What to do?

It was November 6th, the day after we elected Donald J. Trump as President.  Again.  I was sad, a bit confused, afraid of what was to come, unclear about what should be done.  I sat down to write a list of what I thought might be our work in light of this calamity.  

And the first thing I wrote was “Do nothing.”  Maybe it was time to give up.  As a child of the Sixties, I was educated to believe that social action was a personal responsibility.  I have spent the intervening years both practicing policy activism and teaching a couple of generations of students the wisdom of and the need for action.  Maybe it was time to let someone else carry this weight.  A kind of retirement.

That lasted a few minutes.  And then I started to brainstorm the things that we might do.  It turned out to be a longer list than I thought it could be.  Here are those ideas.  I haven’t taken the time yet to think more deeply or complexly about these ideas; they are still the unpolished results of the brainstorm.  But, for me, it’s a start.

First.  Foremost.  Don’t give up.  It is not time for any of us to retire.  We continue to be called to act, and we have to respond to that calling.  But what can we do?  In no particular order:

1.  Work in media.  Not just the mainstream media, but social media, too.  Lost of good stories.  Lots of editorials.  Lots of influencers with liberal ideas and a commitment to social welfare.  Push back against the media who prematurely capitulate.  Support media whose rights have been abridged.  We need to recruit, support and listen to professional communicators.  If our ideas and priorities are not communicated well, they will be meaningless.  And we need to call out, every day, the ridiculousness of the administration’s ideas: “taking” Gaza, incorporating Canada as a state, settling the Russian war of aggression without involving Ukraine or the rest of Europe,  firing the people who guard and maintain our nuclear weapons, cutting off funding for HIV testing and trials in Africa, deporting anyone we feel like, without regard for law or due process.

One problem is that Trump has dominated all media for the last decade.  Bolstered by Fox News and a conservative tilt in social media (see Musk’s X and the capitulation of other social media outlets to Trump’s threats and demands), the MAGA story has been told and retold and retold.  We need to have our own stories told.  Many years ago, as a faculty member running an admissions program at a school of public health, I argued to my colleagues that public health schools needed to have an affirmative action program for professional communicators who wanted to get MPH’s, people who might not otherwise have gotten into the school.  Do you believe that the American public will be largely unmoved by stories of people in need?  Then maybe this program isn’t for you.  But history shows that Americans do react to the stories that they read and hear, that become part of the country’s political culture.  

We have to be really, really good at telling our stories, about the people who will be hurt from the application of reckless chainsaws by Trump and Musk to necessary programs.  People will die, and their stories need to be told.  Outbreaks of infectious diseases will occur in communities insufficiently vaccinated, as with measles in Texas as we speak, and those stories must be told.  HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa was at pandemic levels in the first decade of the 21st Century.  Children were being born infected.  Those who were not infected often were orphans shortly after their birth.  The situation was so bad that one of the most conservative Presidents to serve in my lifetime, George W. Bush, established PEPFAR as a way of channeling tens of millions of dollars in aid for prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa.  This has been a remarkably successful program, administered by USAID and CDC.  Trump’s and Musk’s woodchipper approach will likely kill the program.  Let’s make sure that that story gets told.  Today’s media is starting to find these stories: people who voted for Trump but now are concerned about what he is doing, communities in pain who are collateral damage to Musk’s follies, like Kansas farmers losing billions of dollars in selling their produce for distribution through USAID, and the stories about what is not getting done that needs to be done, if only the White House were paying attention.

2.  A game of inches.  We don’t have to convince a big chunk of MAGA or a majority of Republicans in Congress.  Just a few.  Five embarrassed Republican senators and five embarrassed congresspeople.  No third party candidates for a while.  (Trump barely won the popular vote.  Stein got 628,000 votes. You don’t think there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans?  Make a list of all the Democrats in the House and the Senate, then add all of the Democratic Governors.  Randomly pick two.  Would you rather have those two as Pres/VP over the guys we have?  Of course you would.)  We also have to talk to the Dems who stayed home.  Getting out the vote (GOTV) is critical.  Think we have no chance of scraping off a few votes from MAGA?  Check out what is happening among Mormons in Utah.  A bunch of them voted for Harris; many are organizing around their opposition to MAGA extremism.  Again, we don’t need to change the minds of millions of Mormons and other conservatives.  A game of inches.

