Going around chanting “We won the Popular Vote” really means nothing, hell it doesn’t even get you a participation ribbon. There are no points for second place kids, time to pull up your big boy/girl pants and become constructive.. I said constructive not destructive – PB/TK
Please Stop Chanting That “We” Won the Popular Vote! –
On the first day of Trump’s administration, well over one out of every hundred Americans took to the streets to march and rally against the new President. A week later, airports around the country were flooded with protesters, forcing Trump’s team to back down on one of their signature proposals. In any normal parliamentary democracy, a crisis of legitimacy of this magnitude would have already led to the head of state stepping down and scheduling a new election.
This is America, and Hamilton and Madison and the rest feared the common rabble far too much to allow for that degree of instability, but even within the constitutional framework they designed, mass protest movements can be effective. A generation ago, such movements ended segregation, forced Lyndon Johnson out of office, and ended America’s quasi-genocidal war in Vietnam. More recently, the occupiers in Zucotti Park and other encampments around the country moved issues of income inequality and economic injustice to the forefront of national consciousness in a way that probably doomed the Presidential campaign of poor hapless Mitt Romney and which definitely paved the way for the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders and most recently the astonishing growth of Democratic Socialists of America.
The effectiveness of Occupy Wall Street was inseparable from the genius of its slogans. This isn’t a matter of precise accuracy. The really elite super-rich make up well under one percent of the population, and the broader ruling class is considerably larger. A businessman who ‘only’ has a hundred employees and who fires fifty of those hundred when they try to organize a union may not be anywhere near the top one percent of wealth-hoarders, but I hope no one in Zucotti mentally included him in the ‘we’ of “We are the ninety-nine percent!” Statistical nit-picking aside, the genius of the slogan was that it powerfully and succinctly conveyed the entirely accurate impression that the people whose interests are actually served by the current economic system are vastly outnumbered by their victims. The rules of political mobilization at that level resemble grenade-throwing far more than chess. It’s a context in which there absolutely is such a thing as ‘close enough.’
