If I hear another Democrat blaming the collapse of this country on Democrats’ running on slogans like “Defund the Police,” I will, I don’t know, metaphorically puke.
After four years of the most inept, ignorant, criminal and treasonous presidency in history, 47% of the electorate chose to re-elect it—and the problem was some slogan that demonstrators in Minneapolis came up with in response to George Floyd’s murder?
No matter that the slogan was repudiated again and again by the Democratic party and its candidates (and certainly by Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi) it is supposedly those three words that caused a near majority of Americans (74 million) to vote to re-elect Donald Trump and to elect hundreds of Republican candidates running on openly racist platforms like Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Elise Stefanik etc. And to take Congress this year.
In other words, the Democratic party as a whole is judged due to slogans uttered by a few while Republicans get a pass for openly expressed racism and calls to subvert our elections by the party’s own leaders in Congress and the governors’ mansions. And a president.
Add to that the Bernie Sanders candidacy. Why oh why did we even allow some old Jewish socialist to run for president? And AOC, Omar and the other four or five members of the so-called Squad? Why do Democrats allow them to be in Congress spouting, among other things, offensive messages about American racism and Israel including such egregious truths like that AIPAC buys support with “Benjamins” ($100 bills).
Obviously, the Supreme Command of the Democratic Party should shut these people down.
The list goes on and on. Moderate Democrats have the Stockholm Syndrome. That is when terrified and abused hostages and prisoners give up and identify with their oppressors. The Republicans come up with the lies and smears and the Democrats turn them on themselves.
I don’t see this so much on the left. I wish the Democrats would kick out the likes of Joe Manchin, AIPAC Democrats, anti-choice Democrats and the mealy mouthed House and Senate members who, even as American kids are slaughtered in school, refuse to say the words “gun control” without adjectives like “sensible” and/or reassurances that our only concern is AR-15s and not the proliferation of guns and gun “culture” period. But we can’t, for obvious reasons. We need to win.
The difference is that the left doesn’t call on our Supreme Leaders (whoever they are) to crush those moderate, squishy, apologetic voices who are always insisting (usually successfully) that Democrats nominate candidates who stand for nothing and who go on to lose. We know that we are stuck with these people unless we can defeat them in primaries which is how Democrats are supposed to deal with candidates we don’t like.
And then support the Democrat in November.
Of course, that is not what hundreds of thousands of Bernie supporters did in 2016. I don’t know if that is what cost Hillary Clinton the election but it might have. So I make an exception to my rule. Any Democrat who stayed home and/or did not vote for Hillary against Trump in 2016 should stand down and shut up.
Nonetheless I cant blame them or any Democrat for the rise of the racist fascist right in America. It is not Democrats who are going to cost us the next election and, possibly, our country two years after that.
It is the racism, economic greed, selfishness, anti-tax idiocy, xenophobia, antisemitism, anti-regulation, billionaire loving, gun worshipping, homophobia, white and male supremacy of a near majority of the American people combined with a Constitution and institutions (like the unrepresentative Senate, the electoral college, gerrymandering i.e. voter suppression etc) that has destroyed this country. And stupidity perhaps above all.
Blaming Democrats for the sickness that is America today is like blaming the abolitionists for the civil war. Why oh why did they use such extreme language about slavery?
The problem is THEM (the right and those who tolerate them or appease them) not US just as the problem in Germany in 1932 was the Nazis and those who appeased them not the anti-Nazis who fought them in the streets and at the ballot box.
I know that for some Democrats it is to painful to accept that the problem with America is the American people. But it is. Unless we accept that and devise ways to deal with all that represents, America is finished. For people like us anyway.