It’s December. It’s unavoidable: Donald Trump is going to be our next President.

Jill Stein’s recount efforts [cough, Green Party fundraising campaign] aren’t going to stop it; the electoral college isn’t going to stop it; Trump’s many, many conflicts of interest and evidence of Russian interference in our democracy aren’t going to stop it. Trump is going to be the President.

When last we spoke we dove into Why She Lost. Tl;dr: she lost because of all the things. Sexism, racism, voter suppression, white supremacy and the social change that comes with breaking it down, ongoing effects of globalization, Hillary campaign missteps and overconfidence, media malpractice, fake news and echo chambers, messaging, decades long Democratic abandonment of down-ballot work, and a candidate who wasn’t a good match for the times or her opponent. Over the last several weeks there has been quite a bit of analysis of the available data, and upon reflection I would still argue that anyone who points to “the one reason” she lost likely has something to gain from that narrative.

Many, many things went wrong for Democrats in 2016 (see the list above) and many, many things went right (see what I did there?) for Republicans.

Now, millions of people and, without hyperbole, the future of our democracy and our country depends on changing that trend. And it is a trend: the Republican Party is the strongest it’s been in 80 years, thanks to pretty steady trendlines of growing power at the state level on up since the mid-70s, with a few blips of Democratic ascendancy.

In Why She Lost I posited that what we do from here falls in four buckets:

Culture Change

Power Building

Resistance

Direct Service

An important note: the list isn’t in order of importance — we need to be doing all of the things, all of the time, simultaneously. “We” are a big group, not totally aligned (yet.) Some of us rock at doing the long hard slog of culture change, some of us are kickass at the cold hard work of power building, some of us are situated to be and lead the resistance, and some of us are on the front lines of shielding as much as possible the people who will be most screwed by President Trump and his merry band of billionaires. The times we’re in demand that we all kick ass, all of the time, simultaneously. It’s going to be messy and complicated and sometimes we’ll get in each others’ way but it’s where we are right now. Let’s buckle up and get to it.

So, first up: culture change. Easy peasy, right?

Consider this the antithesis of the “good policy is good politics” argument that seems to have some sway of late, especially amongst people who adhere, despite all evidence to the contrary, to the notion that Hillary lost blue collar white voters because of bad economic/trade/health care/whatever policy, and that if only the Democrats had fought for and won some magic combination of policy that would have prevented (white) suffering in the Rust Belt, those voters wouldn’t have been lured by the hate mongering and easy (if disingenuous, at best) promises of Trump.

I call bullshit. Let’s look at how those voters have fared over the last eight years:

Thanks to Obamacare, something like 20 million people have health insurance who would otherwise be uninsured, and most of them are young, poor, live in rural areas, and are happy with their Obamacare coverage. Many of the counties that benefited the most from Obamacare gave Trump and other Republicans their highest vote margins — even as Republicans ran on taking away the health care Obama/Democrats fought to get them access to.

Look at Ohio, for the love of god. Purple is more uninsured, light blue is less uninsured. Click through to check it county by county and be enraged: http://nyti.ms/2dUJdhz

A Vox piece was just published that dove into why Obamacare enrollees — including one woman whose job was to enroll people into Obamacare! — voted for Trump. The answer: they don’t believe Trump Republicans will actually roll back their benefits. They hope they’ll actually increase access to Medicare and reduce the cost of Obamacare programs. Let’s acknowledge that that’s less likely than Trump signing off of Twitter forever or actually divesting himself of his conflict of interest laden businesses and take moment to slowly and sadly shake our heads together.

Or let’s take a look at jobs and the economy. The jobless rate over the last 8 years has fallen from 10% to 4.9%, and the biggest drops in unemployument were among white men. What’s more, working class white people reported that they were satisfied with their own economic situation. Read that sentence again, please: a large majority of working class white people reported, in October 2016, that they were satisfied with their personal economic situation.

AND they felt secure in their satisfaction, very nearly as secure as so-called “elites” with a fancy college education: 77% of working class whites reported that they felt their job was secure, versus 81% of college-educated whites. They also said they didn’t care about trade deals.

Again, this was in October 2016. For the white working class, the election was not a revolt against hard times or a cry for better policy. Eight years of a Democratic President, and Democratic policies, had been, on balance, good for the white working class.

Policy that makes people’s lives better isn’t enough to win their votes. Not when someone else, someone who doesn’t look like them who they think is less deserving is also getting some help.

Consider: those same white working class voters who are, by and large, employed and secure, feel under attack and pushed out by diversity.

They are more likely *by far* to hate immigrants from over our Southern border. More likely than not just college-educated whites, but more likely than working-class blacks who, just as another reminder, did not fare nearly as well as working class whites over the last eight years (and well beyond.)

By and large this data has been translated as “people who are suffering economically are more likely to be racists.” I call bullshit again. People who are racists — people who benefit from white supremacy and are therefore not excited about its demise — are more likely to claim economic distress. Remember: working class whites say they’re employed securely *and* that they don’t like immigrants or diversity. We’re pointing the causality arrow in the wrong direction.

