” after Obama was re-elected in 2012.
As of Friday morning, Clinton received 395,000 more votes than Trump. Even if that changes, he most definitely wasn’t given a mandate to take the nation in a drastically new direction. The cobbled remnants of what used to be the Grand Old Party should know that.
Clinton’s defeat means the Democratic Party establishment, which she has been part of ever since she was First Lady, also faces its own day of reckoning. Trump won a lot of what had long been one of the party’s core constituencies – working-class Americans.
Thomas Frank saw this coming. In his bestselling book “Listen, Liberal: or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?” he made the case that for 25 years Democrats had given little more than lip service to traditional liberal goals. Among the ones they’d abandoned was the right of the working class to get a fair share of the American economy.
Last March, Frank recognized that Trump was moving into this traditional Democratic territory. But the party, as well as the national media, were too focused on Trump’s caustic personality. “Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds if not the thousands,” Frank wrote. “Conservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them.”
Frank didn’t trust those explanations for Trump’s popularity, so he decided to watch several hours of his speeches. He saw “the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke.” And although disgusted like most, Frank “noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches … Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.” That issue was jobs and trade.
Trump effectively delivered that message to voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, states Democrats had won in every election since 2000. Although some Clinton supporters will argue she lost because Americans rejected a woman for president or because Bernie Sanders supporters wouldn’t support her. But it was those three states that cost her the election.
Clinton also failed to sufficiently mobilize black voters. They didn’t defect to Trump despite his offer to “make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets.” According to long time civil rights journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, Trump was right to call out Democrats for a quarter century of offering African-Americans empty promises in exchange for their votes. That particular appeal aligned with traditional Democrat ideology, not his party’s.
Clinton’s misguided focus on the fringe of Trump’s support blinded her to these problems. Gliding on that air of superiority allowed her to insult millions as a “basket of deplorables,” a remark more disturbing than when a woman told John McCain in 2008 that she thought then-Sen. Barack Obama was “an Arab terrorist.” McCain had the decency to correct her. Clinton’s arrogant Democratic audience applauded and laughed.
The vast majority of Americans who voted for Trump aren’t racists. They’re hard working people, many of whom have been economically left behind by the modern economy and a government indifferent to their plight. And they were rightfully disgusted with the political establishment on both sides of the aisle.
They’ll learn that Trump can’t satisfy both the working class and please the GOP base on every problem he attempts to address. He’ll start to look like all the other elected officials when he breaks campaign promises he couldn’t possibly have kept.
Trump won’t be the chosen one to fix it all, but also our country won’t be destroyed by one man, either. Congress should stand in the way, and there’s enough people — independents, liberals and conservatives — on high alert if Congress fails to control his authoritarian impulses.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
