Don’t Mourn, Organize
By 
It’s OK to be sad about the election for, oh, a few more days maybe. But its getting close to time to stop doing two things. The first is just damning everyone who voted for Trump as an unforgivable person who we hope receives punishment, which is too common in these comments, I am finding. As I stated in my election run-down, yes, some people who love Trump are truly horrible humans but there are huge swaths of people who are just super low-information and we have to find ways to reach out and get these people back. Telling them all they are horrible is, uh, not going to work. Maybe showing them how they were misguided. Maybe creating alternative media structures to reach out and get them to do something different next time.
The other thing it’s about time to stop doing is talking about giving up. What would Debs do? Or King? Or Chavez? Or Mother Jones? Or Ella Baker? Or Frederick Douglass? What is more hopeless–watching civil rights workers getting killed in Mississippi or losing an election? I get it–everyone is sad. But there are real fights ahead and it’s getting to be time to start figuring out how to fight them. It’s going to be ugly out there and the more we fight, the less ugly it will be. Nothing applies to 2025 that didn’t apply to 2017. Joseph O’Neill sums it up in one paragraph:
I think we can expect an attempt to round up, incarcerate, and deport tens of thousands of suspected undocumented immigrants. We can expect a flurry of executive orders designed to transform and weaponize the Department of Justice. We can expect business leaders to gather in the Oval Office to pay homage to the president. We can expect Elon Musk to be horribly prominent, possibly as an enforcer of Trump’s promises to impose tariffs on imported goods. I’m going to assume that the Democratic Party, as we speak, is preparing for these and other eventualities. I am sure Trump will overreach. It is up to the opposition to make him pay for his overreaches. It is not our job to help him “succeed.” It’s not our job to “unite the country” or, as President Biden has suggested, “turn down the temperature.” It’s our job to make Trump fail, fail again, fail worse.
So what are your strategies to make Trump fail again?