Liberals to the Mattresses

A practical strategy for wartime Democrats

Now that the tragic reality of the phrase “President-Elect Donald Trump” has begun to sink in, liberals across America have begun coping. Being liberals, we cope by analyzing: we want to know what happens now, or why it even happened in the first place.

We’ve already come up with some pretty good answers. We know that the Electoral College stole from the majority again; that Republican voter suppression finally took the ultimate toll; that the media at every turn enabled and excused an incompetent; that the Democratic Party favored a technocratic insider in a season of revolutions; that the FBI chose partisan loyalty over the rule of law; that social networks willingly fed voters a post-fact reality; and more, and even more still. Most critically, we know—as we always should have—that white, misogynist, nationalist America is still out for blood, and it will not rest until it has had its fill.

It is deeply depressing, and we should not delude ourselves: after eight glorious years in Obama’s America we are plunged, darkly and despairingly, back into wartime.

But we would be wrong to despair too much. Although Trump’s victory is surely a defeat for everything good in this country we love so dearly, it does not mean that we’ve hit the end of the line. We know that America is better than this, and every one of us will fight tooth and nail to see that truth actualized. As with any war, there will be casualties—people will be hurt, sometimes in visible and demoralizing defeat, but we should not permit that to distract us from the big picture. Instead, we should gather every final, gasping iota of our determination and focus it collectively, laserlike, on this singular fact: we can win.

Winning will not be easy. In many cases, it will mean leaving our comfort zones for the sake of the greater good. But in the long run, it will mean a victory for those ideals that we cherish most, a victory for the more perfect America that we dream of every day and every night. That is a fight worth winning. Here is how we can make it happen.

Become a vocal champion of centrist Democrats, especially in red states.

Here’s a truth: democracy is a zero-sum game—one person’s win is another person’s loss. Since the American political system employs single-member districts, this means that whoever amasses the largest coalition of voters the fastest wins, full stop. Amassing large coalitions means appealing to a great many interest groups, not all of whom want the same things. This means that we won’t all get what we want, liberals least of all. In short, the politics of coalition building is the politics of hard-nosed compromise.

Living this truth will not be painless to those of us that are young. Our liberalism is quite liberal: it centers around things like a Scandinavian-style social safety net, firm-handed gun control, and the prompt enactment of a carbon tax. But winning the war will mean the sacrifice of idols. It will mean standing together, with votes and dollars, alongside Democrats who support school prayer, who do not mind free access to guns, who favor more coal extraction. Like it or not, we need these people to keep our country from the brink. We need them because the ounce of sacrifice we make in their names will absolutely be worth the pound of salvation they will bring to the table.

It will come in votes they will cast on the floor of Congress when the vultures descend to privatize Social Security and Medicare. It will come when restrictions that functionally outlaw abortion are turned back. It will come when they vote against war. Many liberals turn their noses up at the memory of the Clintonian centrism of the 90s, but there is no denying that a second Bush Administration would have been much worse. The stakes are unimaginably high this time around, and we will need allies. We will need Democrats who can win.

Become an activist with your time and your money.

Much has rightly been made of how Trump’s worst impulses will need to be checked by a Republican Congress. This is true, but only partly so. Trumpism will also be kept in check by an entire Democratic policy industrial complex whose sole task for the next four years will be to keep him from blowing up too much of Democrats’ hard-gotten progress.

It is our mandate to stand with and support these people, for they will be on the front lines of the coming battle. It will be Planned Parenthood that will keep abortion, contraception, and reproductive health services safe, affordable, and legal. It will be the ACLU’s litigators that will keep the press free and protestors safe from federal violence. It will be NextGen Climate’s lobbyists that will keep the cancerous web of fracking pipelines from growing any more than they already have.

We liberals must avail ourselves of these organizations as conduits for our fury and our fear. We must donate as much as we are able, and volunteer for as long as we are able to make sure that Trumpism is kept in check. We must call our congresspeople, write letters of indignation, and not shut up. Democracy does not happen only in presidential and midterm elections; it is constant, and we must be constantly engaged if we are to succeed.

And when elections do come, we must make sure that we turn out in breathtaking numbers, every single cycle, not only to vote but to phone-bank, block-walk, registration-drive, and scream at the top of our lungs. We owe at least that much not only to the next Democratic President, but to Democrats who fight for progressivism up and down the ballot. It is our solemn duty to these people that we show up and publicly affirm the value of progressivism to civil society. Without continuously engaged activism, we cannot win the war.

Expose yourself to far-right white America, and learn everything you can.

One stunning aspect of this election was how badly liberals were blindsided by it—I myself had predicted a 5-point Clinton blowout. It was tremendously shocking, and part of the reason it was so shocking was because we had no idea where this impossible nihilism could have come from. We knew that xenophobia and institutional mistrust were out there, but not at anything resembling the scale we saw on Election Day.

Of course, we’ve since had the wool torn from our eyes: we know that it came from white America, and it came in particular from a slice of 30+ white America that has completely lost faith in America’s institutions and America’s promise. Many of these people used to vote Democratic, but suddenly and collectively felt that a crisis had taken hold among their ranks. They lashed out, blaming Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, Black people, big banks, academics, artists, and just about every other member of the Obama Coalition that wasn’t them. The result bore out on Election Day.

While racial and cultural resentment itself is not easily addressed with policy solutions, it is nonetheless urgent that liberals try to listen to these people and their eardrum-shattering noise. We should listen not because their hate is legitimate—far from it—but because we must learn how to pacify the angry hound at our doorstep. Clearly, whatever Hillary Clinton offered by way of her candidacy was not enough, and so we—white progressives in particular—must do everything we can within the boundaries permitted by our progressive principles to offer new solutions that will calm the hate of white America. This could take the form of free job retraining programs; it could be taxing the hell out of the rich. Whatever the solution, it absolutely cannot sell out the interests of minorities and communities of color, but it does need to be strategic.

While it sickens me to think that such darkness would drive Democratic policy priorities, the alternative is more grotesque still. It would mean losing election after election, over and over and over. The alternative is more President Trump. The pain inflicted would be beyond reckoning. If the war is to be won, the saddening truth is that more of white America must be on our side.

Look out for each other, because war is hell.

The coming political war will be the work of our lives, and it will be immensely rewarding, but also exhausting. There will be great victories, but also great losses. It will be dark before it will be dawn. This means that we must look out for each other, particularly the most vulnerable among us. We will need to look out for the bullied Muslim child, the working-class single mom who will lose her Obamacare insurance, the undocumented student who worries she will be deported and separated from her family. The war will claim real-life victims, and we will have to serve as combat medics just as much as we will be infantrymen.

This is a watershed moment in American history, and I’m urging you to join me on the front lines. When I tell my future family about what the decade from 2016-2026 was like, I want to tell them about how I fought away the darkness instead of getting engulfed by it. I want to tell them that I helped save America from its worst impulses, and brought us back from a brink that has long since passed. I want to tell them that we stared into an abyss and found our better selves.

But more than any of this, I want to tell them: I won the war.

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