What Do We Do Now?

I Don't Think We are Prepared for What is About to Happen Here in the US.

I sense among many Democrats an impulse to respond to the first moves of the emerging Trump Administration with arguments and views very similar to those used during the campaign or during the first Trump term. I think it's a mistake.

It is going to take real depths of expertise to address specific initiatives--like the potential court martial of military leaders for their role in the Afghan withdrawal or the proposed round up of millions of undocumented immigrants or gutting specific agencies or targeting opposition leaders.

It will require concerted efforts at multiple levels--federal, state, international, using the potential pressure of the private sector, understanding where actions are contrary to the interests of the GOP or major groups within the U.S., new ideas about organization, about how to use new media.

Name calling and political food fights likely won't help. Expertise, funding, seriousness of purpose, identification of allies and points of leverage, understanding what is achievable and what is not, what can be stopped and what can only be delayed, are all going to be essential. This is new.

It is going redefine what it means to be to fulfill our obligations as citizens and the willingness to adapt, to be flexible, to be resilient. And it is going to require all these things...soon. The new administration takes office in nine weeks.

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The most common question I get these days from friends, colleagues and family is “What are we going to do?”

As the opening paragraphs of this post indicate, I’m not sure we know. What I am sure of is that what we are about to experience is going to be quite unlike anything we have experienced before.

We’re not prepared for it. We couldn’t be. We have never experienced it here in America. (Though there is much to be learned from studying the descent of other societies into increasingly authoritarian forms of government.)

The first goal must be recognizing what is happening, where it might lead and how it is different from that which we gone through in the past. I was struck by a conversation I had with a friend the other day. She is from Rwanda. She said her mother, who she said was not very educated or deeply involved in politics, said to her that she had a feeling that the incoming American administration had much in common with governments that led Rwanda to disaster. My friend described her mother as a survivor of the genocide in that country who was clearly changed by the experience and whose survival depended on having good instincts about what was happening around her.

Her comments were striking. But they also resonated with me in a special way because, as many of you know, my father was a Holocaust refugee and our entire family, scores of people other than he and his parents and one or two cousins, were murdered by the Nazis. And I recall his fears whenever he saw America drifting in directions that reminded him of his experiences as a kid in Austria.

But what really got to me was not the similarity between our experiences. It was that both of us had parents who had lived through the unexpected descent of their countries into authoritarian brutality. Such transitions are not remote incidents in history. They are a generation removed from the experience of many of us. Others among us have seen these transitions in their own lifetimes. Americans from every corner of the world have had these experiences because they are far more common they we typically acknowledge.

I was talking to another friend yesterday and she told me of an attorney friend of hers who was planning to leave the country the week before the inauguration and to spend the first three or four weeks of the new administration overseas. Other friends have made similar plans. I don’t blame them.

But if we are to preserve what is worth preserving here in this country, most of us are going to have to stay behind. It may put some of us at risk. We must take such risks and have faith that in the end our people and our institutions will eventually reject the worst of the changes the new administration are proposing. And we all must do what we can in our own way.

I encourage people to set aside emotion and focus coolly on the threats we face as I have described above. Certainly, that is what it is our intention to do at my media company, The DSR Network We have always focused on a particular kind of discourse that I think will be more important than ever in the next few years—the fact-based analysis of real experts, the best experts in the world. While what we do is not as sexy as some of the more demonstrative personality-based content you’ll find elsewhere, we are entering a period in which understanding the how our institutions work, the law, regulations, policy options, process options, who to trust, who not to trust, what might be effective, what will not be is key. And we know that different kinds of expertise are need to understand what might happen to our immigration policy, intelligence and law enforcement communities, defense policy, education policy, technology policy, economic policy, to the Congress, to the judiciary, to the White House, to the states and local governments.

Going forward, given the stakes, we will work harder to make the best experts available to you…on crucial issues in real time. Further, we will work even harder to ensure that every discussion contains points of view from across the political spectrum…provided they also make the grade as reliable experts our audience needs to hear from.

I’ll try to do the same here focusing on what I have learned from the 15-20 podcasts we do each week and my interactions in Washington and around the world. Given the stakes, I will try to offer a counterpoint to some of what you may hear elsewhere in terms of outrage or typical partisan media. I will try also to focus on developments that are occurring off-camera or behind the scenes that likely to be materially important even if some of them are about policy areas that are drier than the splashier stories of the day. (Particularly those that fall in my special areas of experience—foreign policy, national security, economic policy and technology policy (as well as that which draws on my work writing about how the executive branch works and how it interacts with other power centers in society.)

I hope you will support those efforts—subscribe to this Substack, become a paid subscriber if possible, become a paid subscriber to the DSR Network, read my columns at The Daily Beast and elsewhere. And when you have thoughts about what I or we can do better or differently, I hope you’ll let me know through your comments on this site. We’re all in this together after all. And we’re all about to face challenges and experiences (and opportunities) we have never faced before.

Thanks.