Real News panelists offer their final thoughts on what will come next after election night
Story Transcript
PAUL JAY, TRNN: Looking like we know what’s going to happen is apparently if New York Times and others have somewhere between 70-80 to 90 plus percent forcasting or predicting that Trump will win this. Eddie you want to kick us off? EDDIE CONWAY, TRNN: Yea I think no matter how this resolves itself in the morning, it’s a wake up call for people in America that want to make change, want to see change, want to save the planet, want to save whatever rights and gains we’ve made. They need to start organizing down on the ground. They need to take this serious, win lose or draw they need to get busy. JAY: Glen. GLEN FORD: Yea I don’t think that much is going to happen if Trump does win in the first months of his reign. Certainly TPP is not going to pass unless somehow in this lame duck session that’s coming up next week, it miraculously got through. That would be a definite consequence. I don’t think that a congress under a President Trump would pass a 35% tariff on any US corporate goods as per his campaign promises. But I also don’t think that we’ll have a no fly zone come January 21st if there’s a President Trump. So although most folks on the left are feeling like the apocalypse has arrived this morning, I think a lot of people in Syria might be at least temporarily relieved. JAY: Lester. LESTER SPENCE: For folk who thought there was no difference, I just go back to what we got when Bush came in versus Gore. All those lives we had lost. All those domestic – the national security state that was developed. All those tax dollars that could’ve been spent domestically for a range of things versus us going into debt and going to the 1%. With that said, what I do is I build on a bit what Eddie said. Where does the organizing have to happen? The organizing has to happen in two sites. One is in metropolitan centers. Two is in rural areas. The metropolitan center is what we have to do is actually build the institutions that can basically fight the democratic party apparatus and corporate apparatus that governs places like Baltimore. Then in the rural areas and I don’t know if we, that is people of color on the left can do this. In the Rural areas, institutions have to be developed that can give white working class and rural voters, a difference sense of what’s possible and a different sense of why they are where they are. JAY: Imani. IMANI SPENCE: Yea so I think that for us as millennials as young people, I think we have to start demanding better. We have to start demanding better of our candidates. We have to start demanding better of our local representatives and we have to start thinking about what do we want this mark to be, right? So, I don’t want to be a person who just says the duopoly as you’re saying is the best thing that we can do. But I think that it’s so important that we start to revamp what this world can look like. I think that this is a wake up call. A necessary one in some ways but also a necessary one in a lot of ways. So, what does the next step look like for us? What does the next step look like us for young people with a lot of free time to mobilize for polls, mobilize for legislative action and what can we do next? JAY: Before we continue, we have some updates from Kim Brown. Kim are you there? KIM BROWN, TRNN: A couple of updates just to tell you what’s going on in some of the senate races. In Nevada, the democrat Catherine Cortez Masto has defeated republican Joe Heck. Again that was outgoing senate minority leader Harry Reed’s seat in Nevada. So the democrats are able to retain that seat. Also we’re getting word that Kamala Harris, the attorney general for the state of California has won her senate seat. Being I think she will be the third black woman elected to the senate. So that is interesting news coming out of California. Also there’s a lot of chatter on Twitter. There’s a lot of blame already going around to third party candidates like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, blaming them for the loss of Hillary Clinton in Florida and possibly in Wisconsin as well. But if I could for a moment just to take off the reporter hat and just say just commenting on what I’ve been watching here on social media and been watching in the mainstream news coverage that we’ve featured here tonight. Let’s be clear, conservatism didn’t win tonight. Republican didn’t win tonight. Racism won tonight. Okay, Donald Trump was endorsed by the Crusader which is the Klu Klux Klan’s newspaper. He has also admitted to groping women and fondling women without their permission. So let’s be clear, racism won tonight, sexism won tonight. If we look at Donald Trump and measure him by the metrics of conservatism that republicans set forth for themselves, he does not meet those standards. Really hardly in any way. But his words and his rhetoric is what drove people to the polls tonight and I think it is a stunning defeat for Hillary Clinton and the democrats. It does not appear that the democrats will be able to pick up either chamber of congress to pick up any majority. It doesn’t appear that they’re going to hold the senate and the house is out of question right now. So let’s just be clear who won tonight. Racism and sexism. JAY: Alright, thanks Kim. Dharna. DHARNA NOOR, TRNN: It’s interesting because we’ve been talking all night about how so much of Trump’s support has come from people that want to reject the status quo and while the status quo does embody a different kind of racism and sexism, it’s interesting because I don’t think in any way that the status quo is in any way not racist or sexist. I think for me that biggest takeaway is now probably when there’s a lot more work to be done and I’m going to be really disappointed if folks just decide to throw up their hands and say they’re moving to x country that’s not the US. If you really thought this was going to be like this apocalyptic turned out for the US and you actually give a shit about what the impact is going to be for anybody I hope that we can stick around and ensure that this doesn’t mean anything apocalyptic. JAY: James. JAMES: Wow this is a devastating moment in which I think the different factions of the American populists who have voted for the Trump message and policy analysis shows a real crisis of this system. I don’t think this is a coherent vote in the sense that they were all voting for the same thing. I think they were motivated by the same thing. I think they were all motivated by different reasons of the failure of the system. I think Eddie Conway is right but I would articulate it a little differently. It’s not that we have to start organizing because there are a lot of organizing going on. It’s not just a matter of doing better organizing. It’s horizontal integration across these different sectoral interests. There are the environmentalist who don’t deal with race issues. They’re the people who deal with race issues who don’t deal with gender issues. Or there are the people who deal with gender issues and then there’s a battle in the LGBQT community of don’t confuse all of us as the same. We have to be able to explain in a more coherent synthetic narrative what the system is about, why is this failing and that is will build the strength of advancing our organizing. But just organizing alone doesn’t do it. It’s got to be this integrated. This is a line in the sand moment. We cannot go back to lets figure out how to unify America through some abstract narrative of we are all Americans and the country belongs to all of us. This is a clear vote that not everybody thinks that way and we have to affirm that not everybody thinks that way and we have to fight in a more direct way. The political class who has represented the general population of working people must be put under the microscope in a way that we have not really put them under the microscope. We have to discern who is willing to mature and step forward and who needs to be thrown out and it can’t be a personal issue, it can’t be a gender issue, it can’t be a racialized issue. It’s got be through the vantage point of what is in the interest of working people and what is in the interests particularly of color who are working people. JAY: Okay we’re going to take a little break. Some of our panel want to get going. A few of us are going to stay and then we’ll come back for some final thoughts. But we’ll stick with this just a little bit longer, just to see whether in fact there is some surprise ending here but I think the surprise has already been had. So we’re going to go a little bit to CNN and then we’ll come back again.
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