This Dem says ‘hell no’ to political unity with Trump

“We are now all rooting for his success,” President Obama said Wednesday afternoon, referring to Donald Trump’s victory.

Well, not me. Based on the policies (mostly of hatred) that Trump has proposed, success for him would including building a giant wall along our southern border, banning Muslims from entering the country and continuing to motivate people with lies, conspiracy theories and outright bigotry.

So, I don’t hope he succeeds.

But Obama was not alone: Democrats across the board, including Hillary Clinton, pled for unity.

But I say to hell with unity.

{mosads}For eight years, the Republicans did little but stir anger, misinform and divide. They suppressed votes with voter ID laws, with the closing of polling stations, with the purging of voter rolls, and by creating endless noise to encourage voter apathy so that low-information voters could not understand the difference between horrible options and less-than-perfect ones.

Clinton will, in the end, likely win the popular vote by several hundred thousand — yet we’re supposed to accept her loss because “she understood the rules before entering.”

That’s nonsense.

I didn’t accept those rules, and I still don’t.

Clinton got the most votes. She should be president. Period, the end.

Instead, we’ll have the guy who only got 47 percent, relying almost entirely on white voters.

I also don’t accept our obviously flawed congressional system, with its gerrymandered districts and its unequal representation that favors rural states because of the Senate.

And I don’t accept the flood of money that has entered into our campaigns and into our politics.

Nor do I accept that this election was somehow fair, despite FBI interference, WikiLeaks dumps and a media that stupidly promoted a false equivalency in order to get ratings.

In the last two weeks of the campaign, we heard plenty from networks like CNN about the “optics” of the “bombshell” email “scandal,” yet hardly anything — or often nothing at all — about Trump’s phony “university,” about his sexual assault boasts, about his tax returns, about his proposed Muslim ban (which, for some reason, acquired the adjective “temporary,” when it was in fact not), about his possible dismantling of NATO, or about any of the other countless scandals, stupid comments and outright insane policies attributable to Trump.

Nor did we hear much of anything about several major issues, including global warming. In fact, not a single question was asked about global warming in any of the three debates.

This is the fifth time in our history that the popular vote winner will not win the presidency, and the fourth time since we’ve had both Republicans and Democrats.

In all four of those instances, the Democrat was on the losing end. And now it’s been twice within the past 16 years.

But liberals are told, “You’re supposed to be the reasonable ones. So sit down and be quiet.”

But I don’t want to sit down and be quiet anymore.

I don’t do well with sitting and being quiet when my fellow citizens are being threatened — when a Muslim little girl is being made to feel like she’s not welcome here and a black boy as if he has a better chance of becoming an inmate than becoming a member of the middle class.

I don’t want to sit and be quiet when I can’t get health insurance because it’s too expensive and we can’t even start to talk about a public option.

I don’t want to sit and be quiet when anti-intellectuals have taken over the country and turned us into an idiocracy.

I don’t want to sit and be quiet when our destiny is being determined by hatred, misinformation and stupidity.

We keep hearing from Democratic and Republican leaders alike that we must “respect the Constitution” and the “peaceful transfer of power.”

Yet the Constitution is not some divine document; its major faults have become ever more glaring. And while we should be peaceful during transfers of power, we need not be docile or subservient.

There is indeed a time for unity. But this isn’t it.

Now is the time to accept that our republic as we know it has ended, and it’s time to hit the restart button — peacefully, but with steadfast determination nonetheless.

I’ve had to reckon this election with the fact that I don’t live in the country I thought I was growing up in when I was a kid.

But that delusion is over. And it’s time that the delusion ends for all liberals and all Democrats.

Don’t simply accept this one. Don’t sit down and be quiet, even if not doing so holds consequences, because the consequences of not fighting against this are far, far worse.

Rosenfeld is an educator and historian who has done work for Scribner, Macmillan and Newsweek and contributes frequently to The Hill.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.