I get where this is coming from, but when I say we set the country back 50 years, I’m speaking from an organizing and lawyering perspective.
The incremental legal changes that folks have been fighting to make since the Civil Rights Act passed are about to get systematically undone. Trump has promised to undo every single one of President Obama’s executive orders. He’s going to attempt to stack the Supreme Court with alt-right Justices (potentially 3-4 new Justices), all of whom will be young and remain on the court for 30-50 years, shaping law for the rest of most of our lives. That’s the rest of my life as a lawyer now spent dealing with shitty precedent and being forced to craft even shittier legal arguments to appeal to the new alt-right Justices in a vain attempt to preserve our rights only for it to ultimately be ignored and shot down. The amicus brief on Fisher II isn’t even cold yet, but you can bet conservative impact litigators everywhere are readying anti-Affirmative Action cases at this very moment. Meanwhile, to mount a challenge to that, we’re going to have to toss all of the carefully crafted & tailored legal argumentation folks spent years on just to sway Justice Kennedy and go in essentially blind to what arguments might appeal to the new extremely conservative Justices. Honestly, all the folks who worked tirelessly to save Affirmative Action, bring us marriage equality, & are fighting to preserve our rights in less well-known cases, were royally fucked by this election result. We basically have to reinvent the wheel for progressive impact litigation lawyering.
All of this dovetails into “organizing.” People keep saying that “we just need to come together” and “now is the time to organize” without defining what that is or what it looks like in Trump’s America. Whenever folks talked about organizing before it was mostly about changing policies, moving lawmakers & politicians, & changing laws. Well…how are we supposed to change policies, move lawmakers, or change laws, when all the power players are now extremely conservative Republicans with little to no politicalopposition & thus no incentive to listen to the concerns of “losers?” We just elected the people whom we knew didn’t care at all about our issues. These folks think BLM is a terrorist organization, they think trans folks should be banned from public bathrooms, they think we should electrocute the gay away, they think all Muslims & anyone who “looks like a Muslim” is a terrorist, they think all Brown folks are “foreign” and need to be deported. These are not reasonable people. They are not moved by our protests. And they have the power and the tools to make what they believe in policy and to make it legal & constitutional.
When I say we’ve regressed 50 years, it’s not because I was laboring under the delusion that white people had somehow bettered themselves. I’ve never been that naive. When I say we’ve regressed 50 years, I mean that we’ve handed over to the enemy all the tools we’ve scraped and fought for & forged with our own blood, sweat, tears, and lives. There is no more struggling for progress. We’re struggling for basic survival now, to hold on while so many of the rights we managed to win are stripped from us. When Trump said he was gonna “make America great again,” taking us back to the 50s is what he had in mind. And from a civil rights, constitutional, & policy perspective, that’s exactly where he’s going to take us.
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