Beyond voting: Staying vigilant even after the election
““If Trump is Hitler, what is Obama to the people of Libya? Or Syria? Or Pakistan? What is George W. Bush Jr. to Iraqis? What is Bill Clinton to the people of Sudan? Yuglosavia? What are any and all of them to migrants who have been caged and deported, or Black people who have been executed by police in the streets on a daily basis, or workers who have been left without means to sustain basic life, or tens of millions who are surveilled each and every day? These things occurred long before Trump and will continue to escalate long after Trump.
The empire lives. For now. And Hitler is not dead.””
From social media posts, to voicemails and text chains, to emails that have mostly found their way to spam, to the countless canvassers leaving flyers on my front door, this year’s election cycle has been relentless and inescapable. Celebrities, politicians, and laypeople alike have all come together to push for a blue wave, and their efforts came to fruition: After nearly four years of rule under a man who denies science and calls Nazis “very fine people,” much of the country celebrated the administration taking his place, one that includes the first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president. Simply put, Joe Biden’s win was a sigh of relief.
There is no doubt that the Trump administration’s legacy is one of bloodshed and violence: this year alone, the United States boasts 250,000+ lives lost due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the highest death toll of any country. Black and brown people have suffered enormously from Trump’s inhumane immigration policies and refusal to condemn white supremacy, and the conservative-leaning Supreme Court will almost certainly set women’s rights back several decades. And after all the pain Trump has put the American people through, they deserve to take a moment and celebrate his ousting.
But make no mistake—there is still far more work to be done, and we must remain vigilant.
Donald Trump was not a friend to marginalized groups, but neither are Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris. Biden’s slew of bad decisions includes co-writing the 1994 crime bill that led to the disproportionate mass incarceration of Black people, backing the post-9/11 racial profiling Patriot Act, and voting for the disastrous Iraq War. Harris’s record is almost even worse, especially since she takes pride in her multicultural heritage—during her years as California’s Attorney General, Harris, a self-identified “top cop,” kept disproportionately Black and brown nonviolent offenders incarcerated for longer than their sentences, exploited prison labor, denied a trans inmate gender reassignment surgery, and backed legislation criminalizing sex work. Neither of them support significant police reform despite everything that’s happened with the Black Lives Matter movement this past summer, and deny actual, progressive policies such as universal healthcare. Unfortunately, liberals either remain willfully ignorant on these issues, or they just don’t care as long as Trump is no longer in office. And that’s a problem.
Trump was a bad president, but he is just one of forty-five bad presidents. And as long as presidents keep enforcing the capitalist and imperialist state, there is no such thing as a good president. Democrats view themselves as morally better than Republicans, but are they, really? How can they view the ICE detention centers in horror when Obama built the original cages? How can they claim to care about Black lives when the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Trayvon Martin occurred under a Democratic administration—the administration of America’s first Black president, no less—that condemned the protesters instead of the racism and the police brutality? Democrats and Republicans alike have their hands stained with the blood of the Middle Eastern countries they bombed and declared war on, and they both lead imperialist CIA coups in the Global South with pride. A country founded on colonialism, whose genocide of the Native Americans partly inspired the Nuremburg laws in Nazi Germany, whose electoral college has not once changed in 244 years, can never be “good,” no matter how diverse its executive branch is.
Trump’s defeat is a win, but his ideology continues to survive within the government (and his supporters), and there is so much more to do. We must hold politicians accountable. We must continue to challenge propaganda and educate ourselves, petition, donate, and above all, fight to dismantle the systems of oppression that led us here in the first place. Voting was important, but now is the time to roll up our sleeves and get down to work.