On Wednesday, the US government will shift (hopefully) from being led by Donald Trump to Joe Biden. President Biden will have more of his party in congress to work with towards charting out a different path than the one we’ve been on for the last 4 years. Whether it will be progressive enough to overcome the carnage of the past administration is something only time will tell.
After the events of January 6th, the US has been rocked. Another blow to our country and once again something that I honestly never thought we’d realistically see here. But where do we go from here?
Using some knowledge I have from past abusive relationships I will try to give some advice on how we move past the last 4 years.
Leaving an abusive relationship is hard and in my experience I didn’t have much to start over with. In the same way, the US right now is really hurting. A barely restrained pandemic, high racial tensions, and a rough economy are what we’ve seen over the last year. Starting fresh isn’t possible, but starting new is.
- We need to admit to ourselves collectively that the last 4 years were abusive.
Argue about the merits of a few positive points the Trump administration did if you want, but for the most part this was a full on assault on civil rights, our economy, and foreign relations. Also the callousness of his inaction on the Coronavirus pandemic felt punitive at times, like he was trying to punish the people who didn’t love him. That’s textbook abusive behavior and while no one likes to think they’ve been preyed upon, as a whole the United States was.
2. Reestablishing connection with friends that were cut off during the abuse
A common tactic of abusers is to isolate their victim. The United States in 2016 had great and long standing friendships with Germany, France, South Korea and other democratic countries.
The Trump administration systematically strained those relationships and replaced them with governments sympathetic to Trump. Our allies became the authoritarian regimes in Hungary, Poland, Russia, India, and Brazil. Reestablishing connection with more democratic nations is a must to regain a sense of who we are as a country.
3. Beware the reappearance of the abuser, in this case White Supremacy
Just because Trump will no longer be president doesn’t mean that his ideas or similarly minded people will just go away. Right now we are especially vulnerable to white nationalism. The economy is bad, and we have just experienced a full 4 years of it. That’s enough time for some white nationalist ideals to be normalized into our collective conscious.
Going forward there will be more attempts to mobilize this. Trump may run for office again but even if he doesn’t, his brand of white populism is a political movement. It’s important for us to set boundaries. Most people see the actions of January 6th as unacceptable. That’s a boundary to start with and the more we work on it, we can collectively make it so that white supremacy is a violation of our national identity.
In conclusion, these are going to be rough and weird days ahead, but if we start the framework like we as a nation have been abused, there are tools out there to help us regain our sense of identity. The spoken ideals of the United States have always been that all are created equal. In the past we have fallen short of living that through, however, just because that’s what we’ve been doesn’t that that’s what we can’t strive towards in the aftermath of the abusive Trump presidency.