Skip to main content

Democrats: Don’t Sleep Through Another Wake-Up Call

I’ve been saying for four years that the next presidential election was decided on the day after the last one.

We’ll see if I’m right. I’m terrified of being wrong.

Trump’s election was a smack upside the head for Democrats of all shapes and sizes. Since then, his flamboyant vandalism of what was once a pretty good nation makes them crazy. Myself included.

Trump Derangement Syndrome may be a Fox News trope, but to me — and most of my fellow Democrats — it’s agonizingly real. A fetid stench that won’t go away.

The morning after that election might’ve been the biggest WTF moment in American history. A wake-up call as stunning as any in our lifetimes, including 9/11.

It was the day all those people who “don’t get into politics” suddenly realized they were into politics, whether they liked it or not.

It was the day all those people who habitually stay home on election day — because after all “What difference does it make?” — found out what difference it makes.

It was the day all those people who were sure Hillary was going to win anyway discovered that they should have voted anyway.

It was the day a lot of those “independents” — another word for not paying attention — realized that voting for a third party was as stupid as voting for Trump.

What most of these people had in common is that they were Democrats — by nature, if not by registered affiliation. They were decent people who assumed that other decent people would do the right thing, so they wouldn’t have to. They had presentations to prepare, kids to pick up, appointments to keep, and the lines at the polls were at least half an hour. Besides, Trump couldn’t possibly win, so what’s the big deal?

This is how Democrats shoot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly. They mean to show up at the polls, then they don’t. And every time they don’t, it gives Republicans another opening to undermine the country.

Because Republicans always show up. Every election, even in the off years. They know they’re in the minority, so their propaganda is first-rate — if breathtakingly dishonest — and their get-out-the-vote organizers are ruthlessly efficient. It’s one reason for their success — along with voter suppression, gerrymandering, and methodical corruption. Which makes it all that much easier for them when Democrats don’t turn out.

Yes, it’s infuriating to know there are so many deplorables out there happy to trash their own interests to vote for a sociopath. But it’s just as infuriating to know there was so much willful apathy among people who should have known better.

We failed to take our civic responsibility seriously. Then, when we looked around for a government to help us through a deadly pandemic, there was no government to be found.

We let our guard down. We let really bad people sneak in under the radar, spend billions of dollars over several decades, and win power in every branch, and at every level, of government. While many of us saw them coming, and plenty tried to sound the alarm, ultimately we were blasé about it. We underestimated them, and they took over.

Shame on us. We took our democracy for granted, and now we’re paying dearly, both in livelihoods and lives.

And we’ve come to an inflection point. Another wake-up call is looming, and we dare not sleep through it. Because it’s not just the presidency and the Senate that needs to be taken.

Almost lost in the craziness of this election is that this is also a census year. That means 2021 is the year state legislatures get to draw up new voting districts — a once-in-ten-years opportunity to gerrymander your state and rig the whole system in favor of your party. And if your state legislature is Republican, like it was last time this happened, your local Democrats may never win another election. As Democrats, do we ever think about this stuff? Republicans always do.

But the remedy is simple, if not inevitable. When Democrats come to the polls, Democrats win. The numbers are there. The sympathies are there. The only thing that’s ever missing is the turnout.

Still, the 2018 mid-terms were encouraging. Democrats turned out in overwhelming numbers, and I’m quite sure those included damn near everyone who ever gave a lame excuse for not voting.

So are we pissed off enough? Is our complacency behind us? I hope so, because we can’t afford to get this wrong.


Berkley MI

09/08/20

Comments

  1. And let's not forget about the Supreme Court . . .

    ReplyDelete
  2. Convincing prospective voters to show up at the polls is most crucial in your adopted state of all places.

    Don't let those Wolverines make the same mistake this year as they made in 2016.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True, but they showed up in splendid numbers in 2018. And the primary turnout, right at the start of the pandemic, was impressive.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Warning: Red States may be Hazardous to your Health

In late September, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison for helping her daughter obtain abortion pills. The case was less about abortion than about some bizarre behavior regarding the burial of the fetal remains, but this is still appalling on any number of levels. Even so, that’s not what piqued my interest. Rather, I was drawn to one curious footnote to the story, and I’ve heard nothing about it since. Apparently, the judge in the case had ordered the woman to undergo a psychological evaluation prior to sentencing. Presumably, the results might have helped to mitigate her sentence. Which sounds reasonable, perhaps even routine. But that evaluation never happened. It was, strangely, “cancelled due to lack of funding.” Huh? A person whose future may have hinged on that evaluation was denied it because the state couldn’t afford it? How underfunded are we talking? How many other people moving through the Nebraska judicial system haven’t rece

The Media Wakes Up and Smells the Fascism

  A funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 horserace. The mainstream media brought Hitler into the conversation. Trump gave them no choice. He kept amping up his rants in terms that were so explicitly Nazi, so lifted — practically verbatim — from Hitler’s speeches, that it was hard for them to keep ignoring what they’ve willfully ignored for so long. When Trump used the word ‘vermin’ in his Veteran’s Day speech , he was taking a whole chapter from the fascism playbook. Whether he knew it or not. Dehumanization — the art of equating human beings with insects — is a classic stochastic terrorism technique, beloved of dictators the world over. In Rwanda in the nineties, the Hutu tribe openly called its rival Tutsis “cockroaches” on the radio, inciting its members to exterminate them with machetes, which they did. We’ll probably never know who actually wrote the Vermin speech — Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon are likely suspects — but we can be sure it wasn’t T

Things Have Been Too Cheap for Too Long

  Once upon a time, gasoline cost roughly 35 cents a gallon. That halcyon era came to an abrupt halt during the Carter administration, when oil-rich Arab states severely constricted our petroleum supply, causing hours-long lines at the gas pump that are still fresh in the memory of anyone who was there. When the dust cleared, gas was four times more expensive, and now we count ourselves lucky if it’s only ten times that long-ago price. But we did get over it, more or less. We learned to live with it. Around that time, some pundit I can’t remember said something that has stuck with me ever since. To paraphrase, “This country was built on cheap energy and cheap labor, and we’re running out of both.” It stuck with me because it’s even truer now than it was then. This despite the best efforts of corporate interests — and their Republican flunkies in government — to do all they can to keep both energy and labor as cheap as possible. For several decades, they made