3.  Constituents should bother Republicans locally, like after calls for repeal of the ACA.  Do you think local and vocal public pressure doesn’t affect policy and politicians?  Well, when the Republicans campaigned during the off-year elections in 2010, they grossly misstated and overstated what would be the impact of the Affordable Care Act.  And the public reacted.  People were attending town hall meetings held by Democratic congresspeople, shouting about the government’s supposed efforts to destroy healthcare.  This was aided by the Tea Patry movement, secretly funded by conservative rich people, but listened to as if they were legitimate spokespeople for the grassroots.  And, in Obama’s words, the Democrats got shellacked in those elections, losing 63 seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate.  Fast forward to the 2018 midterm election.  The Republicans had control of the White House and both houses of Congress after the 2016 elections.  They wanted to repeal Obamacare.  But by 2018 the public had learned more about the actual workings of the ACA and reacted to the Republicans’ threats and efforts to repeal it.  In a reversal from 2010, many, many angry people showed up at town hall meetings arguing to protect the ACA.  Their participation made the national and local news.  The Democrats gained 40 seats in the House.  Already, people are showing up at town halls held by Republicans and forcefully demanding an explanation for what is happening today in DC.  There is every reason to believe that the 2026 midterms will be a turning point in this current national disgrace.  We can never abandon fights at the national level, but we have to support local efforts, particularly when the media is willing to show up and show what is happening in our own communities.

4.  Support lawyers in court actions.  Still remember all of those anti-lawyer jokes that were popular a few decades ago, when it benefited the business and insurance communities to run national efforts to get us to devalue the role of lawyers in our society?  Time to realize that a strong democracy needs a strong “Rule of Law,” and that a strong Rule of Law requires strong lawyers fighting on our behalf for righteous public policies.  Back in 1972, when I told people I was going to law school, people were impressed and supportive.  Today, my students who want to go to law school are a bit embarrassed.  Enough of that.  (Always ask yourself the important question “Cui bono?”  Who benefits?  Who benefits from your lack of respect for lawyers?  Right. . . the rich and powerful!)  For the foreseeable future, we will need to rely heavily on a variety of lawyers, like state attorneys general, governmental lawyers, civil rights attorneys, other public interest lawyers, our own personal lawyers bringing civil cases on our behalf against the misdeeds of those with power.

5.  Support your state’s attorney general.  Many of the dozens of court cases brought against Trump in the last month were brought by state attorneys general.  We often don’t pay much attention to these “lawyers for the people.”  But they will be more and more important in protecting us from the worst of the current craziness.  What impact could they have?  Well, I spent much of the 1970's working against the tobacco industry here in Illinois.  And I found little success.  I felt like my job was basically to throw myself under moving trucks.  Th governor of Illinois at the time, Jim Thompson, who wanted to be President some day, vetoed the “Public Smoking Act,” an incredibly innocuous bill that I crafted and guided through the Illinois General Assembly.  We were working with his staff on a signing ceremony until he met with the Tobacco Institute (the bad guys) in the Governor’s Mansion, after which he filed a hand-written veto message.  

But fast forward to the late 1990's, and a couple of dozen state attorneys general brought a class action against the entire tobacco industry, which resulted in the “Master Settlement Agreement.”  Billions of dollars became available for anti-smoking efforts, and the Tobacco Institute, my old adversary, was ultimately put out of business. A joint effort by state attorneys general fought the big banks after the 2008 Great Recession to claw back some of their profits to help their victims.  These exact approaches are being done today, with some hope-giving early results.  Never thought to work for the election of a strong attorney general?  Maybe this is the moment to rethink that.

6.  Who becomes a judge?  I have been saying for decades that “the Supreme Court is on the ballot.”  Well, now everyone who is paying attention understands that.  Backed by wealthy conservatives, the Federalist Society was formed in 1982 by conservative law students at elite law schools, complaining about the liberal bias of their faculty and fellow students.  (Is it our fault that the truth has a well-known liberal bias?)  It has been wildly successful in changing the US Supreme Court and some of the US appellate courts.  Similar successes have been seen in state judicial systems.  In states where judges are elected, we are going to have to muster political support for the election of liberal judges.  (We see you, Wisconsin.)  Where judges are appointed, a candidate for governor must be questioned about the kinds of judges he or she will appoint, and we will have to vote accordingly.  In 2026, 36 gubernatorial races will be held, with Democrats and Republicans each holding 18 governorships.  The make up of state judiciaries will be on the ballot, as will the federal judiciary in the Presidential race in 2028.  We are seeing today that the courts are one of the most important checks against an out of control presidency.  We will all have to vote as if this check and balance is threatened, as it definitely will be.

