The Anti-Inauguration

Building resistance in the Trump era

Anand Gopal, Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Owen Jones, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781608468652
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Featuring contributions from Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Anand Gopal, and Owen Jones.The five essential speeches presented here are taken from The Anti-Inauguration, held on inauguration night 2017 at the historic Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. The Anti-Inauguration event and ebook are joint projects of Jacobin, Haymarket Books and Verso Books.

Building a Multiracial Movement in the Trump Era

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Donald Trump has been inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States. The shock and disbelief that greeted his election more than two months ago must now give way to defiance and organizing.

Part of that pivot demands that we understand how we got here in the first place, but more importantly, how we move forward. Understanding what happened in the election is absolutely necessary to understanding what happens next.

Many have commented on Trump’s victory simplistically. The best example of this is when CNN’s Van Jones characterized Trump’s election as revenge, or a “whitelash,” against black voters, who overwhelmingly voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

We can’t reduce the election outcomes to whites’ collective revenge for the presidency of Barack Obama. It is an assessment that avoids many inconvenient truths about the Democratic Party, while dramatically overstating the depth of support for Trump and his politics across the country.

The first problem with this narrative (aside from the fact that tens of millions of white people voted for Obama twice) is that it promotes a mistaken story that African Americans benefited from the presidency of Barack Obama, and that those supposed benefits have come at the expense of ordinary white people.

The genuine fear and disgust of Trump has contributed to intense revisionism and mythology when it comes to the record of Barack Obama, and while we can all recognize the power of symbolism, and even subscribe to the notion that there was value in the election of an African American to the highest office of a nation born and built on the backs of enslaved black labor, we should not let that acknowledgment cloud our ability to think clearly and tell the truth.

Obama’s presidency was not a gift to black people. It represented the painful continuity of racism, discrimination, and inequality that has always been at the center of black life in America.

Eight years later, black unemployment remains twice the rate of whites. Eight years later, 38 percent of black children continue to live below the official poverty line. Eight years later, a shocking 55 percent workers, mostly black women, make under $15 an hour.

It was precisely the inability of the Obama administration to improve the conditions of ordinary black people’s lives that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement in the first place.

The second problem with the “whitelash” story is that it reduces any critique of the last eight years to a racist backlash. It is similar to the argument that Hillary Clinton’s campaign failed centrally because of sexism.

We certainly cannot downplay the extent to which racism and sexism played a critical role in Trump’s success. We have seen how Trump’s rise has unleashed violent white supremacists and given them the confidence to organize out in the open. There were well over a thousand hate crimes reported in the month after the presidential election. But if we only understand Trump’s success in terms of racial resentment and whitelash, then we make wrong assumptions about a generalized right-wing sweep across the United States, with white people universally lining up behind Trump, waiting to receive their marching orders.

That perception clashes violently with markers of public opinion. Fifty-eight percent of Americans think Obamacare should be replaced with federally-funded healthcare for all. Sixty-six percent of Americans support raising the minimum wage to at least $10, 59 percent support raising it to $12, 48 percent support raising it to $15, an idea that has been demonized by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Sixty-one percent of Americans say the rich pay too little in taxes, which is up from 52 percent a year ago. Sixty-nine percent of Americans believe that providing affordable housing is important. Sixty-three percent of Americans say money and wealth distribution is unfair. Fifty percent of whites say blacks are treated less fairly by police than whites, and fifty percent of whites think the country still has work to do for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites.

This is hardly the portrait of a right-wing America. So how do we square this with the election?

We must begin with the fact that tens of millions of Americans did not bother to vote. There are 238 million voters in the United States, and of that number, sixty million of them voted for Trump. And even among that number, 5 percent of people who voted for him said he was unfit to be president.

On its own, yes, that is sixty million people who voted for a vile racist and sexual predator. But in the wider context, it means that one in four eligible voters chose Trump. That is hardly representative of what white people think. And that is the other part of the story: that literally tens of millions of voters decided not to vote at all.

The media and other political operatives describe the decision not to vote as apathy. It is an easy description that requires little thought or analysis of the problem within electoral politics, that creates so little confidence, and so much indifference, even when it appears that so much is at stake. One need look no further than the Democratic Party to fully understand the problem.

Since the shock of the election, the Democrats have blamed their losses on Fox News, the FBI, bad messaging, and the Russians. But there is virtually no reckoning with the political shortcomings of the party. There is no reckoning with how the party that purports to be a party of the people consistently fails to connect with the basic ideas of fairness and justice that are at the core of those statistics that I read earlier.

But this lack of connection is not a flaw in messaging. It is the product of a party that fully embraces the logic of neoliberalism and the political status quo.

This is why Hillary Clinton ran a campaign focused on Trump’s abhorrent behavior, as opposed to a positive campaign on what Democrats could do to transform the lives of ordinary people. But it was impossible for Clinton to argue that her party would deliver change and break the grip of the political order that privileges the rich and powerful, when it was her party that has been in power for the last eight years. Clinton promised to be the third term of Obama, failing to realize that for millions of voters, two terms was enough.

Eight years ago, Obama ran on the promise of hope and change. But with big expectations and big hope come even bigger disappointment when you fail to deliver. It is absolutely true that the Republicans have been obstinate, recalcitrant, and opposed to giving Obama anything. It speaks to the complete dysfunction of our political system. But it is not just the obstinacy of the GOP that has been the problem. It was also the conservative priorities of Obama’s political agenda.

If you embrace the market, privatization, and the norms of neoliberalism, then there is only so much change that can be expected from your administration. Obama raised everyone’s hopes, but could not deliver — not just because of the Republicans, but also because of this constrained political agenda of the Democratic Party.

In other words, we cannot understand the rise of Trump and Trumpism by only looking at what the Republicans have done. We must also understand it in terms of what the Democratic Party has not done. Embedded inside of every right-wing backlash is the failure of the liberal establishment to deliver a better way.

The lesser evil always paves the way for the greater evil.

Where Obama used t...

Table of contents

• Anti-Inauguration
• Welcome to the Anti-Inauguration
• Naomi Klein: It’s not enough to simply say ‘no’ to attacks
• Anand Gopal: U.S. Foreign Policy Under Trump
• Jeremy Scahill: The U.S. Surveillance State
• Owen Jones: The Ongoing Demonization of the Working Class
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Building a Multiracial Movement in the Trump Era
• About the Authors
• About the Sponsors