As an introductory note, I am writing this post from Quebec, not because I've become an ex-pat for the Trump Presidency but because I'm on one of my short pre-holiday vacations, recharging my intellectual batteries before I invariably get stuck selling hundreds of turkeys and pounding innumerable pounds of fat wrap to encircle Christmas roasts. I haven't made an extensive effort to engage folks up here in Montreal on the US election. My inclination is that, in a place where liberalism has not yet been eclipsed by the present rise of nationalist chauvinism, the reaction is probably one colored both by a degree of embarrassment for us in our election of an arrogant, bigoted con-man as the leader of the free world and by a sense of apprehension at what the election result will mean for the future of Canada/Quebec, especially with regard to Trump's promises to engage in renegotiation of trade agreements. The point of this post is not, however, to extensively assess the effects of the election on US-Canada/Quebec relations. Rather, my purpose is to evaluate the consequences of the election for certain liberal agendas and offer some suggestions on weathering the storm for the next four to eight years, in lieu of emigrating.
1. The New Deal is dead and the neoliberal Hillary Clinton was never going to resurrect it. Erstwhile American supporters of the welfare state need to get over its demise and start working for alternatives that realize basic social justice goals through a mix of policy experimentation at lower echelons of government and non-governmental community organizing. With Trump's victory and the election of two Republican houses of Congress, the American political right has an unprecedented opportunity to remake domestic policy in order to pull America back to the policy landscape that existed before the New Deal, with only Senate rules on floor debate (i.e. the filibuster) in place to spare us from the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and from significant policy experimentations with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and federal housing policy (i.e. supporting the stability of secondary mortgage markets and promoting home ownership among economically marginalized populations). The best that can be hoped for, in this circumstance, is that very little in Washington will change that Trump cannot effect by executive order, a field that still confers significant power in the hands of an individual with questionable competence as an executive and with questionable comprehension of his own limitations under the Constitution. I don't want to argue that there is nothing to worry about here with regard to the retraction of the welfare state in areas that may adversely affect most Americans, but things may not necessarily be as grim as they seem - Trump cannot remake the federal government by himself, even if that is what he and the people who elected him ultimately believe.
Furthermore, had she won, the neoliberal Hillary Clinton was never going to pursue an agenda oriented toward resurrecting broader social welfare institutions (e.g. shoring up the long term finances of the Social Security retirement trust fund, introducing a public option to the ACA structure, etc.). If these ideas were written into the Democratic Party platform, then it was just a residual effect of the left-populism of the Sanders campaign during the Democratic primaries and a carrot to get the Sanders people to show up at the polls in November (which apparently worked out just great, proving that all those excited millennials who supported Sanders in the spring were not stupid enough to believe that Hillary was going to endorse all of Sanders' best policy recommendations). Moreover, there wasn't adequate support in Washington to pursue anything close to a liberal social welfare agenda and there would not have been even if the Democrats took control of the Senate. Fundamentally, the country as a whole just doesn't buy into the idea of going back to the New Deal and the Great Society right now. If it was, then we would not only have strong Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress but a new Democratic administration, committed to pursuing a not-so-incrementalist agenda of economic democracy. If Clinton had been elected, we would have been headed toward at least two more years of gridlock over domestic policy and, perhaps, an acrimonious continuation of investigations and a potential impeachment (though not removal by the Senate) over Clinton's mishandling of classified information as Secretary of State.
On the other hand, maybe the electoral outcome is one more chance for supporters of social justice to disengage from a statist agenda for change, or at least from a statist agenda that relies on broad legislative and administrative enactments by the federal government. If a Trump Presidency means that the federal government is going to back away from the responsibilities that it took onto itself since the 1930s to prevent poverty among the aged, to counter malnutrition of children in low income households, and to address health care deficiencies in low income households, among other things, then it will indisputably open up a space for states and non-governmental community organizations to assume these roles. The missing piece in this regard might be federal tax relief - if the federal government is going to divest of certain domestic policy responsibilities, then other echelons of government will only be able to make up the difference if they can command larger fiscal resources and that would mean shifting some of the tax burden exacted from American households from the federal government to states and local governments. The ensuing policy regimes might be manifestly inferior to existing federal administration in certain domestic policy areas, but, in my view, it's better for state governments and non-governmental organizations to undertake modest relief for, say, penniless retirees, deprived of the existing federal Social Security safety net, than to let such individuals starve, freeze to death in the winter, or go entirely homeless. If a majority of the US population (i.e. the "99 percent") gets to learn, more viscerally than today, the meaning of fiscal austerity at the behest of an extreme minority of winners, then maybe the moral and ideological impacts of austerity will have, over time, justified the sacrifice.