7.  Bolster our civil rights.  How dare Musk’s barely post-pubescent henchmen gather information on all of us from the federal government’s files.  These are not legitimate agents of our democratic government.  These are not people with a vetted and serious claim to being trustworthy of this information.  Or even having a verified need for it.  They are just being grabby, with the hope that what they find might be used against some of us in the future.  And how could any court let them do that?  And we are now shipping people off to retention in Guantanamo, where we kept incommunicado and tortured the worst of the 9/11 terrorists.  And we have plans for putting some of these people in army bases all over the country.  Some of these people probably deserve to be deported.  But some of them have a legitimate right to remain here.  For all we know, a chunk of them may be American citizens.  This is what “due process” is all about.  It allows us to separate out the legitimate actions of the government from its illegitimate actions and gives the people involved the ability to actively participate in the processes of deciding which is good government and which is a violation of our rights.  This is a fight worth fighting because of the importance to our democracy of protecting our civil rights from encroachment by a too powerful government.  (That was the whole point of the Bill of Rights!)  But it is also a winning argument among a fairly large chunk of Americans.  

8.  Find leaders who can arouse a “migdala” reaction.  I happened to be having lunch with a former student of mine, Dr. Sagar Shah, the day after the November election.  I shared with him my view that this election was lost because Trump was able to arouse passion in a large number of people, and that the Democrats weren’t trying to do that.  Sagar, ever the thoughtful doctor,  characterized this as a “migdala” reaction, referring to that part of the brain that mediates passion and high emotion.  

I have already written on this: “This Election Showed the Power of Passion Over Reason,” https://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2024/11/this-election-showed-power-of-passion.html
Trying to fight a passionate candidate with a reasonable candidate is like bringing the cliche knife to a gunfight.  We need to find leaders who can arouse passion.  Nope, not Biden.  Not Harris.  Not Obama. Not Newsom.  All good people, but they are too much reason, not enough passion.  We need more people like Bernie Sanders.  Maybe AOC, Cory Booker, Jasmine Crockett, Jamie Rankin, Raphael Warnock, Josh Shapiro?  Let’s find those kinds of leaders and follow them.

9.  Block, delay, obstruct.  I know this doesn’t sound like the “proper thing to do.”  But we have spent the last ten years letting Trump build a constituency and a political infrastructure, and it is going to take some time for our countermeasures to start working.  Eight-two percent of Senate Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in 1964.  They voted unanimously for the Clean Air Act in 1970.  But how many of them voted for the Affordable Care Act?  Zero.  Not a single Republican vote in either House.  And during Trump’s first term, the Senate fell only one vote short of passing a law that would have repealed the ACA, without any clear plan for its replacement.  (An early example of Trump’s “concept of a plan.”)

When Obama took office, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Leader in the Senate, promised to make him a one term president.  That, of course, didn’t work, but the promise was based on the notion that obstruction is a good tactic.  McConnell refined this idea when he obstructed the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, using the completely ahistorical argument that it was in the last year of a presidency (and then rushed through the appointment Amy Coney Barrett just a few days before the 2020 election).  Want to be seen as thoughtful and reasonable?  Sorry, another knife at a gunfight.  Should we be as unreasonable and inconsistent as the Republicans have been.  Of course not; we still have to live with ourselves.  But within the bounds of some level of decency, when we can block, delay or obstruct what Trump, Musk, DOGE and MAGA are doing, let’s do it.