More on this: http://wpo.st/O6GM2

To win, we need to bridge a divide to these voters — the voters who are more afraid of diversity than of billionaire autocrats. These are almost certainly the same voters who don’t have a clue what “cis gendered” means; they are likely unmoved by analyses of gendered bathrooms, they don’t believe data about how climate change is already affecting their lives. They see change all over the place and it terrifies them. Terror can be easily exploited and translated into hate, and hate is a powerful motivator for action. But on a hopeful note: these are also the same voters, many of them, who voted for Barack Obama at least once. It’s possible to win them.

If we’re going to start to win elections at the local, state, and federal levels (and it will go in that order), we need to embrace culture change over evidence, emotion over rationality, and deeply understand (but in no way excuse) how reducing inequality feels to those who aren’t at the top but also are nowhere near the bottom of the totem pole. Yes, of course we should continue to champion and fight for good policy. But we don’t get to do good policy and help people if we don’t win elections, and we won’t win elections on the basis of good policy that helps people.

So the question is: how do we *do* culture change? Here’s my running list; I’m sure I’m missing many, many things — add yours in the comments or send me a message and I’ll update this list:

Leverage Hollywood for more than Funny or Die videos. Hollywood has diligently taught us that torture is effective for getting information (analysis tends to focus on the TV show 24, but at the moment I’m thinking more Daredevil.) Pop culture also tells us that public service is at best silly and at worst (and maybe more frequently) nefarious and crooked. But remember when pop culture also played a role in helping us see that gay people are, well, people. Let’s enlist our largely left-leaning actors, writers, producers, etc. to help us out here: let’s leverage our pop culture machines to show stories of government doing good and people learning to live well together. It’s a long game, but it’s critical.

Hollywood has diligently taught us that torture is effective for getting information (analysis tends to focus on the TV show 24, but at the moment I’m thinking more Daredevil.) Pop culture also tells us that public service is at best silly and at worst (and maybe more frequently) nefarious and crooked. But remember when pop culture also played a role in helping us see that gay people are, well, people. Let’s enlist our largely left-leaning actors, writers, producers, etc. to help us out here: let’s leverage our pop culture machines to show stories of government doing good and people learning to live well together. It’s a long game, but it’s critical. Remember that coverage in the New York Times isn’t talking to anyone who isn’t already with us. We need to find and build channels to communicate with people who don’t read, listen to, or believe the same sources we do.

Litigate to change the context. Before 2016, North Carolinians would likely have voted for something like the bathroom bill that prohibited transgendered people from using the bathroom that matched their gender identity. In 2016, North Carolinians voted out the Governor who had staked his candidacy on it (by an impossibly small margin, but a win is a win), and there’s evidence that backlash to that law played a role. I would posit that when people’s worlds didn’t collapse with different bathroom behavior than they might have thought about before, they were unwilling to sacrifice to prevent it. There are mountains of evidence that attitudes about gay marriage shifted dramatically after gay marriage was legal and, lo and behold, the world as we know it didn’t end. Sometimes, we need to find a way to make the change before cultural canyons around change can be leapt. In our current political environment, that means sometimes we’ll need to be litigious AF.

Before 2016, North Carolinians would likely have voted for something like the bathroom bill that prohibited transgendered people from using the bathroom that matched their gender identity. In 2016, North Carolinians voted out the Governor who had staked his candidacy on it (by an impossibly small margin, but a win is a win), and there’s evidence that backlash to that law played a role. I would posit that when people’s worlds didn’t collapse with different bathroom behavior than they might have thought about before, they were unwilling to sacrifice to prevent it. There are mountains of evidence that attitudes about gay marriage shifted dramatically after gay marriage was legal and, lo and behold, the world as we know it didn’t end. Sometimes, we need to find a way to make the change before cultural canyons around change can be leapt. In our current political environment, that means sometimes we’ll need to be litigious AF. Go deep, local, and cross-cutting for the long haul. The left has organizing roots that are smart and good, and when we hew to them we win. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals posits the ultimately conservative theory of change that winning is what brings people together, so to bring people together we need to meet them where they are and work with them to win on something that matters to them. In exurban and rural midwest, in the south, in cities, in the mountain west, we need to go deep, bring people together, and win together on things that cross cultures and attitudes. We need to build hope and unity from the ground up, not with messaging — only hateful messaging can work as a shortcut, hopeful messaging requires sweat equity — but with no-shit investment in building community and relationships. We need to be like Barack: community organizers FTW. And we should all memorize Alinsky’s rules.

I’m going to be directing big chunks of my dollars, energy, and work to changing culture. So that I can also help build power, support the resistance, and serve the people who will be most f*cked by the incoming administration. See you out there, friends.

Did you like this? Mind giving it a little ❤ by clicking the heart right down below?