Saturday, January 28, 2017

The Women's March and the Resistance

The Women's March on Washington (Facebook page here) that took place the day after Donald J. ("The Audacity of Grope") Trump's inauguration as president will be the beginning of the end for Trumpism. 500,000 marchers on the National Mall were augmented by sister demonstrations in cities and towns all over America and around the world. The total number of demonstrators in the U.S. came to at least 2,000,000. Around the world, up to 4.5 million.





New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks is wrong in his January 24 column, "After the Women’s March." He says the movement that the Women's March embodied will come to nothing because it lacks "the discipline of party politics." Movements, he says, sometimes lead to social change. The civil rights movement did so. But most movements "devolve into mere feeling, especially in our age of expressive individualism."

He's wrong about that. That isn't going to happen this time, simply because Trump is so odious. He represents such a threat to the marchers, their loved ones, and their various causes that they will organize anti-Trump resistance over the long haul and from the ground up. They will use social media and leverage their online presence, but they will also keep up the personal, face-to-face contacts that began at the marches and demonstrations. If they don't, the alternative is just too dire.

The reason David Brooks is wrong is that he is viewing all this from the point of view of the old paradigm, the one in which party politics was the royal road to change. That used to be so, but this is a new paradigm. The new paradigm began with Trump's campaign and election. Trump sidestepped the old paradigm entirely. He won, not the popular vote but the electoral vote. He's now living in the White House.

Meanwhile, there's real doubt about the future of the Democratic Party. Unless the spirit and symbolism of the Women's March can infuse itself into the Democrats, the party is doomed. I think that spirit will infuse itself into the party, as motivated marchers get involved in local and state politics. This is like what happened with the Tea Party and the Republicans early in the Obama administration — only it's much, much bigger.



Monday, January 23, 2017

"Pussy Power"

January 20, 2017: The new president, Donald Trump, gets sworn in at the National Mall. The crowd is sparse (about 160.000) compared with that for President Obama (about 1.8 million) in 2009:

Comparing Two Inauguration
Turnouts


January 21, 2017: The Women's March on Washington draws a much bigger crowd — at least 500,000 — to the National Mall:


The Turnout at the Women's March
on Washington


Most of the marchers are women and girls, but there are also men and boys. There are satellite women's marches in other U.S. cities and towns, and all around the world. The total number of marchers overall is in excess of 2 million. Many of the marchers wear knitted pink "pussyhats":

"Pussyhats" for "Pussy Power"


Symbolizing "pussy power," the hats are in response to candidate Trump's having bragged about groping women's genitals.

*****

According to the Washington Post:

The size of the gathering proved challenging. The audio from sound system did not reach everyone in the massive crowd, and far more portable toilets were needed.

When the toilets behind the stage broke down, security instructed women to use cups and ushered them into a box truck for privacy.

“I’m afraid to shake anyone’s hand,” one woman joked.

Thus did a march for "pussy power" morph into a march for "potty power" as well.

*****

Handshaking was key at the Women's March. Women from all over the country were meeting one another for the first time. They were organizing themselves into a permanent force in support of women's rights, LGBT rights, immigrants' rights, and more — and against the presidency of Donald Trump.

New York Times writer David Brooks' column of January 20 tells why the march's importance exceeded even that ambitious agenda:

Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.

The real fear should be that Trump is Captain Chaos, the ignorant dauphin of disorder. All the standard practices, norms, ways of speaking and interacting will be degraded and shredded. The political system and the economy will grind to a battered crawl. ...

If Trump’s opponents behave as clownishly as he does ... the whole government will get further delegitimized. But if people redouble their commitment to constitutional norms and practices, to substance and dignity, this thing is survivable.

Already you see the political system uniting to contain Trump.

The Women's March was an example of the political system organizing from the ground up to "build a wall" — specifically, a wall around Trump.