On beyond the RESIST moment

As I walk around middling neighborhoods in San Francisco, the bumper stickers are still prominent; many, many, of us responded to the shock of seeing Donald Trump elevated to the White House by engaging, protesting, and eventually electing a Democratic House of Representatives. Locally, we can enjoy the spectacle of our Congresscritter putting President Blunderbuss in his place.

But after two years, though we still need to protest and impede Trump's racist authoritarianism, we can't allow ourselves to become exhausted spectators to a faraway Washington drama. People are being hurt and terrible policy choices are being locked in by a GOP coterie of con-men masquerading as a cabinet. We need to be envisioning what we do want from government more than what we don't want.

And it turns out, such re-envisioning is just what majorities of us have been doing with results that surprise the cautious establishments of both political parties.

For starters, we don't want Donald Trump in 2020. According to a Washington Post/ABC news poll:

A 56 percent majority of all Americans say they would “definitely not vote for him” should Trump become the Republican nominee, while 14 percent say they would consider voting for him and 28 percent would definitely vote for him. Majorities of independents (59 percent), women (64 percent) and suburbanites (56 percent) rule out supporting Trump for a second term.

Even with our absurdly unrepresentative Electoral College, you can't elect a president with those numbers.

But even more to the point, somehow the stresses of the last two years have moved public opinion in some clear new directions:

A strong majority of Americans support sharply raising taxes on the wealthy. A plurality disapproves of the large corporate tax cut passed by the Republican Congress in 2017. A whopping 70 percent of the country — and even 52 percent of Republicans — support Medicare for all. More than half of the country wants to see abortion remain legally available (with that number dropping below a majority only late in pregnancy.) Fifty-seven percent of Americans (and 69 percent of military veterans) would support removing all troops from Afghanistan after 17 years of stalemate.

Damon Linker, The Week

And there's plenty more: no amount of presidential bluster moved more than 60 percent of us to think it worth shutting down the government for a Wall. Trump's Wall, Trump's push to Make America White Again, simply doesn't cut it for most of us.

And Linker missed a couple of vital items. We don't know quite what we mean yet, but bipartisan support for something called a "Green New Deal" hit 81 percent in December.

And for all the saber rattling from Washington, the powers-that-be act as if they know that getting directly militarily engaged in Venezuela would be wildly unpopular. (Sure hope I'm right on that one, but I think that's the lesson they've taken from nearly two decades of lingering wars of choice.)

And so -- we've moved on from the simplicity and unity of the RESIST moment. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to flesh out where we want to go; inevitably different people will work on different parts of this. And that work will generate different priorities

But the catalogue of items laid out above are no longer fringe ideas -- I would expect that all the aspiring Dem presidents will at least give them lip service.

Resistance gave us that. Now we have to fumble through all available means, including the political thickets, to make our newly clarified majority wishes into realities.