How You Will Stop Trump
During my school years, I used to proclaim “I hate history!”— probably because my mom and dad would take me to museums, monuments, temples, famous cemeteries and all manner of other educational experiences when I was young. (I’m a contrarian by nature.) History is non-optional as a topic of interest, however, now.
Willful ignorance of historical fact is a method used by people who are working to push the civil rights movement backwards. Historical knowledge is the tool of those of us who care about progressing it.
In 1916, Jeannette Rankin became the first woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. She represented her constituents in Montana years before national women’s suffrage existed. That didn’t happen until August 18, 1920, with the ratification of the 19th amendment.
My maternal grandmother was born in 1926, six short years after that momentous victory. She’s alive now and still lives independently, for the most part. She’s possibly checking out some interesting birds in her backyard in Indiana or maybe even working on a jigsaw puzzle in her living room right now. The fight for women’s right to vote wasn’t really a far off event. It was an issue that affected the relatives, family friends and teachers of the older people who are in your life.
There isn’t a Moore’s Law for political or cultural progress, as much as it may seem like there should be in the age of social media. The right to vote didn’t magically create gender equality after hundreds of years of a vast gender divide in politics. The pace of progress around women’s representation in U.S. politics is so glacially slow that firsts for women in that realm are still happening in my lifetime. Here are just a few since my own birth:
- Madeleine Albright sworn in as the first woman Secretary of State: 1997, 77 years after women’s suffrage.
- Nancy Pelosi becomes the first woman Speaker of the House: 2007, 87 years after women’s suffrage.
- Hillary Clinton becomes the first woman presidential nominee by a major political party in the U.S.: 2016, 96 years after women’s suffrage.
I don’t have to fight for the right to vote. I plan to use this right in November, because I consider abstaining to be a slap in the face to those in my great-grandparents’ generation who gained this right.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump decided to again show off his signature two-step move: 1) incite violence, 2) lie. This man has no regard for facts, human decency or the wellbeing of anyone outside of himself. We have no reason to believe that his egomaniacal approach would not apply to the entire population of the world during a Trump presidency, were it to happen.
The media has irresponsibly painted Trump as a clown throughout his candidacy, rather than as a serious threat to global safety and stability. Donald Trump is not a clown. He’s an unhinged man with power, and his candidacy is nothing but a way to gain more power. We can’t let him have it. He must be stopped.
A vote for Hillary Clinton is the only way to stop Trump now. Many disagree. I argue that, regardless of your feelings about Clinton, the dangerous threat to the world that is Trump can’t be stopped by anyone else. Thankfully, I’m not alone.
Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson dislikes Clinton. However, he recently spoke with WNYC’s On the Media about how, particularly in battleground states, it is important to use one’s vote strategically:
“The way I think of voting is that you should think about the potential consequence of your vote. That’s the most important thing. Voting isn’t necessarily a way to say who you are and what you care about, it’s something that has consequences.”
He goes on:
“I don’t think of pragmatism as the compromise of your values. Being pragmatic is an enactment of your values. Your values are that you care about what you do in the world.”
Robinson is very clear about his disdain for the Clintons in this interview. But, he says, a strategic vote for Clinton is the only way to stop the very dangerous Trump, who is “talking freely about nuclear war.”
Writer and professor Clay Shirky puts it nicely when he says “there is no such thing as a protest vote”:
“Noisily opting out as a way of demonstrating your pique is an understandable human act. It’s just not a political act. It’s an elaborate way of making the rest of us do the work of deciding.”
Trump would be an immense threat to global security if he were President. Trump can’t reign himself in, so we can’t let him reign our nation. To stop Trump, each of us must vote with a singular focus on that outcome. We must leave our personal feelings behind this November as our foot crosses the threshold into the polling station. We can’t defeat him through not voting at all, nor by voting simply for “anyone but him.” A President Trump would be a serious threat to humanity. Vote for Hillary Clinton. That’s how you will stop Trump.
