Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Mourn First, Then Organize

The novelist Elmore Leonard once commanded writers not to start with the weather. It is cliche, obvious.

But the sun is out this morning. It is a dark day but the sun is bright and I can only think of one thing: 9/11. The sun was out that morning on what was a truly beautiful day, but the weather was deceiving, created a surreal sense that the terrorist attack that unfolded that morning was perhaps a fiction. It wasn’t.

I felt the same the morning I woke up to the news that American voters have sent Donald J. Trump back to the White House. Trump the narcissist. The wannabe tyrant.

We have elected a man who has promised a program of mass deportation. Who told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza. Who spent his first four years trying to consolidate power and who now re-enters the White House owning all three branches of government and ready to run past whatever guard rails and speed bumps are left.

I fear that we have unleashed not just Trump, but Trumpism on the American public, and Trumpism is more dangerous and has deeper roots than Trump himself. Trumpism is about power and resentment. It is about looking backward. It is about scapegoats and threats and the potential for violence.

There will be a lot of analysis done trying to explain what happened, why Trump improved his vote totals in nearly every state and with almost all demographics. We will hear about the gender gap, and the backlash against “wokeness,” and racism, and much of the analysis will be true.

We will hear that it was, to use Bill Clinton’s phrase, “the economy, stupid,” and there is truth in that. Voters told pollsters that prices and rents remained too high, even as they have been falling, and they saw Kamala Harris as just an extension of the Biden presidency. This allowed voters to ignore the uglier elements of what Trump has been promising, to see him not as the villainous character he is but as a change agent, a bulwark against the power of shadowy elites.

Milan Loewer predicted as much in The Jacobin, arguing that Harris and the Democrats allowed Trump to claim the populist mantel and portray liberals as the problem. Trump, for nearly a decade, has argued that Democrats were part “an antipatriotic establishment” that controls “many of the powerful institutions in American life — in government, law, philanthropy, media, universities, high-tech industries, health care, and even finance.

“There is some element of truth in this narrative, and as long as Democrats remain tethered to the politics of these powerful institutions and the professional classes that populate them, Trump will be able to refract anti-elite sentiment through a partisan and cultural lens. By ceding this territory to MAGA and failing to articulate a full-throated anti-elite politics of their own, Democrats have allowed Trump to claim the populist mantle, even as his policies represent a massive boon for corporate power.”

This analysis may offer a way forward, especially if we couple it with an argument made before the election by labor writer Hamilton Nolan that our best defense against both the malaise and targetless anger is the union movement. Nolan writes that “‘resisting’ the sort of changes that might come about during four more years of The Bad Man requires not just rage and donations and protests—it requires the construction of competing power centers that can stand up to a weaponized version of the government. Organized labor should be that power center. It is what The Resistance is looking for. You can help make it a reality.”

I wrote this only hours after Trump — “The Bad Man” — won, at a moment when so many of my friends and family are mourning the death of what we still thought America might be. I am mourning, too. I’m depressed and anxious and angry. I worry about vulnerable family members. About the immigrants I’ve met. About my students. About our souls.

Mourning is useful, even necessary at this moment. But it can only be a step in a broader political project. We need to take our mourning — and the anger we are feeling alongside it — and turn it to productive means. We need to organize and fight. In unions, as Nolan says, but in a host of other configurations. Mass mobilization will require more than protesting, especially if Trump follows through on his promise to crack down on demonstrations.

I’m not sure what forms these actions will take. But we — the more privileged of us, comfortable, middle-class Americans — owe it to all of the people likely in Trump’s liberal cross-hairs to prevent the worst from happening.

I remember the morning of 9/11. And I remember the paralysis many of us felt. That paralysis had real-world impacts (The PATRIOT Act, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) that have continued to echo into the present. We cannot allow a repeat.

Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist and journalist in New Jersey. He teaches journalism at Rutgers University. Email: hankkalet@gmail.com; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites; X (Twitter), @newspoet41; Substance, hankkalet.substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2024

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