Price hikes and inflation are cyclical and are tied to global events – things will return to normalcy regardless of which party wins the majority in Congress.
Your democracy (and the freedoms it provides) is tied to local events – specifically, election day voting.
If you fail to vote against the party that espouses nationalistic and fascist views, your democracy will disappear.
If you fail to hold politicians accountable for supporting a former president’s attempts to overturn a free and fair election, your democracy will disappear.
If you vote for a party that wants to restrict freedoms and rights rather than expand them, democracy and the freedoms it provides will disappear.
He looks wearily from his pillow across the room at his desk, where two monitors and a Mac sit framed by a window that overlooks the side yard of his 3 bedroom, one-and-a-half bath cape.
He lays in bed with his dog for another 15 minutes, scratching her behind the ear. Finally, he lets out a heavy sigh before rolling over, sitting up, and lowering his feet to the floor.
His 11-year-old Pitbull watches sleepily, yawning and stretching across the center of the bed. He turns to give her one more pat on the head, and her tail thumps the mattress in warm appreciation. Then she lowers her head and closes her eyes. She’ll sleep another hour before heading downstairs to begin her day.
He heads down the staircase from the upstairs bedroom, emptying into the sun-splashed kitchen. It’s one of the things he likes most about the house, but he’s not sure why. He gives this some thought and concludes it’s the practicality of going from a room where sleep still clings to you to a room where the coffee pot awaits. That design makes perfect sense.
“That must be it,” he mutters to himself.
He gets the coffee pot going immediately. He opens the French doors from the kitchen to the cement patio overlooking the yard. The grass is still wet from the morning dew; he walks out, sits on a patio chair, and waits for the coffee to finish brewing.
He starts to rethink why he loves the idea of a staircase connecting the kitchen to the upstairs bedrooms, which has nothing to do with coffee and sleep. He thinks the design decision harkens back to simpler days when the kitchen was the hub of family activity. And even though that was long before his time, the idea of it sits well with him.
In another hour or so, he’ll be back upstairs at his computer, looking at emails and preparing for meetings.
He can’t wait for the day when sitting on the patio is not a prelude to work but rather an interlude to a day without plans or schedules.
As soon as Donald Trump injected himself into the bloodstream of American politics, the Republican party had a problem. And after four years of the Trump presidency, the fascist tendencies he invoked and promoted torpedoed traditional conservatism. As a result, the pre-Trump Republican party lays at the bottom of America’s political ocean, its wrecked hollowed hull a visage of hopelessness.
Although Trump lost resoundingly in 2020, Trumpism remains rampant in the Republican party. Trumpian principles of might-is-right and that lying is perfectly acceptable as long the lies achieve the desired result continues to threaten our democracy.
Republicans in the Senate had multiple opportunities to expunge Donald Trump from the Republican party, with the second impeachment the last best chance. But instead of being proactive, Mitch McConnel and other republicans hedged their bets and sat on their hands. Privately, Republican leadership hoped their voters would have been sickened enough by the events of January 6th to wash their hands of Trump and Trumpism.
Republicans not pushing for Trump’s removal was a strategic decision. The thinking was that if voters said, “enough is enough”, Republican politicians could absolve themselves of the “Trump problem” and avoid getting on the wrong side of Trump. But unfortunately, McConnel and others in the Senate didn’t account for how deeply entrenched republican voters had become in the big lie. They also failed to recognize the degree to which hot-button cultural issues had buttressed the Republican voter’s willingness to turn away from truth and facts.
The Republican leadership’s miscalculation on Trump has led to a “rat-in-the-shower” state of affairs for American Democracy.
Our Democracy is more vulnerable than it’s ever been. And with the midterms in November and the 2024 Presidential election looming, America’s democracy problem has taken on a sense of urgency that we’ve never seen before.
Democrats and independents need to be single-issue voters in 2022 and 2024, and that single issue is Democracy.
bendingtheneedle 