2018 Mid-Term Strategic Options
Here’s an article in Politico that should worry everyone.https://www.politico.com/…/trump-recovery-democrats-midterm…
What’s the strategy that will remove the GOP from power? Should the Democrats run against individual issues or find an overarching idea that encapsulates the reason to vote Democratic in 2018? While it’s axiomatic that successful politics is conducted on local fronts as well as on a national front, what should be the overarching Democratic idea for November 2018? We didn’t have one in 2016, and we lost.
The GOP message in 2016 was MAGA, and there were specific themes contained within.
• America is being overrun by criminal immigrants, terrorists are lurking everywhere, and they are nurtured within our cities = xenophobia and racism
• We’ve been exploited militarily by both our traditional Western allies and our enemies = zero-sum diplomacy and a return to Nixon’s “Mad Man” theory of foreign policy
• Competing economies and “unfair” trade deals must be seen as eating our lunch and harming our economy = mercantilism builds empires
• Our economy is collapsing = politics of grievance, persecution, and the need for vigilantism
• Joblessness/unemployment has grown to double digits because of overall economic decline = the Big Lie tactic used by the Nazis. (We’re at effectively full employment)
• Environmental protection regulations strangle business, and climate science is a hoax = another use of the Big Lie tactic to discredit educational institutions and scientific research (“I love the uneducated” ...DJT.)
• American Carnage and anti-establishment rhetoric that discredits governmental institutions = hyper-patriotism, nativism, and support for anarchic groups like white supremacists, armed militia, and Nazis.
These are just the ones I can think of now, and it’s probably a list that’s pretty repetitive to read at this point. But I think we need to come up with one defining idea that can encapsulate all of the demented, anti-Democratic themes of the Republican Party, or we end will up, once again, in the mud fight of identity politics and the tribalism of contemporary hyper-partisanship.
I think we should concentrate on the Republican Party, itself. We need to go after the GOP. It is a wholly corrupted political party that has clearly gone off the rails. Its leadership is currently suborning obstruction of justice; refusing to speak out against corrupt and probably treasonous behavior in its Executive; and is fighting to maintain dishonest and unconstitutional legislation at the state and federal level - legislation intended to improperly sway elections in their favor. Through its legislative initiatives, the Republican Party has sought to silence the voices of minorities and college students with voter suppression laws, and it has violated the process by which we nominate candidates to the Supreme Court in order to place partisans on the Court. It has assisted in crippling or dismantling most of our governmental agencies by confirming unqualified Cabinet nominees intent on implementing the “Deconstruction of the Administrative State”.
We need to delegitimize this political party starting now so that we can remove its sulfurous leadership – this Den of Thieves that facilitates the GOP’s unpatriotic policies.
