The Arc of the Moral Universe

by Phill Van Horn

Tuesday was a calamity for us all. There are many among us who greeted it with sickening adulation. I wish I could say with any confidence that they will go on to recognize the misery that will radiate from this day, but if there is anything to be learned from all of this it is that the human capacity for justifying self-destruction is without equal. I have gone through many stages of processing the reality of President Elect Donald Trump over the last few days, as I suspect many of us have. For me, it began with a vacuous dread welling up in my chest. I spent some time on Monday attempting to prepare myself for the possibility a Trump victory. That proved fruitless. At first, it was difficult to even form a series of sensible thoughts on the subject. Now that I feel my coping mechanisms taking over it is quite tempting to find assurance in assumptions of moderation. Things cannot really be as bad as they seem, right? Trump will rise to this occasion, right? Clinton said we owe him a chance, maybe I should give him a chance.

There are certainly a lot of voices on the left echoing these sentiments. I’ve read just about every opinion piece in every major paper since Wednesday morning. Even the venerable Paul Krugman, who dropped a late night blurb after the result became apparent predicting a protracted world-wide recession, walked back his dramatic reaction after a bit of sleep. It is quite a difficult day to be a liberal. After the defeat of Sanders in the primary, I lost confidence that the party would champion liberal precepts, but I gave staunch support to the Clinton campaign with confidence at least in their ability to effectively counter the heinously anti-factual populism championed by Trump. That confidence was naught but hubris. Today it seems optimistic to characterize the Democratic Party as a smoking pile of rubble. Some of our more even-tempered elders advise us to relax. This happened in 2000, and the minorities in each house were able to stage an effective legislative blockade. I don’t know how comforting that tidbit actually is. We are still feeling the repercussions of the spectacularly bad decisions made by President Bush 16 years later, and Bush looks like a deeply welcome friend compared to the man now set to occupy the oval office.

It could very well be the yet undiminished zeal of my youth talking, but I do not think it is time to relax. The more I read, the more I think the laissez faire message of our elders is the exact error that caused this calamity in the first place. The data is on our side, right? History is on our side, right? What if it is not? What if the data is wrong? What if this moment of history exists with previously unconsidered pressures? Above all, what is the opportunity cost of waiting it out? We all believe in the power of objective science and quality data, but on Tuesday our objective science and quality data failed spectacularly. Even in 2016, science is subject to human frailty.

I was reminded on Wednesday of a comforting quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that seems to sum up the solace we are being offered: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. I surely hope you are right, Dr. King, because hope is approximately all there is left of liberalism this week. Hope that we are on the right side of history. Hope that President Trump is not the tyrant he has characterized himself to be. Hope, perhaps, that the pettiness central to Republican politics translates into a squandered opportunity instead of a calamitous agenda. Hope against hope that our climate is not pushed irreparably toward our doom before we can mitigate what is about to happen.

In my mind, that is really the most momentous question before us. If we are to believe the science behind climate change, we have an extremely compelling reason to do something far more than wait this out. If we believe the projections, and we assume Trump is going to follow through with his climate-related policies, and that China (and probably others) will respond by tearing up the Paris climate agreement, we would not be engaging in hyperbole to assert that the human race cannot afford us to wait this out. That sounds like the ramblings of a madman, but there it is. Do you believe humans are causing global temperatures to rise through carbon emissions? Do you understand what that will do to the earth within this century? Do you know how much more carbon will be spewed into the atmosphere as a result of Trump’s policies? Putting aside for a moment all of the other misery that is sure to be wrought by 4+ years of Republican governance, this issue makes this moment in history without parallel. Humans have been doing deplorable things to each other since humans were a thing, but upon this issue our continued existence rests.

It is up to each of us to consider each of these questions carefully. How much are we willing to sacrifice to ensure our children have an Earth to live upon? It is quite clear now how colossal an error it was to make climate change a tertiary issue in this campaign. I suspect the gravest question facing our race has become ‘can the forces of liberal democracy respond quickly enough to counter the mortal threat of climate change?’ If the United States does not find a way to lead the other world powers away from fossil fuels, then surely the human race is doomed. If we lead the world in the opposite direction, how much more quickly will our doom arrive?