10.  Write reports, find experts.  I am convinced that just “being right” is not going to win.  We have to be willing to fight and fight hard.  We will need to do studies, write reports and develop expertise on our full range of concerns.  Universal healthcare, prevention leading to better health status, a clean and healthy environment, international peace within a peaceful world order, the importance of immigration in a shrinking country, and, probably above all, climate change.   But I just listened to an interview on PBS of Michael Knowles.  Knowles is a young, tireless apologist for Trump and Musk and MAGA.  He came to first attention when he published a book on why you should pay attention to Democratic policies, which turned out to be a couple of hundred completely empty pages.  (At the time, it was taken as a charming thrust at his opponents, but in retrospect seems like a harbinger of his general approach, as they say in Texas, “lots of hat, no cattle.”)  

You’ve seen this act before: apparently erudite, charming, a bit of self-deprecating humor, a ready and practiced argument for any topic, and always armed with a “recent study.”  Has the interviewer read that study?  Of course not.  Do we know what it actually says?  Nope.  I have found, in reacting to this particularly slick kind of advocate that when you actually look at the study, you are not impressed by it, usually for many reasons.  But if we are going to go to battle with the Knowles of the world, we have to have reports to cite, and experts for the media to interview.  As I have said before, being right and reasonable is not sufficient to win the kind of fight we are in.  But it is necessary, both to win and to maintain our sense of dignity.  Of course, MAGA will always claim that what we say is just “wokeness,” but I believe that having a strong foundation in science and morality will, in the long run, win out.  We just have to stay afloat during that “long run.”

11.  Offer specific explanations.   We need to pick our battles.  I think it would make the most sense to focus on specific battles, not those with broad policy scope.  Specific battles are more understandable.  And when we win one, it is easier to explain the benefits to Americans.  I also believe we need to develop arguments about specific reasons for what we are currently doing and what the other side is trying to do.  For instance, current governmental programs are often a response to economic injustice, to market systems that have unintended collateral damage.  We are just using the government to remedy those wrongs.  But why has that happened?  Because some 60 years ago, conservatives brought forth the idea that markets were the only really good way to distribute resources.  We can call this “Neoliberalism.”  (Want a couple of primers on this?  Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” from 1980 and William Ryan’s rejoinder,“Equality” from 1981.)  Today, anything that involves government is condemned by conservatives as “socialism,” even when it is clearly not.  This is just simplistic, ignorant name-calling.

We need to publicize the more ordinary reason for government action, usually a result of the market’s inability to do its work without collateral damage.  Some DEI programming is problematic to defend; there is very little evidence that all of the DEI training actually works.  But the underlying problem that such efforts are trying to address, deeply ingrained structural prejudice, is a strong argument for such action.  I have been addressing this in my classes with a lecture called “We Did This: Finding Structural Racism in History.”  Slavery, Dred Scott, indigenous schools, Tuskegee, red-lining, implicit bias, the Compromise of 1876, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, little kids with racist thoughts, current anti-immigration policies.  If I know the specific historical antecedents, I will better understand the policy choices before us.

12.  Many other things.  There are many other things we should start doing.  How about pursuing state level criminal charges against politicians?  Supporting domestic and international NGO’s with money, experts, publicity.  Keeping track of all of the misdeeds that the current administration is committing.  Bannon’s advice to “flood the zone” makes responding more difficulty, but over time we need to be clear what all was done, so lists and databases are going to be important.  And we need to know not just what was done, but what have been the consequences of all of these wrong-doings.

13.  A coalition of the sane.  I think, over time, a powerful coalition will coalesce.  It will arise out of the actions we take, our need to stay in touch with each other, and our desire to reach out.  This will end up being a coalition of the hopeful, since doing any of the above things will require hope in the future and our ability to affect it positively.  It will be a coalition of the angry.  My law partner, Rick Schoenfield, always taught me that you don’t get to let your anger show unless you think it would be tactically successful.  This is the time for that.  I am angry.  Everyone I know is angry.  And finding out that we are not alone in that anger is nourishing and will bind us closer to together.  

This will also need to be a coalition of the passionate.  As I said above, passion will need to be a large portion of our message and our style.  It will be a coalition of the righteous.  I think most (though clearly not all) MAGA citizens think they are doing something Good.  We need to be morally clear about our policy goals and the means we choose to pursue them.  And it must be a coalition of the sane.  Enough of craziness or incoherence, of lies, of inconsistencies, of fabulous and confabulated conspiracies.  We need to be the heirs to the generations of thoughtful and passionate defenders of democracy that brought us all to these occasions.

OK, that’s all I have thought of so far.  What else should we be doing?