1.) White America: now 20% woke-er. The election and re-election of our nation’s first black president drove a ton of white people absolutely batshit around-the-bend crazy — including a bunch that voted for him, some of them twice! But a lot of us also went “Yass bissh.” Until someone clued us in that this was a weirdly appropriative thing to say, and so we were like “Sweeeeet” instead. A lot of white people were and are enthusiastic about Barack Obama for both the symbolic value of the fact of his presidency and the extraordinary substance of the man and his accomplishments. This is important, because even as most whites spiraled into a “racial aversion crisis,” many bought into a pluralistic vision of America where people who look like them aren’t always in charge of everything and that’s fine. The conversations around race that his presidency engendered have made all of us who weren’t hiding under our beds for fear of a New Black Panthers-led race war a bit less ignorant about the world Americans of color live in.
2.) Americans, even many Republicans, will remember Obama the way people remember Reagan and JFK — as a transformational president who restored dignity to the office and the country. Ironically, people will look back and credit him — and not his successor — with making America great again. This is especially true since unlike Reagan, he’ll be succeeded not by a vastly less-charismatic co-partisan hack who’s doomed to a single term, but rather by the worst president in the history of America who’s doomed to a single term.
3.) For the first time since Reconstruction, black people are being recognized as essential participants in a major party political coalition — not as junior partners to be shunted into the cheap seats and wheeled out for the occasional Sister Souljahing when the party wants to appeal to white voters who don’t like black people. Hillary Clinton spoke directly to black communities about issues of concern to them. For all the idiotic post-election blather about “identity politics,” nobody — not even the wrinkled old talking heads on the Sunday morning shows — grumbled about “pandering” to “special interests,” etc. This is how it is now. People of color have seats at the head of the Democratic Party table.
4.) Can’t put those LGBT people back in the closet. Nope. They’ve been coming out for decades, and nearly every Trumper knows and loves at least one. And since 2015, every state in the nation has had to recognize their marriages, which means that many Trumpers’ favorite gays have brought partners and cute children into their lives. Which makes it damn near impossible to go back to the old Christian right playbook of portraying LGBT folks as sex-crazed, disease-addled subcultural degenerates skulking in the shadows and stealing all the good orgasms from honest, hard-working American straights.
5.) Our culture is now overtly authored largely by blacks, Latinas and other people of color, women and LGBT folks. I mean, they’ve always been the primary engineers of cultural production in America, but when I was a kid, the labels and the studios always made sure that a white dude got credit, or at least a strong supporting role, because white fragility. In the Rap Age and the Obama Age, all that’s changed. Trump can call himself president but Queen Bey rules our hearts and holds the codes to American cultural hegemony, which will soon be weaponized and used to troll Trump and the Republicans mercilessly.
6.) Access to healthcare has been established as a basic right. Republicans can and will destroy the law that would have achieved near-universal healthcare. They will pay a price, because all those Obamacare beneficiaries that voted for Trump in Kentucky are not about to just accept that the sanctity of the free market demands they die in a ditch from a treatable illness because capital does not value their labor.
(Yes, Berners, we’ll replace it with single payer ASAP. Yes, we should have done that in 2010 BUT WE COULDN’T BECAUSE LIEBERBAUCUSDEMS WERE YOU EVEN PAYING ATTENTION DID YOU MISS THE WHOLE SAUSAGE-MAKING PARTY phew OK better now).
7.) The sanctity of political protest, it’s essential function in our democracy and its value as an engine of social progress have been affirmed repeatedly during our Community Organizer-in-Chief’s tenure. Protestors will now be depicted by the incoming regime as fanged Bolshevik Fifth Columnists, paid by George Soros, seeking to subvert the popular will, undermine America from within and destroy all that is holy and good, but Obama and the movements of his day — Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Fight for 15, even, to the extent that it was an organic grassroots movement and not just a rightwing astroturf operation, the Tea Party freakout — have reminded us that American democracy is supposed to be loud and giant puppets are as American as apple pie.
8.) Our cities, the archipelago of blue, have assumed the role the framers envisioned states taking as laboratories of democracy. Here in New York, we’ve seen big wins with a minimum wage raise, universal pre-K and criminal justice reform in recent years. Urban America can’t go it alone for the long term — we need to eat, and our party needs to become competitive in at least enough rural areas to get us past 270 electoral votes in four years. But in the interim, cities will serve as blue bastions, impeding some of the Trump regime’s worst abuses, such as its planned purge of immigrants, and generating a wave of innovative policies that can be scaled up nationally when politics allows.
9.) We are the majority. A plurality of voters, a majority of the nation’s population. Oh, we’re not always as organized as those elderly white Republican voters. We may suck at voting in off-year elections, and just a few too many of us sometimes can’t be bothered even in presidential years. But any demographer will tell you that the Republican coalition is now outnumbered, and all the voter suppression and deportations in the world won’t protect the Republicans’ gerrymandered-to-the-hilt legislative majorities for very long. Many don’t think they can win the electoral college again in four years, either. Maybe Trump will pull a Putin, or the Republicans will figure out a way to perpetuate their power for another election cycle or two, but absent Soviet-style authoritarianism, there’s just no way a white nationalist party can stay in the game as a national political party.
10.) My son is growing up with the knowledge that women are powerful.Not just women like Ivanka and Melania, who are born into or marry into wealth, but also the working class young women of color he knows from school. He and his generation will grow up with many, many fewer stupid preconceptions about gender roles than me and mine did. The women won’t demand equality — they’ll assume it as their birthright, and the men that didn’t get the memo will have to move the fuck over and accommodate them. Even the troglodytes of Generation Z Or Whatever It Is We’re Calling Them Now will take it as a given that women will run shit and hold positions of power, up to and including the presidency.
,” Spears captioned the photo.