The story now unfolding here in America is the latest crescendo of an arc which began long ago. Across the planet, liberal democracy is under assault from a pair of dueling forces, each manifesting misery in their own way. The flavor which will become most acutely familiar to us over the next four years is that of illiberal democracy. One of the most spectacular lies woven into the psyche of modern America is that the liberal and the conservative can have equal footing in the context of democracy. The truth tucked away into footnotes of the addendum of history is that democracy itself is a liberal institution. Democracy is in many ways the most crucial institution of liberalism; the notion that all humans deserve equality of treatment and opportunity is the basis for both democracy and liberalism. Conservatism is, at its core, at war with democracy. Conservatism seeks to preserve the social order, and this is nearly always accomplished on the backs of immigrants and minorities. Conservatism can only gain or maintain power in the context of universal suffrage through manufactured consent and voter suppression, because it is concerned chiefly with maintaining the privilege of the favored class at the expense of the rest. The architects the Conservative movement are acutely aware of these truths, even if the more common aspirants would deny it with flowering rhetoric about conviction and responsibility. There existed for some time in this country a delicate balance between the concerns of the liberal and the conservative which served to strengthen both. Liberals successfully pushed for suffrage, equality of status and opportunity, and to establish a robust social safety net. Conservatives ensured these programs were viable and solvent, providing a moderating force to the harsh winds of liberalism that swept many less fortunate nations into extremism.

But we have both since gone off the rails. The neoliberalism that has dominated American politics for decades was dealt a mortal blow this week, and it should be allowed to die. The alt-right conservatism that has just been given the keys to our government is quite possibly the most dangerous development on the world stage since World War II. Yet the long path that we tread toward this day was full of liberal failure. Liberals have presided over the unrest that Donald Trump just harnessed to gain power, and liberals were content to address it with incremental change. Right or wrong, for better or worse, that is the path behind us. I do not presume to know what could have been done. But I am assured most confidently that we must now tread a new path.

President Obama is quite famous for his promotion of incremental change. It now seems clear how deeply and unfortunately mistaken this belief is. It is likely that nearly all of his accomplishments will be unceremoniously torn down in the next few years, and replaced with calamitous nonsense. I am struck at the grave error President Obama made in not heeding another of Dr. King’s famous quotes: “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” This must become one of our axioms. Neoliberalism squandered the precious time we had, and there is not an abundance of time left to act before it is too late to make a meaningful difference.

Neoliberalism has been utterly defeated. Its last president will be Barak Obama. From here on out something new must arise. The first agent of this new order rises before us as our President Elect. By his hand, the changes we witness will be truly awful, even in the most optimistic scenario. On the other side of this defeat, however, we must make something new. We must forge the rubble of the Democrat party into one of unabashed social democracy, and we must do it quickly. We must forge it through principled activism and serious policy. We must step up to this grave challenge, because the fate of the country and perhaps the world depend on it.

This party must be characterized by a commitment to justice. Not a perverse and vindictive or extreme and unreasonable justice, but justice that elevates the marginalized, that rights wrongs and stands as the vanguard of human rights. It must renew a bold commitment to the New Deal foundation laid down for us by generations past, but it must also look toward the future with urgency. It must rush to address the problem of climate change with all possible haste. It must be committed equally with securing social justice and enacting the sort of durable, decisive reform that cannot be ripped apart by any single defeat or setback. These are the broad strokes of a populist platform that has the power to defeat Donald Trump and repudiate the disgraceful conduct of his party. Perhaps the most audacious hope of this dream is that this force will materialize out of the ruin before us. This could very well be it. Liberalism could continue to tarry in tranquilized gradualism until the earth repudiates our very existence. But I, for one, with all the linguistic and intellectual fury I can muster, will fight to see this dream materialize.

I do not think it is time to relax. I do not know what President Trump is going to do, but there is no reason beyond unfounded optimism to think his presidency will be anything short of a calamity. If he tries to build his wall, we need to be there, standing in front of the bulldozers until they drag us away in handcuffs. We must work quickly, fervently, and decisively to be ready to make a serious run at all levels of government in 2018 and 2020, and to stem the tide of Republican-wrought horror that is set to emanate from the White House. I am young, zealous, and likely foolish, but I cannot bear the reality of looking into the eyes of my daughters one day and having to explain why I did nothing in the face of the manifold disasters looming in the near future. I have no experience in the nuts and bolts of politics, but I must become involved in a much more meaningful way. The most I can reasonably hope for is to become a small part of the immense machine that needs to be rebuilt, but I dearly hope that many more young people will join me in this work, because I do not think there is any more time to waste.