Serious Coalition building against Pussy Grabber and his Right Wing Cabinet: Here is Why

http://www.leftsideofhistory.com/2016/12/10/coalition-building-left-wing-democrats/

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In lieu of intelligence briefings, the President-elect of the United States of America is going on a victory tour, spewing demagoguery at cheering, fawning crowds.

It’s the worst sort of anti-elitism writ large: this soon-to-be Leader of the Free World doesn’t pore over lengthy, technical foreign policy documents and consult with intelligence experts. No, he holds Nuremberg-esque rallies that satiate his own egomania and make good on an implicit promise to his supporters. Spectacle, after all, won the election, and it’s the single element of the Trump campaign that is sure to remain steadfast throughout his presidency.

If the constituencies that voted for this man are any indication, there are some odd bedfellows in these stadiums. They run the gamut from half-comatose ‘family values’ Christians to struggling blue collar workers to pseudo-intellectual white supremacist cretins who specialize in shitty misreadings of Nietzsche. The spectrum also includes the many obscenely wealthy executives and bankers and lobbyists who supported Trump; however, they would never deign to attend such an event. Trump conned the people in those audiences into believing he’d fight against them, after all.

As we have seen, the Right does a remarkable job of finding common cause. Surely evangelical Christians weren’t all too fond of Trump’s predilection for grabbing pussy, but they liked his hard stance on anti-abortion policy. And the Paul Ryan-style conservatives disapproved of his brash, childish temperament and screeds against the Washington establishment. But they knew a Supreme Court appointment was at stake, so he got their vote.

Many Trump voters likely found an issue that mattered to them that his platform aligned with (at least ostensibly), rationalized the fact that a vote is far from a full-throated endorsement, and cast their ballots for him. With these compromises and concessions in mind, it makes sense that Trump is so confidently making calls for unity despite running a vitriolic, divisive campaign.

In Cincinnati, the first stop of his victory tour, Trump said, “We’re a very divided nation. But we’re not going to be divided for long.” From the mouth of a man who has threatened to imprison his main political opponent and often takes to Twitter to lambast his critics, these words don’t seem like much of a good-faith attempt at mending a divided country. Rather, they reek of suppressing dissent and moving toward autocracy.

But the American Left—in the broadest scope that idea can signify—actually needs to learn something from the big-tent strategy that got Trump elected. It desperately needs to bring all kinds of people together and work toward building strong coalitions, leading to unexpected (if tenuous) alliances. If Donald Trump and his cadre of wealthy bigots could do it, the Left should be able to as well.

The present and the immediate future demand an urgent response to help protect the most vulnerable people and not cede too much of the terrain that civil rights and collective interests have gained. This will require working with and applying pressure to many groups and powerful figures that the Left may find mostly despicable. But given the current circumstances, it’s a necessity.

In the longer term, there is the question of working toward an American politics with an actual leftist foundation. The tepid, centrist liberalism that came to define the Democratic Party has in many ways been an attempt to safely appeal to a wide range of Americans. But it let down many of the voters that it took for granted, and they took notice. A further left solution could be more successfuland help to improve the lives and material conditions of real people.

There is a dual strategy at play here, and it will require a great deal of negotiation. The necessities of the immediate and the long-term will not always seem concomitant with one another. One issue with the Left is its tendency to get caught up in a politics of purity, which is always fundamentally reductive. So it is critical to remember that successful politics doesn’t need to create consensus; it just needs to appeal to some of the most prominent interests of many people.