Wanted to share a couple thoughts I have been having lately.
Caring for ourselves and each other is important. Holding onto our core, essential values is important. I ask for your forbearance on what follows, because the way I write comes out as a lecture, and I'm not trying to lecture anybody or hold anybody to task. I just want to remind myself, and remind the people I love, about who we are.
It's difficult because we do face serious, real threats. People all over are gaslighting us, attempting to sow division, but our response to that must not be to divide ourselves.
So let's remind ourselves who we are. We are anybody who is concerned about Donald Trump's words and actions. This includes not just those of us who are speaking up publicly to oppose him, but those of us who remain silent.
Absolutely I feel disgust for anybody who is remaining silent right now. I believe this is a time of the utmost moral imperative, and their behavior is cowardice. I can assure you that they feel differently. I would say they would frame it as "discretion".
What this means is that, unlike Trump supporters, they are open to appeal. How are Trump supporters "appealing" to these people? With threats and bullying, with attempts to coerce them into joining their angry mob.
Now, how are we appealing to these people?
On this issue, there is not necessarily a "we". We are a grass-roots resistance. We do not have a leader, we do not have rules of order or agreements on what is or is not acceptable. I speak only for myself and have only my words to attempt to persuade.
As much anger, as much fear as I am feeling right now, I must consider the source of those feelings. And the source is both our President and the uncounted millions who openly support him, the flying monkeys who will excuse anything regardless of logic or conscience. Every reservation expressed is an opportunity.
And I, personally, see that opportunity not through our history, not through fables of the American dream, but through direct appeal to who we are now. History is a difficult thing for me to invoke with the knowledge of how many people "on the fence" are ahistorical people at best, or openly hypocritical at worst. There's a feeling when one talks about these things of "that was then, this is now". And it's right! For all the past parallels, what we are facing, who we are, is markedly different from what has come before. This is not 1933 Germany. This is 2017 America. We can be informed by the past, but we must not be defined by it.
And so I look at this through the lens of psychiatric language. Some might argue that we do not have the right to diagnose President Trump with mental illness and behave accordingly. I strongly disagree. It is the victims' right to name their abusers. If we do not use the words to their faces, we should acknowledge among ourselves that President Trump is a malignant narcissist, that his vocal supporters are enablers, "flying monkeys" in the jargon. These words are more useful to me, help me to treat such people in the appropriate fashion, than words like "hypocrite" and "fascist".
But these words are still labels, and labels get overused. Once we find words which are powerful our tendency is to apply them to anything and everything we find objectionable. When we do this, we strip the words of their power, we make them meaningless. This is particularly important with words most people still do not know. They will understand these words through their context, so we must use exceptional care with such words.
More important than words, though, is emotion. I've certainly made mistakes here. I've certainly lashed out at people in anger for asking perfectly reasonable questions. But what I try to do is learn from my mistakes, and especially apologize for my mistakes. Apologies are tricky, because in today's world there's a lot of emotional baggage to them. They can be used as a tool of submission, or as a tool of passive aggression. My feeling is that we should work not to apologize unless we have, in word or deed, genuinely wronged someone else, not merely "offended" them. As we continue to speak up and advocate for our interests, we will occasionally do this. An apology, even if sometimes inadequate, is an essential tool for maintaining trust, respect, and common cause. When these qualities are not present there is no use or need for an apology - apologies are a repair tool, not a construction tool.
Perhaps many of us have felt a strange sense of reversal, a feeling that the way we are now behaving is the way the other side behaved last year. Certainly I feel that way. This is in part a conscious decision on my part. After the election, I did question my base assumptions, went through some soul-searching about how this calamity had happened. This conversation was, in the larger sense, never resolved. It's not something we're all in agreement on or all united on. But my conclusion, which I continue to advocate for, was that if we failed, it was not in our policies, not in our values, but in our strategy and tactics. This is also the conclusion of the Indivisible movement.
But if we learn from the successes of the other side, we must especially be cautious not to repeat their failures. Because their movement is, in significant measure, a failure. What have they accomplished? They elected a President, a President who is despised by half the people of this country. They have galvanized an opposition which dwarfs their own in scale and in dedication. They have brought this country into a maelstrom of fear and hatred.
And they have done this, chiefly, by attacking, belittling, and demonizing anyone who disagrees with them. The President calls anybody who disagrees with him a bad person, very bad. Nasty women. Bad hombres. We ought to be sure that we are not on the path to doing the same, and to be honest, some of us do seem to be.
We call all Republicans "traitors" because they made this possible. We dismiss them out of hand, we repudiate them, excoriate them, even when they express reservations about Trump's words and actions. In many cases we have reason to do so, because their words are not matching their actions, and we do need to pay attention to this. There are two ways to reconcile this discrepancy - one can change their words, or one can change their actions. Which course are we encouraging?
Too often, I feel, it is the former. When we deal with Republicans, we treat them as though they were bad Democrats. If a Democrat votes to confirm Jeff Sessions, have the right and obligation to be mad as hell, because that person is representing our party. But being a Democrat is not the same thing as being a human.
This is tricky. Because I am a Democrat because of my values, values which are not up for compromise. I do believe, believe strongly, that a Senator, Democrat or Republican, who votes to confirm Jeff Sessions is acting as a bad human being. But the reality is that their first allegiance is to their party.
I know the ideal is that representatives of a particular party in government do not represent that party, but represent all their constituents, but we need to acknowledge that this is not the way it has worked out in practice. Republicans in office bear a greater responsibility to Republicans, and Democrats in office bear a greater responsibility to Democrats.
This is absolutely wrong, absolutely terrible governance, and should not be. It's also not a problem we have the ability to fix right now.
So we need to recognize that what the Republicans need to do is much, much harder than anything we need to do. It's very easy to tell them to put party over country when that's not something we have to do ourselves. If you want evidence of this feel free to fill in with your own historical examples, but like I said, I am not making an argument from history but an argument from human nature.
What this means is that we need to be kinder to Republicans, particularly Republicans who are on the fence, than we are to Democratic leaders. My own Republican representative, Susan Collins, has spoken out against the executive order Trump issued Friday. She has done it by equivocating, by implicitly endorsing points of view I think are terrible, but I wrote her today to thank her, not to call her out on her equivocation. I encouraged her to continue to be strong and to work to uphold our Constitution, not to complain about the interest groups who have bought and paid for her. Republicans right now are being shot by both sides. They're smart enough to know that the most they can expect from us is a temporary truce, but a lot of them are also smart enough to run towards the side that's not shooting at them.
