Neither Progressives nor Conservatives are hopeful that the United States (its citizens, voters, or elected officials) is about to unify anytime soon. Divisive thinking is now pervasive in the culture and has become systemic. Systemic conditions are extremely difficult to change.
As an example, a business culture can become so systemic that even getting rid of some of the people in the organization and replacing them with others rarely changes the entire business culture. Often, the new hires (at any level of the company) evolve to conform to the existing culture. Changing the CEO to someone with very different behaviors (a new role model) and a set of articulated, new expectations can help, to the extent that the CEO is strong-willed and aligned subordinates can weed out employees (starting with managers) who won’t or can’t conform to the imposed culture. If the company is sufficiently large, this change can take 5+ years to happen. Meanwhile, the company will be quite divided. Consider Carly Fiorina during her tenure at Hewlett-Packard (a name which she strategically referred to as “HP.”) She was strong-willed and discarded most of “The HP Way,” a statement of values advocated by the founders and embraced by many employees. With Fiorina’s imposition of a new culture, employees left in droves as they were committed to those long-time values—some resigning, others fired. But Donald Trump cannot fire members of Congress. He cannot fire Progressives. Governing the U.S. is not reality television and it is not corporation management. Progressive thinkers have a vote.
Progressives have been watching and listening to Donald Trump’s direct comments and behaviors for a long time. Many believe that the best predictor of the future is the past. In a few ways (not many), President-elect Trump is not as extreme a Conservative as those who are becoming the new establishment, that is, the alt-right and Tea Party Republicans. If congressional Republicans decide their best hope for keeping their jobs is to line up behind Trump, there will be only a very few points of political policy on which there’s a chance for Progressives and Conservatives to find common ground. Mostly, the distance between progressive thinking and conservative thinking is growing as the alt-right cements their power.
Why would even moderate conservative politicians line up behind President-elect Trump’s political positions? They might hope that lining up would reduce gridlock in Congress. Voters are tired of congressional gridlock… and might actually come to realize that if they keep voting for Republican incumbents, that gridlock is not going to go away.
Those who voted for Trump in the primaries were clearly not disturbed enough by his personality and open bigotry to vote for another Republican primary candidate. And 47% of those voting in the general election chose Trump. (Well, actually, it’s the Electoral College, since Secretary Clinton received almost 3,000,000 more popular votes than Trump. But the point remains that 47% of voters chose Mr. Trump.) The division is with the voters. There are people who will accept having a man committed to discrimination and there are people who won’t stand for that in any elected official, much less the president of the United States.
Five days after the election, President-elect Trump announced that he will not totally rescind the Affordable Care Act. I guess he still doesn’t understand separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution, as such changes are the responsibility of Congress. But if he pushes for the ACA to be improved and not discarded entirely, Conservatives in Congress can line up behind that. They don’t have to be 100% opposed to the entire ACA anymore because it can stop being called “Obamacare.” Their congressional home base will not desert them. It remains to be seen who has the most to gain with the modifications: healthcare providers, healthcare insurers, or the populace.
It is on social issues of equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal treatment that Progressives are certain there is no possibility of finding common ground. Progressives know that Trump is closer to progressive beliefs in only a very few of his political positions and that he has been quite the bigot in his own professional life. Many Progressives believe that Trump mostly played to his base of bigots and misogynists to gain prominence with large, admiring crowds and that Trump wants to keep those bigots’ support for another presidential election in 4 years. Appointing Stephen Bannon, well-known white nationalist and alt-right spokesperson, to the position of chief White House strategist and senior presidential advisor says volumes about where Trump is headed on civil rights. It is not toward anything that even moderate Conservatives could support, let alone Progressives.
Trump is not a deep thinker (he has volunteered that he prefers shallow thinking), but he has street smarts and instincts for how to be top dog. Progressives’ biggest concern is that civil and human rights will regress under President-elect Trump’s leadership. Already, we are seeing more hate crimes and hate speech from other bigot, xenophobes, and misogynists who feel they’ve been empowered by Trump. Appointing a white nationalist to a senior position states clearly that President-elect Trump could not care less about being a unifier.
People of color, women, people with disabilities, non-Christians, and people with non-straight gender identities can expect to experience day-to-day discrimination that is more open and more pervasive. Enforcement of existing civil rights legislation and of the U.S. Constitution’s provisions for equality with respect to race, national origin, religion, and gender is not going to become stronger under Donald Trump and his chosen administration. Will Progressives embrace this? These attitudes and behaviors are repugnant and antithetical to Progressives’ beliefs.
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