The wake of the Presidential election has stirred an array of reactions—grief, denial, outrage, bewilderment—among the liberals and the progressives who supported Hillary Clinton. Her loss, scarcely predicted in the polls, and therefore all the more shocking to the people who voted for her (and who outnumber her opponent's supporters by more than a million and counting), has become a case study in political trauma. Donald Trump's victory inspired another, less noted reaction that may prove more politically significant than the current wave of demoralization: defiance.
On the day after the election, Kevin de León, the pro-tempore president of the California Senate, and Anthony Rendon, the speaker of the California Assembly, released a joint statement whose opening sentence—“Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land”—perfectly summarized the disorientation that millions of Americans were experiencing. More important, the statement pointed out that Trump's bigotry and misogyny were at odds with California's values of inclusiveness and tolerance, and, the authors vowed, “we will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution.”
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