Welcome to the Persistence

                In the age of Trump, signs of resistance are all around us.  We are all being encouraged to resist the most unqualified and undemocratic presidency in our history.  Resistance is a good thing, but it’s not enough.  Trump was the end of a seven- decade cycle of American political and social history.  His victory wasn’t a momentary step back or unfortunate but temporary aberration.  Trump’s election means that the parts of American culture that have always been there – the racism, misogyny, religious intolerance and anti-intellectualism – have once again surged to the surface.  They will not go back into the same container they were in before.  Resistance is great – even healthy, but it won’t rebuild the village.

                While we need to continue to stand up to what Trump does and stands for, we also need to prepare for a new reality and a new social covenant.  So, while resistance feels good, it’s persistence that will eventually bring us into a new social narrative.  We should and must protest, but it’s more important to start building.  This is the time take the institutions of modernity apart and reconstruct them for a new era.  Our politics, our schools and our government are broken, intended to serve a different time and place, and even when Trump goes, they will still be broken.  Trump will eventually destroy himself; he’s too venial and stupid not to.  He will cause massive damage in the process, but much of that damage will be to institutions and practices that were already in decay. 

                It’s easy to band together to oppose something, especially something as odious as Trump.  It’s going to be much harder to band together to be for something.  I see little evidence that what is loosely called the ‘left’ of American politics has learned how to build alliances.  There are signs of what alliances might form: around the pipeline protests, for instance, but ‘causes’ still seem to be more singular than they are collective.  What are the principles of an inclusive and integrative democracy in this century?  It’s unlikely they will be the same as the romanticized oligarchy we started with or even the post war class politics that defined the end of the last century.  The great energy conglomerates that dominated the economy for the last century and a half are in decline.  The energy of the future doesn’t look like it will be so easily monopolized.  Manufacturing is already a different animal than the large centralized smokestack industries that dominated the Midwest.  Work, the rallying cry of the labor movement and much of liberal politics since WWII, is going to undergo perhaps the biggest change since the shift to agriculture as automation and AI combine to eliminate people from the work force.  All of these things are going to impact the economy in a manner at least as significant as the Black Plague did in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. 

                Trump is serious and dangerous, but he’s really just a distraction to what is coming next.  This may very well be the most significant shift in human existence, period – one we may not survive.  Everything is on the table; nothing can be assumed to be safe or beyond radical change.  Not much of what we have learned has prepared us for what’s next.  The elites from the ‘best’ schools are probably the last people to listen to right now.  Their knowledge is tied to this ‘imagined order,’ and they aren’t likely to be the first people to see the new shape of things.  This is going to be hard.  This is going to cause massive dislocation.  It will not be pretty any more than the Renaissance was.  We will have to learn to persist.  We will fail monumentally.  There will be several shifts and phases before there is any clarity.  If you want to live in a just and inclusive society, prepare to define it and fight for it.  This is no time for alarm or pessimism.  We must persist.

                The next time you turn on your tablet or television only to be slapped in the face by more of the spectacularly stupid and hurtful things that Trump does, remember he’s just a side show.  He and the people that voted for him are here because they weren’t ready to move forward.  By all means resist, but prepare for more.  Learn to talk to your neighbors.  Learn to build alliances.  Learn to imagine.  This is the time embrace the uncertainty and love the possibility.  Think big – and hold on.