2. If and when the Trump administration finally is enabled to reconfigure the federal judiciary, all of the liberal agendas promoting racial justice, reproductive rights, and marriage equality in the face of racial bigotry, patriarchal oppression, and sectarian prejudice will be eroded away, demonstrating, fundamentally, how short-sighted the idea of expanding individual rights through the federal judiciary, rather than through statutory enactment by democratically elected legislature, actually was. At the outset, I want to enunciate the fact that Roe v. Wade (1973) was a bad judicial precedent. As a matter of Constitutional law, substantive due process has always been and will always be a two-edged sword. At the end of the Nineteenth century and the beginning of the Twentieth, the political left had a long history of being bludgeoned by jurists, fabricating unwritten Constitutional doctrines to suffocate legislative social justice projects (e.g. the elimination of child labor) that enjoyed popular support and democratic mandates at the state level. That all ended suddenly in 1937, but, then, as the left began to savor the right of state legislatures to enact policies for the economic benefit of their citizens,
substantive due process became a mechanism for approaching the desired social projects of the left in the name of racial equality, reproductive freedom, and the struggle against other entrenched manifestations of prejudice against insular minorities (e.g. LGBT populations). In this manner, by a seven to two majority, the US Supreme Court spawned an unwritten right to privacy in reproductive decisions by women through the Fourteenth Amendment, determining off-handedly that state legislatures lack a compelling governmental interest to protect life in the womb before the end of the first trimester of fetal development on the principle that the life of the fetus would be non-viable outside of the womb. When nine jurists with no background in medical science determine when, as a matter of Constitutional law, human life can be considered to begin, against the wishes of numerous state legislatures, their respective electorates, and diverse sectarian religious traditions, it should stand to reason that the argument is not settled and that the right of reproductive liberty, enshrined through a dubious interpretation of due process, may not be viable in the long term.
When the Trump administration fills Justice Scalia's open seat on the Supreme Court with another avowed conservative, the only thing that will conceivably stand in the way of the overthrow of Roe v. Wade is the continuation of the Court in its current form, with its current array of liberal justices and Justice Kennedy, who can be counted on as a libertarian friend of individual rights against governmental interference. When Kennedy or one of the liberals goes (probably passing away), so, invariably, will the institution of reproductive freedom as a matter of federal Constitutional protection. For that matter, so may the institution of marriage equality/gay marriage and a slew of other judicial precedents anchored on liberal institutions of Constitutional interpretation going back to the Warren court. In my opinion, it was utterly short-sighted of the liberal supporters of these institutions to wager the solidity of legal protection on the continuity of a federal judiciary that would hold the same willingness to expand the concept of due process to encompass their ideals. In the effort to enshrine new individual rights under the US Constitution, moreover, they have nurtured peculiar alliances of enemies, determined to turn back the clock on a society where they feel alienated by the rise of godless secularists devoid of any respect for the sanctity of human life or the preservation of traditional morality. Succinctly, I would contend that the durability of reproductive freedom and marriage equality would have benefited more from an incrementalist approach through state legislatures, acknowledging that such an approach would have produced patchworks of reproductive rights and marital institutions enduring for decades or entire generations. On the other hand, once the federal judiciary steps out of the way, that is precisely the best thing that liberals can hope for!
3. If Black lives don't matter now, then it stands to reason that they will be worth even less over the course of a Trump administration. There is nothing to suggest that the Trump administration is going to make any tangible effort to redress racial inequalities that are driving the current course of race relations in urban America and, especially, relations between African-American communities and local law enforcement. And then there is race. My point in this post is not to heave all of Trump's supporters into Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables," but we have to acknowledge that there are a lot of abject racists who voted for Trump, perhaps out of some expectation that somehow a Trump victory would restore the "natural" order of American race relations (Whites on top, Negroes down below, other assorted brown or otherwise colored populations somewhere in between). Furthermore, enhanced racial subordination does not require transparent, de jure mechanisms to segregate and enforce racial hierarchies, a fact that citizens of Massachusetts should be manifestly aware of in regard to the reaction to forced desegregation of public schools in the 1970s. It cannot be overemphasized that the racial compositions of most urban communities in the Commonwealth have been, to a significant degree, shaped by White flight to suburban communities, arising, in part, from desegregation of urban schools. The continuity of disparities in the educational performance of urban and suburban school districts in Massachusetts, highlighted on election day with the failure to pass an expansion of public charter schools in municipalities with underperforming district public schools (a measure largely supported by voters in urban communities), constitutes a significant vector in the persistence of racial inequality in the Commonwealth, particularly with respect to employment, income, and entrepreneurial opportunities for non-White populations.
