The Women's Marches maybe the largest in US history
vox.com
vox.com
Estimated crowd in DC on Saturday was 1.2 million. Nationwide, it was 3 million. Just one of the six Los Angeles area protests had 750,000 people.
Even Witchita, Kansas had thousands.
I've never seen anything like this, and it's just the beginning.
"Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don't always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views." https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/82317419903654298...
That's a talking point of Trump supporters, but a moment's thought shows that it's not remotely true. It seems to assume that people only participate in democracy by voting and then politicians rule on their own recognizance during their terms, almost as if voters were electing kings/queens.
In a democracy, politicians are responsive to voters' desires 365 days/year; you can call them, write them, meet with them, protest them, and if you pay any attention to democratic politics, you know it has a serious effect (along with passively collected information such as survey results).
Second, protesting government is a major part of democracy. The March on Washington led by Martin Luther King had nothing to do with an election. The U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights protects it, saying "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I don't remember the Republicans having the same attitude at all about Obama; they resisted all the time in every way possible, setting records in Congress for obstructionism, buying guns, etc. Vladimir Putin seemed to start this talking point; perhaps it's true for him, but he knows little about democratic government.
I don't think it's the end. People were inspired yesterday, the crowds realized they have the numbers and the passion to fight back. People were taking action, finding their local organizations, learning how to inform their representatives, and even planning the next protests already.
We're going to see more and more of this.
We will also see more "Alternative Facts" and PR campaigns from the White House, closely following Dugin's handbook (dismiss, distract, distort, and dismay).
Yes, the opposition is toast if that happens.
Its certainly difficult to mobilize a mass political movement in the US without an imminent election and outside of the immediate aftermath of one, but the great and influential movements all were movements that managed to do that.
The time for a movement is not over. Whether it will hold together or not is, certainly, a thing about which there can be legitimate differences of opinion, but the signs I see suggest that there is something there.
Beginning of what? What do they want? I couldn't really distill a pattern in my mind from the signs I saw in Austin. There were marches world-wide, so I'm guessing it's more than "We hate Trump".
This one will definitely be in the history books, though.
It also looks like the Republican effort to disenfranchise people by reducing early voting, voting hours, closing polling stations, enacting voter ID laws, purging voter rolls, etc has worked in the sense that it slightly reduced Dem turnout which was enough in this election. Their efforts to steal elections by gerrymandering themselves into power has also given them outsized control of the House and various state governments.
It is really embarrassing that the majority of the country votes D and the Rs have control over the government. It's pure subversion of democracy.
Russia certainly tried to influence the election but if it had been Obama running (or anyone charismatic) instead of Clinton it wouldn't have mattered; Trump would have lost by a huge EC margin.
I'm far more worried about the long-term damage to the country now that the FBI has once again become an open political weapon, and that Rs are unapologetically disenfranchising people in an attempt to maintain power permanently.
While I don't agree with a great deal of the rest of your assertions, this stands out to me as the important one. If the Democrats had run almost anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would have likely won.
They ran Hillary Clinton.
Of course it's hard to point to one factor in such a complex, real world situation, But look at a chart of Clinton's poll numbers; she was comfortably ahead, and as soon as Comey's letter came out, her number dropped like a rock and never recovered.
> It is really embarrassing that the majority of the country votes D and the Rs have control over the government.
Note that the Democrats have won the popular vote in 5 of the last 6 national elections. Other than George W Bush's second election in 2004, the GOP hasn't won a nationwide majority since 1988.
The fact of the matter is Trump's support base is broader than his opposition - at least, in the states where it matters.
The country is a democracy, not an elected dictatorship. Voters and their desires don't disappear the day after the election. Republicans took resistance of Obama's presidency to record levels; only their propagandists can say with a straight face that those who oppose Trump should be quiet for the next four years.
> Trump lost the overall vote, and lost women's votes 54-41%.
I guess I don't see the point you're trying to make here.
The GP asked how Trump got elected. He overwhelmingly won white, Christian, middle-class (and above) families - a group that has felt left out of American politics for the past decade or so.
It shows the cynicism of the GOP that they would adopt a talking point from Putin, endorse something so undemocratic, and pretend to suddenly forget the unprecedented resistance the engaged in when Obama was President.
Also, my point was relevant to the comment I was responding to.
I don't know what you mean by "fair", but the non-voting population has much less influence over politics than the ones who vote. Regardless, we have surveys showing the opinions of non-voters and Trump, at least a couple weeks ago, was at record levels of unpopularity among Presidents-elect.
But I don't see how it's relevant to the point, which is that elected officials are compelled to and do respect the opinions of voters.
They should have voted then. They didn't vote, and when the guy they don't like get voted into office, they get all angry. Well, they should have voted.
>...elected officials are compelled to and do respect the opinions of voters.
Trump does. He's going to implement his policies, since the voters have voted him to do so.
They did. First, Trump was behind the leading better by an historic margin for a candidate that won the electoral vote. And, second, Trump's popularity has fallen since the election.
In any case, your implict idea that public-to-elected-official interaction is limited to elections is contrary to the founding principles of this country.
All voters have influence, not just the ones who voted for you and not just for one Tuesday every four years. He's the President of all Americans, not just Trump supporters.
No, its not.
> at least, in the states where it matters.
Even there it likely isn't now -- even if it was in the most trivial sense on election day -- given the degree to which his support has fallen since then.
Wrong. You are confusing pollsters with an exaggeration of a subset of the set of analysts working with data from those pollsters (and the subset in question is whose approach was criticized by the most well-regarded in the broader set for the exact thing that led to overstating Clinton's likelihood of victory.)
This error though reflects exactly a frequent propaganda line from the Trump camp, and when it gets echoed here and in other forums its often corrected the, so at this point I have begun to doubt whether is ever an honest error rather than deliberate injection of "alternative facts" into the discussion as a distraction.
I was impressed by the numbers of some of the top gatherings. The shared record is for two religious events at ~30 million people in India and Iraq.
And best of all, it is moral to permit human beings to make their own choices about their own bodies.
Unfortunately, the incoming administration and Congress have collectively said some pretty dumb things, and tried to pass some pretty dumb laws, against these ideas.
There are also potentially government issues related to race and ethnicity and sexual orientation and gender, and I think a lot of people marched with those in mind too.
The fundamental question of the Trump presidency is: who is going to own the narrative? Who gets to decide what is true, what is real, what matters, and what the government should do or not do?
The purpose of a mass protest is to seize the narrative, or at least to demonstrate that Trump does not own it. The larger the gathering, the greater its demonstrative power. Each person who decides to go knows that they are individually only a tiny little drop, metaphorically. But they hope to help make a big flood.
Most of Congress is up for re-election in 2018. The President is up for re-election in 2020. Contrary to popular belief, politicians (including Trump) do care a lot about what people think, and they will change, moderate, or slow their efforts if they get the sense that they'll lose an election over it.
This strategy is not new or unique. Republicans used it to great effect in 2009-2010, killing the public option out of Obamacare, and blocking the cap-and-trade global warming bill--even though the Democrats held the White House and Congress.