The Legacy of 2016
Tuesday, November 8th will see the end of what has been a contentious and riveting election season. After months of mudslinging, political debates, and carefully edited Facebook videos attacking either Trump or Clinton, America will finally reveal who it loves the most, who it wants to be president, who gets the final rose. 2016, however, will not end on Tuesday, November 8th, nor will it end with the end of the calendar year. The rise of Trump in conjunction with the continuation of movements seeking justice for historically oppressed groups have made 2016 the setting for ideological conflict that will continue to influence the American identity for years to come. At the heart of this conflict is a question of America’s values and history, and how they will shape our future.
On the most basic level, Trump’s platform is his campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again.” Implicit in this slogan is the assumption that America was once, but is not currently, great. Trump’s vision to reinvigorate American greatness centers around a few key policies: immigration reform (deporting illegal immigrants and building a wall), trade renegotiation (getting rid of NAFTA and bringing American jobs back to America), rebuilding the American military (to beat ISIS and establish “peace through strength”), and cutting taxes. However, from the outset of the election, Trump has been associated less with his proposed policies and more with the many offensive things he says which reveal his prejudiced and harmful attitude towards women and minorities. He brags of sexually abusive behavior, he makes fun of disabled people, he perpetuates stereotypes of Mexicans as criminals and Muslims as terrorists. He can control neither his Twitter nor his tongue. In short, he consistently exhibits behavior both oppressive and absolutely antithetical to what we would require from a president.
Strangely, these seemingly repellent characteristics are as much a part of his platform as his vision of making America great again. Trump does not shy away from prejudice; he embraces it. Trump openly excludes Mexicans and Muslims from his concept of a “great” America. In fact, his vision of reform involves removing and blocking members of those demographics from the country. This vision is entirely contradictory to the missions of the movement for social justice (e.g., “Black Lives Matter”) which constitutes the other side of the ideological conflict of 2016.
This social justice movement seeks to defend and uplift historically marginalized groups. The social justice understanding of America disagrees with Trump’s platform from its very outset; it maintains that America was never “great” on account of its treatment of non-privileged demographics. How can a nation be great which hails “liberty and justice for all” as its core values, while at the same time oppressing certain peoples on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality? Following this outlook, America can never be “great” until it lives up to its ideals and achieves racial and social equality. Evidently, this outlook is antithetical to the Trump platform of return to the “great” America — for how can you reestablish a greatness that never was? Additionally, Trump’s propositions for how to handle Mexicans and Muslims would continue exactly the kind of behavior social justice condemns. The social justice movement therefore rejects Trump, firstly for the prejudice evident in his rhetoric, but also for his fundamentally irreconcilable evaluation of America and understanding of American history.
As a political figure, Trump has polarized the nation in a way that reveals the division of the American populace. There are those who believe in American greatness (and superiority to foreign countries like China and Mexico), those who don’t, and perhaps those who like America but recognize its flaws and realize that Trump will exacerbate rather than resolve our greatest social issues. Colin Kaepernick’s protest of the national anthem also made this division apparent. Social media reactions to Kaepernick’s protest either rebuked him for daring to insult the national anthem, supported him for using his position to highlight an important social issue, or expressed ambivalence towards his motivations while defending his right to express himself.
Whatever the outcome of this election, this year has shown that we are in the middle of an ideological crisis regarding America’s trajectory going forward. Will we, as Trump suggests, set economic prosperity as the determination of American greatness, perhaps at the expense of non-Americans and marginalized groups? Or will we instead establish a socially conscious standard of greatness? If we base our political decisions on a desire to better the conditions of ourselves and our country, we cannot conform to either Trump or the outlook he represents. We do not, however, need to deny any notion of American greatness simply because of historical injustice. Rather, we should be equally aware of our national shortcomings and strengths, and we should allow that knowledge to inform our understanding of what sort of progress should be our aim.
