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This is the Division Among Democrats that Matters Most Now [1]

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Date: 2022-07-22

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 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: will America be a Democracy in our 2030s, or will it be more like what Germany had in their 1930s?

Few are the Democrats who are making the kind of noise such stakes call for. 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 the kind of noise that’s needed to wake people up from President Biden or Speaker Pelosi.

When people are fighting for their lives, their manner is not like what this old Democratic leadership – of decent people – are showing.

There are some Democrats who do raise their voices -- like AOC and Bernie Sanders. But we need more, and especially those who do not have a reputation for being far from the middle of the right-left spectrum. Liz Cheney has demonstrated that the fighting spirit of 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 able to talk about the central values of American democracy and how the Republicans are threatening them. As “mainstream” an American message as one can imagine.)

We need a large chorus of Democrats seizing attention with bold statements fashioned to awaken Americans to the real stakes in the upcoming Midterm Elections. Voices raised 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 gives an abundance of evidence of just how destructive is the spirit that drives it. There’s nothing about today’s Republican Party that is not ugly. (It’s a party in which showing integrity – as Liz Cheney has – is extraordinary, and gets one ejected from the Party.)

Out of that abundance of evidence the Republicans so generously provide — of their ugliniess and brokenness — the chorus of Democrats should be able to fashion an impactful message to awaken Americans to this ugly truth.

But these truths have to be delivered with the moral passion that the stakes in this battle call 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.

We can vote to drive Fascism from power, and consign them to the margins where craziness like the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi Party used to reside. The Republican Party of the past drove those fascistic elements 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 in the upcoming Midterms. Step forward, organize, coordinate their voices—whatever it takes to awaken and move the nation.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/22/2111928/-This-is-the-Division-Among-Democrats-that-Matters-Most-Now

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