Okay, now that I've had a chance to sleep for four hours, with a throbbing ankle and a racing mind, here are my finals thoughts on Shitstorm 2016.
First and foremost, it's a great day for the radical and progressive left. We warned you. We warned you that we would not stand for a candidate with a corruption streak as long and as wide as Hillary Clinton's. I'm not talking about Benghazi or all this bullshit concerning Bill and his lady-friends. Rather, you had America's top diplomat using a private email server to handle classified documents. And yeah, sure, Bush and Cheney and Reagan and Nixon have been hiding correspondence of all sorts for decades, but the Democratic Party doesn't get to claim moral superiority and then whine when they're held to the same standard that they insisted on.
Speaking of emails...Wikileaks decided this election. Y'all loved it when Assange outed Bush and Cheney for war crimes, yet you're quick to excuse away the fact that Hillary Clinton is a horrible human being. I get it, DNC. Who wouldn't want to follow up the first black president with the first female president? But you had Elizabeth Warren. You had Tulsi Gabbard. (Not to mention you had a beloved populist that could have been our first Jewish, socialist president.) Yet you choose a neoliberal warmonger who has more responsibility for the death of women and children than, until now, Trump could have ever hoped to have had.
Hillary Clinton was never an icon for feminism. Hillary Clinton was never an icon for the left. She was, at BEST, a centrist who held her own political interests closer to heart than she could have ever held the interests of this country. Her loss, while lamentable, was predictable, and, in a Marxist sense, necessary.
Now, on to Donald J. Trump. The fear you guys have for this guy is laughable. He's just one of three branches of government. He's not going to overturn Roe v. Wade, because he'd need a constitutional amendment, and 3/4ths of the states are not going to do that. The same goes for gay marriage. Will progress slow down in transgendered rights and on drug and prison issues? Sure, but progress is inevitable. Four years aren't going to kill your dreams. Trump isn't going to bomb the Middle East, at least not any more than Obama or Bush did. Trump's not going to deport nearly as many people as the Obama administration has, nor is he gonna force Mexico to pay for a wall at nuke point. The guy is so full of shit that it's running out of his ears, and the BEST we can hope for is that the guy ushers in late capitalism and allows true radical left revolution to take place.
With all this being said...the left HAS to organize. I'm talking Democrats and progressives and democratic socialists and socialist socialists and Marxists and communists and anarchists and anarcho-communists and all the above. We're a fractured, splintered group and the right has made us that way, and unless we're willing to criticize ourselves and regroup, and compromise in the short-term, this is going to happen again and again.
It's time to stop being lesser-of-two-evils centrists.
It's time to be revolutionaries.
Who's with me?
