Book Review: What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America

Reviewed by Jill Moyer Sunday

WHAT WE DO NOW: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America
Essays edited by Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians
Melville House; January 2017
$15.99; 224 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1612196596

What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America was written for the many Americans who woke up on November 9th, 2016 wondering what happened to the future that had looked so promising just the day before. This compelling book of essays (edited by Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians) is a collective response to the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. Twenty-seven prominent progressive thinkers fill these pages with the intent of helping readers focus, regroup, and set an agenda to defend the core values under siege by the new administration.

What We Do Now is not a self-interested paean of loss, but, instead, offers cogent examination of the issues at stake and practical methods to rebuild the thought infrastructure equated with a democracy. Bernie Sanders (“Where Do We Go from Here?”), Elizabeth Warren (speech to the AFL-CIO on November 10, 2016), and David Cole (“The Way to Stop Trump”) clarify the progressive platform in the first section titled “Setting the Liberal Agenda.”  Ten more sections and a coda follow, each thoughtfully exploring people and issues at stake: racial justice, immigration, women’s rights, civil liberties, climate change, religious freedom, economics, LGBTQ rights, and media truth. While the authors take different approaches—Gloria Steinem and George Saunders offering bully parables, Robert Reich mapping a 14-bullet resistance list, and Paul Krugman explaining the dangers of “quietism”—all of the essays call for the same actions: protect the vulnerable, make grassroots connections, and actively stand up for democracy.

However, the greatest strength of What We Do Now lies not in these messages of resistance and rebuilding, but in the often painful unpacking of the circumstances that delivered America to this precipice. Some of the essays seek to explain the short-circuiting of U.S. progressivism by reminding Americans of the roles they may have played in Making America Great Again, shifting the blame from partisan politics to complacency.  In “White People: What Is Your Plan for the Trump Presidency?,” Brittany Packnett asks: “We got us. Do you have ya’ll?” She continues:

And white people . . . you don’t get to just have conversations anymore. You don’t get to just wear a safety pin and call yourself an ally. You don’t get to just talk while the rest of us fear for our lives because discrimination, rape culture, and xenophobia just won the White House.

Other authors offer additional head-in-the-sand reasons. John R. MacArthur pinpoints economic desperation, the “steady disintegration of towns and cities” in the Rust Belt and the “dislocation caused by economic trade deals.” Linguist George Lakoff discusses the normalizing effect of Trump’s repeated phrases on the human brain. Katrina vanden Heuvel traces Trump’s rise in 2015, when “ratings-and-profit obsessed networks” covered Donald Trump more than twice as often as Hillary Clinton and 16 times more often than Bernie Sanders (who also ran on a platform of change). By March 2016, over two billion dollars of free media attention had been given to Trump.

While some essays are chilling—Bill McKibben’s essay about climate change (“Donald Trump is Betting Against All Odds on Climate Change”) combines Trump’s  environmental views with the words “game over,” and Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum’s essay (“Post-Election Sermon”) questions if America’s Kristallnacht is at hand—it is Dave Eggers’ words in the coda that fully expose the depth of repair needed.

In “None of the Old Rules Apply: Travels through Post-Election America,” Eggers describes a visit to the United 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. As he left the memorial, he noticed—on the first house, the one closest to this memorial—a huge confederate flag draping the front porch.

It’s important to note that this was the Lincoln Highway. And that the Civil War ended 160 years ago. And that Pennsylvania was not a state in the Confederacy. So to see this, an enormous Confederate flag in a Union State, a mile from a symbol of national tragedy and shared sacrifice, was an indicator that there was something unusual in the mood of the country. Ancient hatreds had resurfaced. Strange alliances had been formed. None of the old rules applied.

While many of the What We Do Now authors offer organization, resistance, and the bulwark of the constitution as safeguards against disaster, as Eggers illustrates, the roots of discord are insidious and deep. Yet, as the book repeatedly posits, there is power in unity. Bullet #14 in Robert Reich’s “The First 100 Days Resistance Agenda” reads: “Your idea goes here. Call a meeting of family and friends this weekend. Come up with to-dos.”

According to What We Do Now, we are all on call.

Jill Moyer Sunday is a former journalist who teaches writing and literature at Waynesburg University. Her creative nonfiction can be found in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Connotation Press, JAEPL, The New Delta Review, and WOE.