BY ED FELIEN
You ran a great campaign.
You took the right message to the right people, but they just weren’t ready to hear it.
White male privilege is a lot to give up.
Socially conservative men – Latinos, Muslims, Blacks and Whites — believe their sperm is sacred and must be protected. Nevaeh Crain, 18, went three times to a Texas hospital. They wouldn’t help her. She died from sepsis. Doctors said they had to “confirm fetal demise” before they could intervene in her miscarriage. Maybe it will take more deaths of young women and a lot more public education before Texas law allows doctors to care for women in crisis.
That is the task ahead. We have a lot more public education ahead of us. Fortunately, we have the best of Hollywood – Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson and all the late-night comics – on our side.
The situation in America in 2024 seems eerily similar to the situation in Germany a hundred years ago. Berlin was where it was happening in art, architecture, music and theater. Night club comics made regular fun of a little man with a funny moustache who talked about a Third Reich. The principal difference between then and now was that Hitler had the SA (the Sturmabteilung), a paramilitary organization in league with the local police, that took orders from Hitler. They were the people who rounded up Jews, homosexuals, Communists and Gypsies and sent them to concentration camps.
The closest Trump can come to the SA are the Proud Boys. Their leader, Enrique Tarrio, is currently serving 22 years in federal prison for his part in planning the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2020. We can expect that Trump will pardon Tarrio and his confederates, and it is likely that Tarrio will revive and reconstitute the Proud Boys. But it is unlikely that the Proud Boys will be as effective as the SA in rounding up immigrants and political dissidents. The SA needed the cooperation of the local police. By 1933 Hermann Goring had effectively nationalized the German local police and created the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei).
The murder of George Floyd had a profound impact on how we view the local police. People all around the world could see the racism, and people all around the world and in Minneapolis wanted change.
I am confident Trump doesn’t have the organizational skills of Hermann Goring, and he won’t have the cooperation of local authorities in Blue states like California, New York and Minnesota. I would expect vigorous resistance to Trump’s fascist impulses from Governor Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey and Chief O’Hara of the MPD. I am confident that our local blue wall will hold against the incoming tide.
But we have work to do.
We need to reach out to our brothers and sisters in rural areas, in North and South Dakota, in Iowa and Wisconsin. We need to make sure they have high speed internet to connect them to the rest of us. We need to upgrade their community colleges so their kids can stay close to home while they learn about the wider world. We need young people in the cities to move back to the country to educate and to organize.
We were not able to “turn the page” on Trump because we had not yet learned the lessons on that page.
Let’s get to work!
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“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
Emily Dickinson
