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Tuesday, July 3, 2018

What is the Democratic Call to Arms?

Is it this nation's unbending cruelty on immigration the issue that will move mountains this November? Or guns and the multiplying horrors in our classrooms? Or the Supreme Court tilting ever farther right? Maybe it is the mistreatment of allies and an affinity for autocrats? Then there is the long standing Mueller investigation and the possibilities of what this will reveal. And how can the boorishness, the vulgarity, the lies and  the ugliness of the President not be our first and last thought when casting a ballot? The phantom tax cuts for all but a few? The spiralling debt? The trade wars that threaten the stability of our economy? Roe v Wade under attack? The continuing economic uncertainty of the have nots? The list is as long as the first day of summer.

There are so many avenues to go down, or maybe it is none of the above. Tomorrow may lead us on a different journey, to a different conclusion as to where the bottom rests.

As the mid-terms creep ever so closer and world spins even further out of control, we are as confused and uncertain as ever as to the most persuasive and compelling mantra to stop the Republican runaway train in its tracks. Every day brings yet another cause for us to mobilize against. Every fortnight we rise in anger at yet one more step towards our own destruction.

There is grave danger in attacking too many demons. Too much diffusion, too little consensus. The Republicans are utterly void of rational, fact based policy but strong and focused in their drum beat message of fear and hatred. The Dems are left at the starting gate here, their loudest voice reserved for the call to get out and vote. Where is the gravitational pull in such an entreaty?


We have everything to fear when fear itself propels our adversary while casting a ballot is our call to arms.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is wise to calmly recall history suggests that Democratic centrist and Independent voters become uncomfortable when the news is dominated, as it is now, by an American left whose call to arms is always cocked, locked, and ready to go into the streets, shout someone down, confront, harass, and punish. When voters enter the booth this November and in two years the choice will be more complicated than picking between a president who tweets insults and tens of thousands of left-wing Democrats promising "we'll shut the roads down." But when the choice is between two brands of incivility, the Maxine Waters version usually loses.
Social scientists of many stripes will study for years how a candidate and now president whose substantive threat to "our democracy" consists mainly of unprecedented boorishness drove otherwise normally temperate people (like yourself) into a frenzy.

Anonymous said...

We have to embrace the fact that technology, when one-sided, has made intolerance and bias worse, not better. Lies are disguised as fact on Facebook every day. Thousands of ads are place by the Republican National Committee. Our learning about policy and issues has been compromised. We are experiencing a phenomenon of voters not being able (or unwilling) to discern truth. This is sound bite decision-making at its worst. Our only hope is to answer the Republican National Committee with technology. I do not believe the Democratic Party is doing that. We will not regain the house without this.--RE

Anonymous said...

YES RE. The Democratic Party has a monopoly on truth, they NEVER lie, they NEVER distort, they would NEVER stoop to placing false or misleading ads on any social media, EVER, they are the paragons of thruth,virtue and the American way. No Democrat would ever lower him or her self to utter an untruth!!!!!
And of course we know we can believe each and every word we read in The New York Times too.