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GELFAND’S WORLD - All the liberal media are stressing over the election results. About the nicest turn of phrase was "catastrophe." Compared to our earlier wishful thinking about a Democratically controlled government that could have reversed the Supreme Court's recent ruinous decisions, it's clearly not a great result. But to quote the old adage, "Don't mourn, organize" -- the question is what to do now while the wolves are solidly ensconced in the chicken coop.
I'd suggest a couple of high priorities.
The first is to protect the Constitution. We're talking about maybe 3 or 4 key elements. The first 2 are the sections describing the powers of the president and of the congress. The convention that created the original Constitution obviously did not choose to create a king or a dictator. Let's do our best to keep it that way.
You may point out that the current occupants of the Supreme Court have gone out of their way to protect Donald Trump from legitimate criminal prosecution and from doing his time. We probably can't do anything about those unwise decisions, but we can do our best to shout out our outrage over any extensions of these unconstitutional decisions, using the power of public outcry to affect the court's reasoning. This is thin at best, but it's what we have available. And it may be possible that the newer conservatives on the court will recognize that they have gone a long way towards creating a monster. They may wish to put some limits on presidential authority before it is too late.
The next priority is to protect the freedoms described in the Bill of Rights. I would like to hope that Donald Trump's recent comments about going after his political enemies were just his sardonic sense of humor coming out. But the problem with Trump is that he goes from randomly generated whimsy to cruel vengeance in the blink of an eye. He also has the unfortunate tendency of surrounding himself with some of the worst people to sport 46 chromosomes. For these reasons, we have to be prepared to raise a ruckus whenever the new administration threatens freedom of speech or freedom of the press. We certainly have heard Trump making veiled threats against both.
Just to make clear that this comment isn't a joke, and that there are followers of Trump who really wish to end American freedoms, I will quote the following from Quora:
That's quite an enemies list, even if you recognize the misspelling of Schiff and the odd grammatical error. The author of this diatribe (camouflaged as a legal question) shares with Trump a lack of knowledge of what the Constitution actually says. Like it or not, we have to recognize the existence of people who are malignantly ignorant, including the newly elected chief executive. We need to be pointing out to the American people that we need to protect the 1st Amendment just as vigorously as some like to protect the 2nd.
Finally, we ought to be protecting those rights that are defined by the 14th Amendment, including the defining of citizenship. The rightwing has been attacking the idea of birthright citizenship for decades, and we have to watch them carefully whenever they gain power.
Another priority which goes beyond our borders (and attacks a defined presidential prerogative) is the defense of Ukraine. The nearly 50% of the American public who voted for Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump should state clearly -- and loudly -- that we support Ukraine against Russia and call on Europe and Asia to come to her defense both economically and through military support. Perhaps a few Republicans who remember being anticommunist in a different era can recognize the neo-Soviet threat and call on their senators to oppose Russian expansionism the way that they did in the 1950s and '60s. This may be the one political position where Republicans and Democrats can join together.
As to the rest of the domestic agenda that the Trump administration proposes to effect -- tariffs, tax cuts on the rich and on corporations, mass deportations -- we will have to wait and see. The imposition of tariffs cannot help but add to the costs of most everything. Cutting taxes on the rich cannot help but add to the national deficit unless taxes are increased on the poor and the middle class. And of course there will be those Republicans in the congress who have pushed for and will continue to push for cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and the Affordable Care Act. This did not go well for the Republicans the last time it was proposed back in the days of George W. Bush.
Every time the Democrats lose a presidential election, they join in a mass orgy of recrimination and self-doubt, offering arguments about how the message needs to be subtly massaged or there needs to be better outreach to those who despise them.
May I offer a slightly different approach?
The right wing has developed a whole communication system of its own through Fox News and talk radio that invites people to enter the bubble and stay there. It has been called many things, including the term "right wing noise machine," but it is in all possible ways a vast instrument of propaganda that tells people that Democrats and all liberals are traitors who cannot be trusted to think clearly. The liberal side of the political spectrum has not even tried to grapple with this massive apparatus. One way to do so is to tell its viewers and listeners that they are not getting the whole story. They don't have to believe us, but we at least owe them the duty of informing them that they are being played for suckers.
How to do this? It's a good question, but the kind of money that was supplied to the Harris campaign could do a lot to communicate that message. Imagine, just for a start, putting up billboards all over the country pointing out that a counterargument exists.
There are those who will explain to us that this would be a difficult task, but how many more right-wing victories are we willing to endure?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
