For years now Republicans have used slim electoral wins to claim a mandate and had proceeded to inflict on a majority of citizens agendas that harm the majority or which are not consistent with the views of the majority. They have been able to do this in no small part because far too many Americans have been too lazy to get to the polls and vote. Indeed, in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, lost the popular vote and only garnered the vote of less than 28% of registered voters. Only in the GOP bubble or Trump's ego driven world would that be counted as a mandate. The result, based on protests that we have been witnessing and the Democratic victories in many special elections, may be that the majority is learning that sit home and lazily say "I don't like politics" is leading their communities and the country to ruin. A piece in the New Yorker looks at the protest since Trump entered the White House and how they increasingly target GOP policies and what they may portend. Here are highlights:
In the past month, teachers in three conservative and comparatively poor states have gone on strike, and, in that short time, certain patterns have developed. . . . . the strikes have been organized on Facebook rather than called by union leaders, and, in West Virginia and Oklahoma, the teachers have rejected lawmakers’ initial offers of pay raises; they have said that they also want to change the systematic underfunding of education. “The real midterms are happening right now, in Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona,” the left-wing political theorist Corey Robin tweeted on Sunday.
The tenor of liberal mass protest has changed in the fifteen months since Donald Trump became President. The early demonstrations (the counterprotests at the Inauguration; the vast and furious crowds at the Women’s March, a day later; the more anxious ones that gathered at airports, calling for the release of sequestered Iranian graduate students and Iraqi grandmothers, after the President issued his first travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim nations) had a feeling of holding the country back from a precipice. There was talk of creeping fascism, and a sense that the Trump Administration was a bad dream from which the country might awake if people pinched themselves hard enough.
The protests in the second year of the Trump Administration have taken on a different character. For one thing, they have been somewhat less about Trump. As a gun-control movement coalesced in the aftermath of the massacre of seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, its villain was not Trump but the National Rifle Association and the influence it exerts in Washington and state legislatures around the country. The student activists from Parkland have been careful to argue that their call for gun control is in the reasonable mainstream, in contrast to the inflexible, extreme positions taken by politicians loyal to the N.R.A.
The Parkland protests were sophisticated not just in their messaging but in their sense of how local political power can be. In Sacramento, California, during the past two weeks, there have been demonstrations in response to the police killing of Stephon Clark, a young, unarmed African-American man who was shot after allegedly running away from officers who had confronted him in the yard of his grandmother’s house. The protests have aimed to shut down civic life in the city . . . A few days before the shooting, a leader of the local Black Lives Matter chapter, Tanya Faison, had called for volunteers to follow police officers around Sacramento, recording what they did, as a method of citizen surveillance.
The red-state teacher revolts have been especially precise in their tactics. They have focussed on the long-running matter of how conservative states, some of which require legislative supermajorities to raise any tax at all, pay for their schools. A common refrain in Oklahoma, where school funding has been so aggressively cut that about a fifth of schools now open for only four days each week, has been that many teachers have taken home about the same pay for a decade or more. The images that have circulated are of textbooks so old that they must be held together by duct tape. Schools are in bad shape all over, not just in states run by conservative politicians; . . . Hillary Clinton won nineteen of the twenty states where teachers are paid the most in the 2016 election, and Trump won nineteen of the twenty where teachers are paid the least.
The world of American politics right now is bracing for two events: the outcome of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the midterm elections.
[T]he midterms are beginning to take shape—or, at least, the stakes of the elections are. Since the ascendance of the Tea Party, in 2010 (and, in some places, since long before then), politics in many parts of the country have been arranged around a program of cutting taxes and radically limiting governmental services. In November, we will know quite a bit more about whether that approach will continue to be a major part of our politics, or whether it will prove to be an ideological fad that took over for a while, and then dissipated. . . . the confidence of teachers in red states has grown: in Oklahoma, they rejected an offered fifteen-per-cent pay raise; in Arizona, they are demanding a twenty-per-cent hike. Those are not the bargaining positions of people who assume that the public will abandon them. It is the posture of those who assume, like the student activists from Parkland, that they are taking the common-sense position, that, even in red states, they have behind them a critical mass of support.
[T]he demonstrations of the past few months have suggested not a split country but a broken political system: in a less toxically partisan time, a slightly more restrictive gun-control regimen or a steadier rate of funding for the schools could be resolved by subcommittees, instead of through marches. The increasingly extreme Republican regimes of this decade—Scott Walker’s in Wisconsin, Sam Brownback’s in Kansas, Mary Fallin’s in Oklahoma, and Paul Ryan’s and Donald Trump’s in Washington—have tended to act as if narrow electoral majorities were a mandate for vast political change, and as if those groups who supported their opponents should have no voice at all.
For the past decade, these politics have redesigned actual towns and cities, leaving them with books with rotting bindings and schools that close on Fridays because they can’t afford anything more. But people live and teach in those towns, and they take notice of changes like these. Eventually, a bill comes due.
Let's hope the bill for Republicans at all levels is very, very high come November, 2018.
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