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I just came back from a walk in the rain. It’s the morning after, and I felt compelled to walk off my election hangover by going out into the first sky-tears, after the past two months of glorious, dry campaign weather here in Cincinnati. I walked fifteen minutes over to the pond in Burnet Woods, the same pond where, as a five-year old, I first saw the magic of mallards gliding as the live version of Make Way for Ducklings. The Burnet Woods pond is still serene and inviting and delivers easy sitings of a mallard family. If history counts, the outcome of this election, I tell myself, will not touch this pond.
I took this walk and write this piece in the grip of grief and with the impulse to retreat. We woke this morning to the news that Trump has defeated Harris for the presidency. I find this hard to believe, and I feel compelled to retreat long enough to swallow the meaning of it, retreat into fatigue, disbelief, and avoidance of daily life—the kitchen dishes, showing up for work, calling the refrigerator repair service.
What will Retreat be like in the coming weeks or months? Good armies retreat strategically after battle defeat, to mourn their losses, to regroup, and to take the measure of the larger campaign. For all of us who voted for Kamala Harris, who worked for her, and who pinned our hopes on her campaign to save our democracy, this grief feels heavy, and not quickly lifted. I feel sad for our nation’s voters who did not show up when it counts most. Roughly 66 million people cast votes for Harris. Compare that to the 81 million who elected Biden and fired Trump in 2020. And this time only 73 million voted for Trump, compared to the 74 million in 2020. Where have all those 17 million voters gone?
I’m sorry to say that, as a country, we are getting what we deserve. If the majority of us can vote for a man who openly defies the Constitution we are electing him to protect, we deserve no one better. If we can vote for a man who has been convicted of 34 felonies, and faces another 52 federal charges, to lead our justice system, a system he has repeatedly dismissed and disrespected, we deserve the “leader” we have elected. If we can vote for a man so blatantly interested in himself over others, we will have only ourselves to blame when he dismisses our interests over the coming four years, including the interests of those who voted for him. And if we can return Trump to power while handing the rule of the Senate and the House to the Republicans under his thumb, we deserve the exercise of unchecked power that he has threatened to wield. We have asked to be ruled by threats and fears.
What grieves me more than what we have done to ourselves by handing the “loaded gun” of unchecked power to this desperate man, is what we have done to the rest of the world that relies so heavily on the example of our democracy. Democracy is fragile everywhere, and this election will ripple around the world, rattling many countries. They can’t be blamed for our voting habits. Shame fits the size of this folly of ours. And the expected impact of this election on our global climate crisis only magnifies our shame for willfully imposing Trump’s brand of power upon our planet, and maybe even some day upon the Burnet Woods pond.
Retreat for me will mean retreating from the news cycle saturated for another four years with this man’s face and voice and threats. Retreat will mean gathering with my family, friends, and fellow liberals to hold on to what we have and count our blessings and mourn and eat and play games and forget and make plans. It will be a confusing and frustrating set of gatherings, but we are wired to gather in grief, to comfort, to huddle. That’s first, for now. And that grieving may last many months.
Then what? One of my exercises during the waning days of the campaign involved writing my worst-case scenario plan. This is an approach I learned from cognitive therapy methods for managing severe anxiety, which usually involves our overestimating the threats and underestimating the resources we have for coping. If we can face the fact that, even in the worst-case scenario, we can expect to survive, then the more realistic outcomes will be more manageable. This is the beginning of what it will mean to resist in the coming years.
My first step in this exercise on October 23rd was to list the components of the worst-case scenario for this election. Realizing that there are many pieces to this puzzle helped me see that the odds were low of all of them turning out badly. The six possible election outcomes I listed that seemed to drive my worst-case scenario were:
1) Harris loses
2) US Senate shifts to Republican majority
3) US House retains Republican majority
4) Ohio’s anti gerrymandering Issue 1 loses
5) Sherrod Brown loses Ohio’s US Senate race, and
6) Three Democratic Judges lose their races for the Ohio Supreme Court.
Now here I am, in my morning after hangover, facing all six of these bad outcomes—truly the worst-case scenario I could imagine.
The second step of my exercise back on October 23rd started with a list of my resources for resisting the Trump agenda:
a) a large network of family, friends, and activists
b) a posture of endurance (in contrast to triumph or defeat) for the coming four years
c) a set of daily activities that are nourishing and unlikely to change in the near future (work, sports, yard chores, writing, music, etc.)
d) the example of the civil rights movement over the past 150 years overcoming multiple setbacks more formidable than this election setback.
More elusive for me has been the step of identifying the organizations that will best guide my efforts to build up the kind of political momentum we will need to stop Trump’s nefarious and fascist agenda, to return our country to a robust and resilient democracy. New organizations will surely mushroom soon, but for now my list includes the Democratic Party, journalism and especially the independents (The Guardian, The Conversation., others?), Planned Parenthood, The Innocence Project, Physicians for a National Health Plan. There must be others I can’t think of in my soggy state of mourning. I need these groups to lure me out of retreat and feed my hope and guide my efforts to resist the coming threats to democracy.
Run. Is that an option? I’ve heard my friends joke about moving to Canada or Scandinavia or Montana. Not for me, not today. For me, running geographically from this political storm requires too high a price to pay for insulation, and it does not take care of my need to do something, however small, to address the problems. But I’m a wealthy white retired male citizen who does not yet have a target on my back, other than working for, or perhaps being a part of, “the enemy within.” I can imagine feeling differently about the Run option if I were a woman of reproductive age, a legal immigrant citizen, a person related to undocumented immigrants, a non-citizen on a work visa, a Muslim, or a Haitian from Springfield, Ohio. Who knows what the next targeted group will be? We are soon to become a nation ruled by threats and fears. That has been Trump’s power m.o. from the start.
The other alternative to the geographic Run is the psychologic Run. This is the easier option and one that is already widely popular. It takes various forms. Denial is one of the ways that 71 million people have managed to vote for Trump in this election. Hakuna matata. There is no problem. Related to that tactic is distancing; Trump may be a problem, but he’s not your problem and you’re not a part of his problem. Maybe you even disapprove of his behavior, but you’re not going to let it interfere with your life.
Further along the spectrum is dissociation, that mind trick that kids learn when they are abused by the people responsible for their care. By switching to a channel of indifference, they can mentally escape, at least for a short time, from the threats that run their lives. It’s the last recourse of the helpless. These people don’t physically run from their perpetrators—some even cling to them—because they dissociate instead. If it’s possible for a population to mimic a person, our election of Trump may represent our clinging to the strongman who threatens us. People at risk for deportation, like those apparently docile Jewish captives in WW II Germany, may seem oblivious of the risks they face because they have already checked out.
Retreat, Resist, or Run. We’re likely to do a lot of all three in the next few years. We’re going to need the magic of mallards in the pond.