Lessons from 2016 post-election

Masha Gessen warned just after the 2016 election that the Democratic leadership was far too eager to pretend that normal democratic and rule-of-law practices would continue under a Donald Trump (Administration Autocracy: Rules for Survival NYBooks 11/10/2016). She quotes defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton the Wednesday after the election:

[S]he said, resignedly,

We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.

Gessen continued:

The president [Obama] added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself—as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.

Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.” Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”

She noted that "this talk [from Clinton and Obama] assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign."

And she warned:

More dangerously, Clinton’s and Obama’s very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to [Trump's] minority victory. ... Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over. [my emphasis]

The Democratic leadership, even in 2020, is still mired in its post-Reagan model of accepting Republican framing of issues (e.g., budget deficits are terrible) and pretending decade after decade that the continually radicalizing Republican Party is center-right party committed to democracy and the rule of law, while the Republican Party itself has been moving to full-blown Trumpism, where it stands right now.

Her final paragraph still resonates:

Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance — stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.

Some of those substantial changes need to be high priority, including Constitutional Amendments that provide equal rights for women, direct election of the President, and overturning Citizens United so that Congress and state legislatures can restrict campaign contributions from corporations and plutocrats.

But in the immediate future, these changes would require a Democratic Party that did not have a deer-in-the-headlights attitude toward their authoritarian Republican opponents.