It’s a little embarrassing to admit how stunned we were as a staff at the Washington Monthly when Donald Trump won the election in 2016. I think everyone was shellshocked but it fell on Nancy LeTourneau and me to keep everything going, with regular posts as if nothing catastrophic had occurred.
It wasn’t easy. For a while, it was excruciatingly difficult. Very slowly and almost imperceptibly, things began to return to a form of normalcy. Of course, it was impossible not to resist this process since it felt like capitulation or acceptance of something that was wholly unacceptable. But it happened anyway, as the unthinkable became a reality that we had to deal with every day.
Eventually, those initial feelings of dread passed, even as the rationale for the dread was confirmed on a constant basis during all waking hours. We got down to the grind of resistance and the documentation of atrocities. And, in some respects, it became not all the different from the job of blogging during George W. Bush’s two terms in office.
But, I have to tell you that the dread has returned. At least for me, I was sustained for a long time by the feeling that Trump was an aberration that could and would be corrected. The success in the midterms seemed to confirm this. I am no longer finding that kind of sustenance readily available to me.
Things are breaking at such a rapid pace now that it seems like a runaway train, and the idea that this train can be derailed is looking bleaker by the day. For sure, I can still find reasons to hope. The polls suggest that Trump would lose to any candidate the Democrats’ put up. But this feels more like grasping at straws than actual reassurance.
Getting Trump out of office is going to take an all hands on board effort, and I see the opposition as unfocused and splintered. The institutions that could assure a fair election and broken up on the shoals. The establishment is proving powerless to protect its own interests, and those very much include many interests they share with ordinary Americans.
This will be the furthest thing from a fair fight, and the referees are either absent or complicit in Trump’s power grab and lawlessness.
So, it’s just hard to do this work now. I’ll still do it, in part because it’s never been so important. But it’s just a thankless grind most of the time. If you appreciate what I do and would like to encourage me to keep at it, please consider getting a subscription so you can see all my material, including much that doesn’t appear anywhere else.
I still feel like what I do is vital and not available from other sources. I guess that’s what keeps me going.
5
Different era, different context, different people, but Thomas Merton’s 1966 “Letter to a Young Activist” may have some words that provide a helpful (if not very comforting) perspective:
“…do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”
http://jimandnancyforest.com/2014/10/mertons-letter-to-a-young-activist/
I hate to see you feeling so down Martin. I am too, because the breakage is coming at an astonishing pace. However, until the election in November, we fight with everything we have to give. There’s just isn’t any time for mind numbing pessimism now. After the election we can revisit this.
4.5
5
5
The normalization has succeeded because it has been incremental. I see some hope that exactly what is most terrifying – that Trump has been unleashed – that the atrocities will become so rapid and blatant, is what will abolish the perception of incrementalism; that the sleeping apoliticals will notice it happening. In particular, a tsunami of revenge has begun rolling in, Trump’s fresh sense of empowerment means there’s no serious attempt to hide it, and vicious revenge is something the man on the street can easily process.
We have understood, but the media have never grasped, the first maxim: Believe what the tyrant says. He was never joking about “lock her up”. It was never merely a line to pump up his rallies. He will not be able to restrain himself from publicly instructing Barr to empanel a Grand Jury against Clinton, and likely against whoever wins the Democratic nod. In my battered innocence, I can’t believe that the media, or ordinary independents, would continue to sleepwalk through that moment.
I wish I could trust that trust. I hope that Barr lacks the power (he certainly doesn’t lack the intelligence) to restrain that royal impulse until after the election.
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4
We’ve got to maintain our determination to win. It will help our chances if we keep the healthiest frame of mind possible, and if we maintain maximum perspective. I refuse to fall into despair. There are many evidences of our prospects being good. I see the dangers and hazards you see, but we’ve just got to soldier forward and win.
Our coalition can’t be allowed to split significantly. Every day, we all have to be thinking “what am I doing to help build the coalition of 67 million voters our candidate will need for us to be confident that they will win?” We have to work together to ensure our coalition will push past voter suppression techniques and see that their votes are properly counted. We have Executive powers in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that we did not have in 2016. That will help.
Trump will continue to do nothing to broaden his base. His base is remarkably small for an incumbent President. We have a House of Representatives which can and almost certainly will continue to conduct investigations of Trump and his Administration which will damage the President’s electoral prospects.
Glass half full. No more full than that. Every day to Election Day.