We are still in amazement and slight disorientation about the absolute explosion that happened in U.S. politics on Election Day. The sweeping victory of former President Donald Trump and his party was a wonder to behold, especially because the expectation (as with 2016) was for an opposite result.
The victory is also a win for many causes and grassroots movements that have grown systematically over 30 years. They magically came together a mere three months before the election and created a coalition that has rocked not only the United States, but also the entire world.
Incredibly, hardly anyone could have predicted this coming together at this speed at this time. Truly, many of the groups behind the shock did not even know that they had aligned interests. Now they are presented with opportunities that they likely never imagined they would have, and are dealing with the problems that confront any movement that rapidly moves from dissident to ruling status.
Let’s just consider some of these groups. Keep in mind that most of these groups previously inhabited separate sectors.
The homeschool movement started in the 1970s as a fringe radical group but has grown to become a serious power in the 21st century. The graduates are winning competitions in many realms and gaining admission to top universities. They have come to define the term excellence in music, literacy, math, and many other fields. And they have also gained political power as a focused interest group pushing for its rights.
This one is particularly strange because homeschooling went quickly from being disfavored to being mandatory, thanks to the school closures from 2020 onward. These shutdowns recruited millions into the ranks as parents got a closer look at exactly what their kids were being taught at school. Outrage followed.
The medical freedom movement is adjacent to the homeschool movement, but not the same. This group is concerned about issues of informed consent over vaccination, alternative therapeutics, home births, and all that is associated with medical and medicinal choice. This group is not left-wing or right-wing, but simply demands freedom. It found more followers in COVID-19 pandemic times when vaccine mandates suddenly invaded whole new sectors.
Similarly adjacent but different, the food freedom movement focuses on healthy eating and foods that are not corrupted by chemical additives and large-scale corporate agriculture. It celebrates small farmers, organic products, raw milk, fresh eggs, and ultimately regenerative agriculture that does not rely on chemical fertilizers and insecticides and so on.
This movement was previously considered left-wing, but connected with the interests of small farmers and ranchers who have demanded the right to connect directly with their customers. They are dubbed by the media as right-wing.
These concerns are related to but not necessarily connected with small-business concerns. Small businesses face an astonishing barrage of impossible odds in the face of government-subsidized online commerce (which has ripped through the retail sector) and ferocious foreign competition.
The retailers are struggling to survive while manufacturers are hit from all sides. They watch as U.S. manufacturing of all sorts flows in only one direction: out. And this is entirely for two reasons: high regulations at home and the international strength of the dollar—which, given its status as the world’s reserve currency, guarantees soaring trade imbalances forever, making domestic manufacturing darn near impossible.
The small-business movement is connected to the labor movement, which is nostalgic for a time when the United States made things and exported something other than oil and debt. And speaking of oil, the attacks on so-called fossil fuels has built another resistance movement fed up with scientifically sketchy claims concerning climate change. The attempt to reset all energy production has been met with growing public incredulity.
In a different realm, we see something unusual in military families who have dealt with terrible pain left over from misbegotten adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are patriotic people who see the need for a strong military to serve U.S. interests and our country rather than far-flung experiments in international nation-building.
They have watched as the military has been misused for pointless wars, resulting in terrible injury and death, but then also deployed for purposes of social planning with diversity, equity, and inclusion standards and absurd theories about gender switching. It’s all too much.
The movement of people deeply concerned about out-of-control illegal immigration seems disconnected from these groups, but it has grown robustly for 20 years. This is because of a simple but profound insight: The attempt to manipulate political outcomes using demographic destabilization means losing one’s country forever. There is no reason for such a thing. This resistance movement has exploded in size over the past five years.
This concern dovetails with that of a growing workers’ movement that has become fed up with gains on Wall Street seeming to come at the expense of working Americans, even as income in real terms is flat and falling and competition from undocumented workers is increasing. This has all led to the gradual realization that the workers’ movement has class connections with many of the other above groups.
The groups focused on seemingly arcane topics of money and its soundness have gathered since the 1970s to oppose inflationary paper money and have become an enormous movement over the decades, with a focus on gold and silver. That mutated toward an inclusive bitcoin, the profits from which have built industrial power and political influence. Following the worst inflation in 40 years, these groups too have found their moment in this election.
And their concerns are not unlike those of the anti-financialization movement that picked up after 2008. Even though Occupy Wall Street had a socialist ethos and goldbugs have a capitalist one, they have been vicariously united on the ideal: honesty in finance, truth in accounting, and transparency in governance.
We could go on to include every spin-off interest and cultural movement concerning religion, family, pro-life laws, gun rights, and the restoration of traditional gender norms. The groups of dissidents from the hegemon number in the thousands, with memberships in the tens of millions. And they have grown ever more sophisticated and radical over all this time.
Before the election, none of them was fully aware of their united concern for overthrowing the powers that be simply because most of them have been kept apart by virtue of cosmetic differences of left and right.
What happened in 2020 was for the ages. Their common enemy revealed itself in the COVID-19 lockdowns that empowered a select class of ruling elites in government, corporations, media, and on the global stage, where they have immunized themselves against any citizen input. The outrage was slow to build against lockdowns because the shock was so enormous. The midterms of 2022 came too soon to put the coalition together.
In retrospect, the three months before Election Day looked like a perfect moment of coming together. It was not easy and far from inevitable, but the arrival of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to the Trump effort brought not only millions of new votes, but also thousands of groups and associations to bear on the effort.
Mostly it brought together new consciousness, an awareness that they must all work together or hang separately. People who had been separated by bias for decades suddenly found a common enemy and a common answer, and then the magic happened.
I’ve never witnessed such citizen-based energy in my life nor been part of such an immensely powerful social and cultural movement rooted in determination and hopeful passion. The results have spoken for themselves.
To be sure, the problems are only now beginning, because there is absolutely no chance that the Trump administration can possibly deliver on all of the dreams and expectations of the grassroots movements. In fact, the level of expertise of Trump support at the base far outstrips the awareness of the people tasked with the reform efforts.
The cries of betrayal are already in the air. That is to be expected, but there are ways that the Trump team can get ahead of the revolution it unleashed through bold action and determined disregard of the orthodoxies of the status quo. It’s not an easy thing to do, and there’s always the temptation to make excuses in the name of responsible governance.
There will never be a shortage of naysayers nor sycophants. The challenge for everyone will be to find that magical mental space of having hope, helping where possible, challenging when necessary, holding to a realistic patience, and applying every possible effort to improving the world insofar as circumstances present that opportunity.
