Mountain View Voice guest opinion
November 18, 2016
Listening to commentators discuss the presidential election, one might think that Donald Trump had won by a landslide. In fact, he won no mandate! Hillary Clinton seems to have won the popular vote by a substantial margin. Trump won less than a third of the presidential votes in California. Republicans held on to the their slim lead in the U.S. Senate largely because of their dominance of sparsely populated states. Few House seats changed hands because those who draw district boundaries, in both parties, have created a system that undermines competition.
The media and pundits are reacting to the fact that most of them underestimated Trump’s ability to mobilize his base in key states. Clearly he benefited from working-class reaction to the deindustrialization of the Midwest as well as the demographic insecurity of many European-Americans faced with a future in which they will become just one more minority group.
But I fathom something deeper. The conventional one-dimensional right-left division no longer explains American voting behavior, particularly in presidential elections, if it ever did. People vote based upon a wide range of domestic and foreign issues, personal identity, party loyalty, and candidates’ personalities. How else does one understand that many people in the Rust Belt appear to have voted for leftist Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and then Donald Trump in November?
Even if Trump and the Republicans had won in a landslide, those of us who espouse progressive change would not only be justified, but we would be obligated to continue to work for our own principles. That’s what conservatives have done when they’ve lost elections.
On many issues, we don’t know what Trump will propose as president. There are areas where we can work with him, but there will be times to confront his message. I’m going to focus on two important examples: sustainability and human rights.
Trump says he doesn’t believe fossil fuels are causing climate change, and he promises to unleash the fossil fuel industry. I doubt that coal will ever again be king, but unregulated fracking, pipeline expansion, and more offshore oil drilling may lie ahead.
We must battle in the courts, state and local governments, and even the streets — note the Dakota Access Pipeline campaign — to limit fossil fuel expansion, but we should also be promoting renewable power through state and local policies as well as our personal investments. In expanding solar and wind power, we will find many allies among Trump voters as well as traditional Republicans. Here in the Bay Area, where most of the major employers — the engines of both local and global economic growth — have joined the fight against climate change, we can demonstrate that sustainability is good for the economy.
The fight for human and civil rights never ended during the administration of our first black president, and Trump’s campaign rhetoric will undoubtedly lead to heightened prejudice and institutionally racist practices in law enforcement, immigration, and elsewhere. We’ve never eliminated those problems here in the Bay Area, but most of our communities treasure and benefit economically and culturally from our diversity.
We must act quickly to quash racist outbursts by people who think Trump’s victory has legitimized prejudice. We must insist that law enforcement act in a way that recognizes that black lives, along with all others, matter. We must show Muslims and undocumented immigrants that we value their contributions to our communities, that their children have the same right to education as anyone else, and that “family values” means that we don’t break up families. We reject the normalization of sexual assault and any effort to force LGBTQ people back into closets.
As we strive locally to protect our quality of life, expand housing opportunities, and improve traffic, we must engage at every political level to preserve hard-won progress and lay out our own practical, compassionate, and forward-looking vision for a greater America.
Mountain View City Council member Lenny Siegel was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention.