Like more than half the American electorate who voted this past week, I was deeply dismayed to learn Donald Trump will be our next president. Although I respect the call for unity made by Hillary Clinton and President Obama, I believe it\u2019s limited to accepting the outcome. If we oppose the laws and policies Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress will try to implement or repeal, then we have an obligation to become an honest and passionate opposition.<\/p>\n
Accepting the outcome also means the Republican Party and those who voted for Trump acknowledge he was not popularly elected. He won only because of the Electoral College that he called a \u201cdisaster for a democracy\u201d after Obama was re-elected in 2012.<\/p>\n
As of Friday morning, Clinton received 395,000 more votes than Trump. Even if that changes, he most definitely wasn\u2019t given a mandate to take the nation in a drastically new direction. The cobbled remnants of what used to be the Grand Old Party should know that.<\/p>\n
Clinton\u2019s defeat means the Democratic Party establishment, which she has been part of ever since she was First Lady, also faces its own day of reckoning. Trump won a lot of what had long been one of the party\u2019s core constituencies – working-class Americans.<\/p>\n
Thomas Frank saw this coming. In his bestselling book \u201cListen, Liberal: or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?\u201d he made the case that for 25 years Democrats had given little more than lip service to traditional liberal goals. Among the ones they\u2019d abandoned was the right of the working class to get a fair share of the American economy.<\/p>\n
Last March, Frank recognized that Trump was moving into this traditional Democratic territory. But the party, as well as the national media, were too focused on Trump\u2019s caustic personality. \u201cArticles that accuse Trump\u2019s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds if not the thousands,\u201d Frank wrote. \u201cConservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Frank didn\u2019t trust those explanations for Trump\u2019s popularity, so he decided to watch several hours of his speeches. He saw \u201cthe man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke.\u201d And although disgusted like most, Frank \u201cnoticed something surprising. In each of the speeches \u2026 Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.\u201d That issue was jobs and trade.<\/p>\n
Trump effectively delivered that message to voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, states Democrats had won in every election since 2000. Although some Clinton supporters will argue she lost because Americans rejected a woman for president or because Bernie Sanders supporters wouldn\u2019t support her. But it was those three states that cost her the election.<\/p>\n
Clinton also failed to sufficiently mobilize black voters. They didn\u2019t defect to Trump despite his offer to \u201cmake life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets.\u201d According to long time civil rights journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, Trump was right to call out Democrats for a quarter century of offering African-Americans empty promises in exchange for their votes. That particular appeal aligned with traditional Democrat ideology, not his party\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Clinton\u2019s misguided focus on the fringe of Trump\u2019s support blinded her to these problems. Gliding on that air of superiority allowed her to insult millions as a \u201cbasket of deplorables,\u201d a remark more disturbing than when a woman told John McCain in 2008 that she thought then-Sen. Barack Obama was \u201can Arab terrorist.\u201d McCain had the decency to correct her. Clinton\u2019s arrogant Democratic audience applauded and laughed.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of Americans who voted for Trump aren\u2019t racists. They\u2019re hard working people, many of whom have been economically left behind by the modern economy and a government indifferent to their plight. And they were rightfully disgusted with the political establishment on both sides of the aisle.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ll learn that Trump can\u2019t satisfy both the working class and please the GOP base on every problem he attempts to address. He\u2019ll start to look like all the other elected officials when he breaks campaign promises he couldn\u2019t possibly have kept.<\/p>\n
Trump won\u2019t be the chosen one to fix it all, but also our country won\u2019t be destroyed by one man, either. Congress should stand in the way, and there\u2019s enough people \u2014 independents, liberals and conservatives \u2014 on high alert if Congress fails to control his authoritarian impulses.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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