After the Nov. 8 election, Princeton’s campus has been solemn. The harsh rhetoric from Donald Trump and the fierce condemnation from the left drove a wedge in a widening gap between conservatives and liberals in the United States, and many students feel like the worst-case election scenario has come to pass.
I am one of those students. I worry about what may befall our country under the leadership of someone with zero political experience, restraint, or decency, who has advocated for torture and the registry of Muslims in a database. We must fight against this wholeheartedly. But the best path forward for liberals is not to obstruct Trump’s government, for now. Instead, we should establish clear policy goals and remain watchful.
During President Obama’s first term, then-Speaker of the House John Boehner famously said that the Republican Party’s main goal was to get Obama out of office in four years. I remember, even as a teenager, feeling disgusted. Both parties, regardless of who wins the nomination, should focus on trying to run the country as effectively as possible. The mindset of “let’s kick the other guy out of office” led to eight years of Republicans blockading anything coming from the left — or often even the center.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the rise of the Tea Party. Tea Partiers preferred shutting down the government to minor compromises that benefited everyone. Ted Cruz is the epitome of this, and I never want to be anything like Ted Cruz, for reasons that all Princetonians should understand.
Liberals cannot be like that. For those of us who cannot directly shape policy, the best path at this moment is to be watchful. We will fight back against racism and xenophobia, but we cannot simply label all Trump supporters as racists and expect things to get better; we need to converse with conservatives and find key metrics that everyone can agree are worth watching.
We should reach out to our Republican friends and family members and learn what they think will represent progress for our nation. As terrible as the outcome of this election is, it represents an opportunity for liberals to ask a conservatives what clear, measurable, objective goals they have for the Trump presidency. If vague answers are given — like “Make America Great Again” — we can gently press for more specific answers.
Gentle questioning has two benefits. First, it will set a precedent for interactions between liberals and conservatives when Democrats are back in power. Second, it will arm us with specific goals to point to if the Donald Trump administration fails to live up to its promises.
By starting early, liberals can see that Trump is held to the same accountability that we hold Kansas Governor Sam Brownback to. Brownback once proclaimed that his administration would be a shining example of a “red state model” economy, but his policies have failed so miserably that schools had to be closed early in 2015. The state eventually stopped producing certain economic reports because of just how bad the economy got. Now Brownback is now the least popular governor in all the United States because people rightly held him to his bold promises. We can do the same with Trump.
This basic strategy represents faith in our democratic process and in the electorate. By contrast, those who are protesting Trump’s victory hurting their own cause. The rules of the election were clear: the winner of the electoral college wins the nomination for the presidency. By protesting, we undermine a basic tenet of our constitutional democracy: our promise to follow the rules we agreed to beforehand. When a Democrat becomes president, we will not want Republicans protesting a fair election.
The only rational way forward for liberals is to hold ourselves to high standards of decency, establish clear metrics for Trump’s success or failure, and commit ourselves to helping our country even with Donald Trump as its president. We should choose our fights wisely, but let us not become the liberal version of Ted Cruz, for a country full of conservative and liberal Ted Cruzes is the fastest, surest way to Make America Hate Again.
Matthew Martinez is a sophomore from Peoria, Arizona. He can be reached at mmm7@princeton.edu.
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