With the mid-term elections literally around the corner, I have been reading article after article in online journals published by conservatives and liberals on political polarization and why one party or the other will be rewarded or penalized if such-and-such happens. I have paid special attention to articles in conservative journals expounding on why the Democrats MUST dumb down their leftist rhetoric and move to the middle by targeting the unpredictable but critical independents (frequently labelled the Politically Disengaged and Moderates) in order to win. To put it as bluntly as my Irish-American grandmother would, all that hyper-sophisticated political bullshit makes my ass tired.
I believe this situation is far less complicated than is acknowledged in the national press. In the last nearly two years, we have lost our collective way in large part due to the powerful and unrelenting daily assault on our senses by an avaricious, fiercely narcissistic, demagogic President determined to confuse, obfuscate, and manipulate the American people with a constant shit-storm of blatant lies and far more subtle falsehoods created with one intent only: to stimulate his base into paroxysms of support that will allow him and his conservative minions to continue in power.
Holy crap, people, this situation isn’t that difficult. To understand where we are now you have to start with why Donald Trump won the presidential election. Although the answer to that question is not simple and requires some thought, it isn’t overly complicated.
Here’s how I see it. First, Trump attracted a fairly large number of disaffected people in states that had previously been reliably blue (and here you better be thinking Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin), many of whom didn’t vote on a regular basis. That skewed the polling results, threw national polls off, and lulled the Democrats into a false sense of security. Second, die-hard Republicans who couldn’t stand Trump nevertheless held their noses and voted for him by the millions because they absofuckinglutely hated Hillary and couldn’t imagine living in a country where she was President. Third, Hillary ran a national Presidential campaign that was worse than piss poor and that failed in the most basic ways to get the vote out in key states. In other words, she proved herself to be an incompetent political novice and failed in every measurable way to run a successful campaign. And fourth, conservatives hated those eight years of waking up every morning with an intelligent black man with a Harvard education sitting in the White House, and here you better be thinking covert as well as overt racism no matter how much people love to claim we are now post-racial. No doubt those conservatives were bound and determined not to allow another Democrat to be elected President in 2016.
With Hillary and Obama thankfully gone from the national stage, only the first of those four factors is in existence today. And the Democrats are hopefully aware of the ginormous errors Hillary’s campaign made and have worked diligently to correct those egregious mistakes in local and state-wide elections. If they haven’t, God help us and the country.
My point is simple. The so-called “deplorables” have always been with us. They are not new to the political scene. Just read American history and you will find them in the ranks of slavers like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, Edmund Randolph, and many others who claimed to be of high-minded morals but saw nothing wrong with owning human beings as chattel and torturing them into hellaciously hard labor and early deaths. Or among the greedy, land-hungry settlers who screamed their devotion to Manifest Destiny while dispossessing Native Americans of their land and livelihoods. Or in members of the Native American Party, popularly called the Know Nothings, a nationalist coalition that hated Catholics, was militantly xenophobic, and was openly hostile to immigrants. Or among the racist Southern Democrats who organized and led the state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism against black people that ruled the Deep South and Border States for nearly a hundred years.
Hello! The politically alienated are not new to American politics. But, let’s not give an inch in terms of legitimizing their animus to people of color, to recent immigrants, and to those whose religion is not theirs. Politically, our job is to insure they do not dominate the national stage while the rest of us, conservatives as well as liberals and libertarians, go about the business of grounding the aspirations built into the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence in a new reality of liberty and justice for all, no matter where you live or what your circumstances.
Yes, Russian attempts to disrupt our elections exist and are continuing, especially since our national government has shown no interest in stepping up to protect the electorate from that interference, thanks to Donald Trump.
Yes, highly organized vote suppression by Republican state politicians is alive and well. Some things never change and only get worse. Vote suppression will only be defeated when Americans who believe every citizen must be able to vote for the candidates of their choice rise up and denounce those highly partisan, anti-democratic efforts to keep Republicans in power.
All Americans want to live in a free country ruled by laws equally applied to all citizens and legal residents. Let’s make that happen by voting for people who want a country free of demagoguery and lies. Let’s get back on track to making this country as good as the Founders thought it could be, even though too many of them never rejected slavery or white supremacy. If we can demonstrate through actions that the aspirations in our Founding Documents are real and achievable for all citizens regardless of color, race, or religion, we will be successful.
Get your butts out and vote for Democrats who believe in justice for all.
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