Keep On Pushing

We're in hell. But we have no choice but to maintain the struggle.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

In the end, it wasn’t even close.

Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was a leap into the great unknown—powered by our undemocratic electoral system and foisted on a majority of voters who’d wanted someone else to win.

Not this time. This time, every single person in this country knew exactly who Trump was. They’d all lived through his first term. And all across America, people asked for more.

Trump won everywhere. He gained ground in almost every state and county in America—in rural and urban areas, in the North and the South and the Midwest. He won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and North Carolina and Georgia. He will be the first Republican to win the national popular vote in 20 years.

He is what this country wants, and now, he is what this country, and the world, is going to get—along with a Republican Senate and, quite possibly, a Republican House. It is as decisive a win as we’ve seen in a long time.

It feels certain that Trump’s second term will be worse than his first. He has an emphatic mandate, an unrestrained Supreme Court, a Republican Party fully signed up to his cult of personality, a shattered and pathetic opposition party, and a cabal of thugs and maniacs who have been huffing from the deranged fumes of the far-right swamp for nearly a decade. Things will be worse because we’re nearly a decade further into the onward march of fascism across the world. They’ll be worse because Trump has no mountains left to climb and nothing left to lose. They’ll be worse because our planet is dying more quickly than ever.

It’s a desperately sad and scary time, and we should all give ourselves permission to be sad and scared for a little while. But at a certain point, we are going to have to pick ourselves up, figure out what the hell just happened, and think about how to defeat the forces that gave Donald Trump a second term. And then we have to vow to keep on pushing.

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First, though, a little blame. We can start by looking at the people Trump just trounced: the Democratic Party. There will be endless analyses of why Kamala Harris lost, and endless recriminations about who is responsible for that loss. Most of those diagnoses will probably have some element of truth to them. Racism and sexism are alive and well. Incumbent governments around the world have paid a heavy price for inflation and the soaring cost of living. Voters have been saying that the country is on the wrong track for years. Maybe this goose was cooked long ago. Who even knows so soon after the election.

But one thing I hope we can all agree on is that, whether or not Democrats were doomed from the start, they ran one of the most awful, demoralizing, incompetent campaigns in living memory.

I keep coming back to one word for the Democratic effort we all just suffered through: contempt.

Democrats looked at an electorate screaming for years for Joe Biden to leave the race and laughed in their faces. Then they treated us all like fools for weeks after Biden’s debate fiasco, insisting that we hadn’t seen what we so obviously had seen.

When Harris replaced Biden, she kept his obviously disastrous campaign team in place. We were given weeks of empty spectacle, culminating in a Democratic National Convention festooned with cops and Republicans, where dissent was systematically suppressed. Harris spent untold time and energy going after Liz Cheney Republicans, who exist mostly in the minds of West Wing-pilled DC idiots, rather than putting forth any kind of tangible vision for the country. She selected a vice president on the basis of his ability to draw contrasts with the MAGA movement and promptly muzzled him. She cozied up to corporate elites like Mark Cuban. Her surrogates repeatedly chose the most patronizing and alienating approach to voters. Harris went on live national television and, when asked whether she would have done anything differently from the deeply unpopular incumbent president whose presence was a continual millstone around her neck, said she couldn’t think of a single thing.

And, last but certainly not least, Harris and her campaign went out of their way, repeatedly, to show their contempt and disrespect for voters pleading with her to take even the smallest steps to end the genocide in Gaza. She made the calculation that not enough people cared about the horrors that she and the rest of the Biden administration were helping to perpetrate to make it worth her while to earn their votes. She sent fanatical Zionists like Ritchie Torres and racists like Bill Clinton to Michigan. She did everything she could to tell Muslim and Arab voters, and anyone else in despair about the genocide, that their concerns were meaningless to her. Contempt, contempt, contempt, all the way down.

What was the result of all that contempt? Mass demobilization:

Twitter

Great job, guys.

Make no mistake: the inability of the Democratic Party to stave off a second Trump term is one of the worst, most damning political failures in American history. It is a catastrophic, thoroughly discredited entity, more concerned with maintaining its position at the heart of the system than in changing that system in any meaningful way. The current leaders of the party will be remembered, above all else, as handmaidens for fascism. May they never know a day’s peace.

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Now let’s talk about us.

We are in a bleak, horrible period of history—one filled with violence and hatred and dislocation and planetary collapse. I have no particular hope that things will get much better anytime soon.

But that is no excuse not to keep trying.

It’s easy to look at the broad sweep of history and not feel how hard it was, and how long it took, for change to come. We see the civil rights movement and overlook the century of struggle that preceded it—struggle that coincided with some of the worst, most desolate times for Black people in this country. We see the fight for womens’ liberation, for queer liberation, for anti-colonial independence, for labor, for the right to control our own bodies and our own destinies, and we log the wins rather than the grinding, often unsuccessful effort that led to those wins.

Most people in those fights never got to see their work pay off. They lived, and died, in a world where the battle had not yet been won. But they kept on pushing—because they knew that there was no other choice.

Right now, there are people in Gaza, surrounded by death and grief and starvation. Their world has been obliterated to nothing. They have lost more than almost any of us in this country could possibly imagine. But they’re not giving up. They’re not forfeiting their right to stand up for themselves, to continue to resist the people who want them wiped off the face of the earth.

If they can do that, if our ancestors could do it, then so can we. So let’s take a day or two to rage at the world we live in, and then let’s promise to meet each other in the struggle.