Opinion: ‘We’re Not Going Back’ Wasn’t Just A Campaign Slogan, It Was A Promise

Eight years after his shocking win in 2016, and four years after his defeat in 2020, Donald Trump is now, once again, on the cusp of being elected the next president of the United States. He will regain this seat of immense power with fresh grievances, threats of being a dictator on “day one” and calls for retribution against his “enemies” — ushering America into something both familiar and strange.
This projected win comes after many losses — including the rollback of women’s reproductive rights with the striking down of Roe v. Wade and the realization now that two prominent, experienced female presidential candidates — former Sen. Hillary Clinton and Vice President Kamala Harris — have failed to crack the highest, hardest glass ceiling in the land.
The first Trump presidency — marred by incompetence and scandals — was a mess, but it could have been much worse if not for the career Republicans in his midst, constantly working to hide his flaws and rein him in. But this time around, there will be no John Kellys or Mike Pences to be the more rational actors when dealing with an irrational man. There will be no one to say “That’s against the Constitution” that Trump does not adhere to and has been dismissive of in the past. There will be no respect for the rule of law — only the rule of one. It is the greatest challenge to our Democratic experiment since the Civil War.
This is not a drill.
But now is not the time to cower or capitulate. I can promise you that HuffPost is doing neither. (And you can do your part and join us in this fight. Click here to support HuffPost.) We’ve been sounding the alarm on Trump since day one. Reporting extensively on his authoritarian leanings, his dangerous foreign policy, his racist and fascist rhetoric, and how he stoked a bloody insurrection on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This campaign season, reporters including HuffPost’s Liz Skalka have been on the ground in nearly every swing state while others, such as S.V. Dáte, have followed every move at the White House, documenting this unprecedented year in presidential politics.
This is the hard part where we will all be tested. Do we believe in the tenets this country was founded on or not? Do we believe in the expansion of equal rights under the law or not? Do we truly accept and even celebrate those of different viewpoints, having a peaceful discourse that is both respectful and educational, instead of one that is petty and vitriolic?
Both my parents were born under Jim Crow, sometimes seeing the worst of humanity — in person and on TV — from their hometowns of Gainesville, Texas, and Newport, Arkansas. My mother didn’t have a credit card until she married my father, and her first loan for a car had to be co-signed by my grandfather.
When I expressed to my father my fears of where our country was heading — fears many people born after the civil rights and women’s rights movements like me share — he dismissed them. Not because he didn’t think the worst could happen and not because he doesn’t take Trump’s threats seriously, but because as someone who has lived through so much in his 82 years, there was something achingly familiar about this all. He came into this world in an apartheid state. If he spends the remainder of his life witnessing the great undoing of all the progress he and others like him fought for, he will not be moved or surprised. He has already seen the worst of America and its ugliness. People who spat on schoolchildren who just wanted a fair education. People who promoted “separate but equal” only to humiliate and marginalize an entire group of people. People who colluded with others to murder four little girls at a church in Birmingham. A face that joined other similar faces to burn down the prosperous Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Black neighborhoods of Rosewood, Florida, and East St. Louis, Illinois.
What was Jan. 6 but a continuation of an American tradition of silencing others through violence?
They want us to cower. They want us to capitulate. They want us to turn on each other and live in fear. But even if this election shows that the original sins and wounds of this country have never been properly dealt with or healed, even if it shows there are people who would rather destroy this country than share in its vision — we cannot stop. We cannot afford to give up or give in to anything. Now is the time to find a strength within us, a strength given to us by those who came before us to fight back. This is not new. We have faced these kinds of people before. We have witnessed these kinds of horrors before. And we have beat them.
And we will beat them again.
Not because I know we have it within us to fight, but because you can’t put the formerly oppressed back in “their place” anymore than you can cram the toothpaste back in the tube. What was accomplished in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s might be relitigated and knocked down by a conservative-leaning, Trump-supporting, activist Supreme Court, but you can’t take away the last six decades of progress and people striving for that more perfect union. You can’t erase our memories. You can’t legislate us to the back of the bus and expect us to sit there. We can either learn how to live together as a people, respect each other and the rule of law, or you can fight us. All of us.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery titled his first book, based on his experience in covering the Ferguson, Missouri, protests in 2014 after the death of Mike Brown, “They Can’t Kill Us All.” What to some might sound hyperbolic has been the reality for countless Americans and immigrants in this country for decades. Lowery wrote: “A seat at the table, the new generation of Black activists reasons, isn’t worth much if your fellow diners still refuse to pass you a plate.”
The reelection of Trump proves that despite the presidencies of Barack Obama, despite the legalization of same-sex marriage, despite every gain that has been made in our society, those who yearn for a fantastical yesteryear that never existed are a fearsome foe. They don’t care that LGBTQ+ people, Black people, Indigenous people, women, Muslims, Jews, Latinos, Asians, Middle Easterners, immigrants, and many, many more have no intention of returning to a day when they were treated as less than human. That they’re not going to give up their seat at the table, let alone allow you to no longer pass them a plate. Power concedes nothing without a demand, and we are demanding that our humanity continue to be not just respected but celebrated.
You want my rights? Come take them from me.
The time to treat these toxic daydreamers as if they’re simply misinformed is over. We know what we’re up against, and it’s America’s torturous, racist, sexist, nativist, Confederate past. We’ve fought these ghosts before. But if the past is prologue, the Confederacy only lasted four years and three weeks. And the civil rights and women’s rights movements shaped the world we live in today. The long moral arc of the universe still bends toward justice, just as Dr. King said. If we have to relegislate all this and fight these fights all over again, we will. Because there is no alternative. There is no other option.
So lace up your shoes and get ready to dig in.
At HuffPost, our newsroom is ready. Are you?