(BLOG EDITOR'S NOTE: Some have questioned why this blog takes the political stance that it does. The following article explains our editorial position best.)
A friend of mine thinks the most important division among Democrats are between moderates and progressives. I disagree.
I see the most important division being between those whose voices address our current dangerous political situation in the tones, and with the urgency, that the situation calls for. And those who speak in mild tones that belie the reality that we are fighting for the very survival of American democracy (and much else that the quality of our future depends on).
The heart of today’s interparty battle is Democracy vs. Fascism. Fascism is consistently destructive. And the Republican Party is manifesting most of the destructive hallmarks of Fascism:
- Trying to overthrow an election, and attacking the rule of law;
- Working to establish minority rule by disenfranchising Democratic-supporting demographies;
- Dealing continually in Big Lies;
- Expressing cruel impulses (on immigration, in the Alito opinion);
- Serving the richest and mightiest at the expense of those with less wealth and power.
The stakes in the Midterms, some think, are huge: the Constitution itself, they say, is at stake. The stakes: in our 2030s, will America be a Democracy, or will it be more like what Germany had in their 1930s?
Few are the Democrats who are speaking to the nation in a way called for by such stakes. Few are making the kind of noise needed to awaken the Americans sleeping through this danger. (For unless Americans really want a fascist regime – and that surely is nothing like a majority – unawareness must be assumed when the futures markets say the American electorate is likely to give control of Congress to a political party that has stopped bothering to hide its fascistic nature.)
We certainly don’t get — from President Biden or Speaker Pelosi — the sounding of the alarm needed to wake people up.
When people are fighting for their lives, their manner is not like what this old Democratic leadership – of decent people – is showing.
There are some Democrats who do raise their voices -- like AOC and Bernie Sanders. But we need more, and we especially need to hear it from those not so widely identified as being far from the middle of the right-left spectrum. As Liz Cheney has demonstrated, the fighting spirit for delivering a powerful denunciation of Fascism doesn’t have anything to do with how far to the left one’s political ideology is located.
(Representative Jamie Raskin is one such voice: being a constitutional scholar, and eloquent, he can speak movingly about the central values of American democracy, and about how the Republicans are threatening them. One cannot imagine a more “mainstream” American message.)
With the Midterms approaching, we need a large chorus of Democrats seizing attention with bold statements well fashioned to awaken the American people. We need voices attracting attention in whatever ways will best move Americans to keep power out of the hands of a Party whose threat to the future lives of Americans is multi-dimensional:
- that is working to establish itself as a permanent ruling power;
- that has backed an attempted coup d’etat and tried to cover up what happened;
- that is sacrificing the future of our children and grandchildren because the Party has been bought by the fossil fuel industry, blocking the necessary action to minimize our disruption of the earth’s climate;
- that deals constantly in lies, including the Big Lie;
- that has sacrificed the well-being of the nation to gain power back (by making their priority the failure of the Democratic President rather than the good of the nation);
- that has given us a Supreme Court that has shown itself to be an instrument of partisan power rather than of the rule of law, a court that makes decisions that assure that Americans will be at war with each other of difficult issues indefinitely.
The Republican Party provides an abundance of material — evidence of their ugliness and brokenness — from which a powerfully impactful message can be fashioned.
There’s nothing about today’s Republican Party that is not ugly. (It’s a party in which integrity is rare, and – as the cases of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger shows — is punished with expulsion.)
But this ugly truth has to be delivered with the moral passion this grotesque reality calls for.
We should not assume that we will always have the ability to fight Fascism non-violently, through the ballot box. The 2020 election showed we still have enough democracy left for that to be possible. It also showed how uncertain it is that this will remain true.
It is now in the power of the American people to use their votes to drive Fascism from power, and consign them to the margins. (The Republican Party of the past drove the crazy fascistic elements like the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi Party to the fringes. But those elements are an intrinsic part of the spirit of the Republican Party of today.)
If we do not defeat fascism now, at the ballot box, who knows what kind of price will have to be paid by Americans of the future to regain the government of, for, and by the people, if indeed they can ever regain it at all?
So let those Democrats willing to fight as though our lives depended on it, because in a fundamental sense they do. Step forward with boldness. Stop waiting for those Democratic leaders who learned their form of political rhetoric during an era where reasonableness rather than prophetic denunciation was the established practice, and in a liberal culture where pugnacity was frowned upon.
Let the Democrats who can express their passion for saving our country appoint themselves the voice of the Democratic Party for the upcoming Midterms. Step forward, organize, coordinate their voices—whatever it takes to awaken and move the nation.
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