With regard to race relations writ large, it is not that the Trump administration is going to advance an explicit federal policy agenda in order to actively promote further degradation of race relations or actively create de facto conditions for racial subordination. Rather, Trump was elected by a demographic within the US population that is overwhelmingly sick and tired of hearing about racial inequality from the media, of being called racist (when they can point out that one or two of their friends are Black), and of flipping the bill for government programs intended, in part, to redress the prolonged impact of racial inequality in access to education, employment, housing, and a range of other public policy areas. Most Trump voters, especially outside of the South, would likely view the Ku Klux Klan with utter contempt, but, conversely, the Trump electorate by and large simply wants the Civil Rights era to finally be over and for America to move along as if there was nothing more to be done. On the contrary, the creation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the current struggle of relations between African-American communities and law enforcement is indicative of the fact that the Civil Rights era is far from over and that, emphatically, every effort to prematurely move beyond the struggle for racial equality and justice constitutes a step backward.
If the Trump administration is going to effectively serve the wishes of those who put it in power, then racial relations in the US are going to fester for the next four years with, at best, no appreciably efforts made by the federal government to address important issues facing African-American and other racial and ethnic minorities. That conceivably implies that the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is going to be placed on an extremely short leash fiscally and operationally. There will be no more exhaustive investigations into police brutality against African-Americans or other minority groups. In turn, without the specter of federal investigation into police practices, a spiraling of violence between local law enforcement and African-American communities is a possibility, as both sides conclude, rightly, that Washington will not intervene to reduce incendiary pressures. At worst, being a "law and order" administration, Trump will actively intervene in local flash points of racial violence to bolster law enforcement without any effort to acknowledge possibly valid grievances from aggrieved populations. Such a situation implies an expressly autocratic turn to repress movements for racial justice and perpetuate discriminatory practices by law enforcement. Effectively, if Black lives don't matter now, then they certainly will matter even less in four years as the federal government does everything in its power to make believe that racism doesn't exist.
4. Policy agendas aside, people on the American left need to come to some conclusions on what it is that we are dealing with in a Trump administration. Can Trump be treated as if he was just a garden variety conservative Republican who will undertake a strongly conservative agenda in conjunction with Congressional Republicans? On the contrary, is Trump something completely different - an autocrat and potential fascist, backed by a narrow majority of the American electorate, intent on a radical transformation of the federal government and willing to contravene the US Constitution in the process? The answer to these questions is not going to become apparent immediately, but we need to be vigilant that we do not mistake the latter circumstance with the former. There has been an impulse apparent among leadership within the Democratic Party and among educated liberals, generally, to conclude that Trump's victory needs to be treated in approximately the same manner as the Republican electoral victory in 2000 (beyond the initial struggle over ballots in Florida). That is to say, if we assume that Trump is no different from any other Republican political leader, then Democratic leaders should pursue efforts to forge compromise with the administration on domestic policy agendas where possible and adopt conventional legislative tactics to minimize the negative effects of shifts in federal policy. Effectively, with Republican leadership in control of the executive and legislative branches of government, we can assume that domestic policy agendas will shift to the right but that the Constitutional institutions of government will not dramatically change. This conclusion might be overly presumptive. Emphatically, I think that it is too early to axiomatically label Trump a fascist. It is apparent that some corners of the American left are already proceeding from such a determination. Protests that are already taking place in numerous American cities reflect fears that the Trump administration will follow through on numerous campaign promises, including mass deportations of undocumented individuals and restrictions on Muslim Americans, possibly including registration with local authorities. The latter of these policy proposals, in particular, would represent a pernicious contravening of American Constitutional institutions respecting freedom of religion. If such a policy was enacted, then we can only guess which other Constitutional protections might be actively violated by the Trump administration, with the consent of those who elected him.
Succinctly, I would argue that the US, as a whole, has something much more ominous to worry about than the impending Trump administration per se. The election of Trump is the clearest sign that the American public has become dangerously polarized on a range of policy issues and, more fundamentally, on the role and purpose of the federal government, as outlined within the US Constitution. The limitations of federal power, as outlined in the Constitution, are plastic but not non-existent. We forever find ourselves debating what the proper role of the federal government is. In these terms, the civil war was one extremely traumatic episode of sorting out the authority of the federal government in relation to the states. Something tells me that we are approaching once again one of those violent efforts to sort out what limitations exist on Constitutional federal power. At this moment, the focus of that violent struggle might not be opposing field armies, but opposing mobs, in the same sense that the 1960s race riots were struggles between mobs, mediated through the forces of law and order. Can the latter be counted on when they are shaped by the impulse of white nationalism? That is to say, I believe we are heading toward a moment in US history when decent people, with respect for our Constitutional traditions are going to have to put their bodies on the line against the federal government and its supporters. This doesn't paint a pretty picture on the number of freedom loving Americans who may die fighting their government in this period of American history. The left might be wise to fundamentally reconsider pacifism and join the "Second Amendment people" at their own game.
