CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--Recovering from the damage that Donald Trump will ultimately achieve will be like trying to recover from the great depression and both world wars combined.
At least that's going to be the magnitude of the chore at the political and governmental level. Just the damage to major departments such as Interior, State, and Justice will take a decade to fix. This level of worry is also inherent in the announced resignation of Justice Kennedy from the Supreme Court.
We should all remember that Kennedy wasn't a good friend of liberalism. He was a conservative. But, once in a while, he joined with the more liberal side on some question of importance. It was generally considered that with Kennedy, there might be a chance for a win, so a veritable industry of court strategists studied Kennedy's decisions, looking for an in. That era is now past, and the future -- at least at this level -- looks exceedingly grim.
The idea of giving the hard-right wing a lock on legal decisions -- possibly for decades to come -- is giving people the political equivalent of stomach ulcers. What's to be done?
It's a little late to create the liberal Supreme Court that might have come with a Hillary Clinton victory. There is a lot of blame for this, and it belongs to a relatively few groups of people. There is the Green Party. There are the people who voted for Trump as some kind of statement of rebellion. There are those who can't be bothered to be political and don't even think about making the effort to vote.
It's not that people are wrong when they find fault with the Democratic Party. Allow me to share an anecdote with you from my own experience. At one point in my life, I was a delegate to the annual state convention of the California Democratic Party. It was, I think, in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
There was an agenda item on the schedule that would have taken power away from the grass roots delegates and concentrated it (even more than it already was) within the small group of party insiders. Those of us from local Assembly District Committees and County Democratic Committees understood the stakes and vowed to oppose the motion.
When the motion came to a vote, the state Chair called for the ayes.
"Aye."
Then he called for the nays.
"NO!"
It was obvious that the nays were in the majority. We had won the vote on the merits. But then I heard this:
"The ayes have it."
So, stated the chair. It was a lie, but somehow the normal methods of parliamentary inquiry (a call for a roll call vote, for example) were not allowed to be put in play. We adjourned for the day and I had learned a lesson about the raw, cynical use of power by someone who should have behaved better.
So, I'm not putting myself above my fellow citizens who look with disgust on our political system. I've seen it in microcosm. An older generation remembers the undisguised corruption of big city political machines.
Except … We cannot afford to let our well-merited cynicism prevent us from doing what we must do. The stakes are obvious. The failure of liberalism to accomplish vital tasks is truly tragic.
We should have been well ahead of where we are today, except for our failure to get political in a way that is effective. We should long since have developed a system in which workers on the low end of the power curve get treated with respect and dignity, where they have some say in their hours and benefits. Where more of the Gross Domestic Product is distributed to workers and less is amassed by the already stupendously wealthy. We should long since have developed universal health coverage so people don't have to live in fear of personal bankruptcy and untreated illnesses.
But we didn't develop that kind of system and now we are paying a heavy price. Yes, it will take a long time to undo the damage that Trump, McConnell, and Ryan have already done and are yet to do. But we have to start the process.
What's to do?
Might I suggest that the core of the problem lies in a cultural tradition that praises being apolitical. After all, politics is dirty. It involves picking the lesser of two evils. "They're all crooks." You can fill in your own list of cliches if you wish. Those cliches are sometimes true, as my experience and generations of scandals demonstrate.
But right now, in our cynicism and alienation, we've given the real crooks control over the system. Some of our potential voters have failed to realize that there are really a lot of Democrats who are good people, folks who labor honestly for the public welfare. I think that at the congressional level, everyone has to make compromises to power and to the various interest groups, but that is just life. The Democratic congress gave us the Affordable Care Act. The current congress has tried to destroy it.
What to do?
For one, we should try to develop a culture of voting in every election. The Republicans have done a pretty good job of instilling the voting ethic on its side. There is a whole new generation of potential voters who would be willing to support decent candidates. We must convince them that going to the polls in every single election should be part of their work ethic.
Not only that, but they have to understand that they must vote for the party rather than for the person. Voting for a Republican congressional candidate, no matter how nice a person he is, goes towards putting someone like Ryan in power. You simply can't do it.
That having been said, let's deal with the obvious contradiction between supporting corruption and voting for people who aren't Trump supporters. I propose the concept of what I have called Reform Democrats. We are people who can be registered in any political party (or typically no party at all) who vote for Democrats who represent important principles but not corrupt machine politics. The fact that we are registered as independents (technically, "no party preference") gives us a bit of leverage and the proper emotional distance that we need.
We dislike candidates who are owned by corporate money, who accept corporate money, or who have a history of voting against working people. We can accept them taking money from pacs as long as they are the right kind of pacs.
A voting trend that is analogous to the idea of being a Reform Democrat (even if its adherents don't call it that) seems to have taken hold in California. We have the equivalent of a second party (no longer a third party) in the form of independent voters, the majority of whom support Democrats.
What has generally been missed is the fact that lots of us are making a political and moral statement in our refusal to sign our names to the party roster; It's that one bit of distance from accepting party discipline that we hold to.
Might I point out that I don't have anything against my friends who are proud bearers of the party name. I just want to make clear that I will defend my own intellectual integrity. I can remember when there was a deeply corrupt state representative from my area, a man who eventually went to jail for his crimes, yet Democrats in the party apparatus expected me to support his candidacy. No.
By the way, I'm noticing that a few of my old friends have exited the Republican Party and become independents. I see it as a similar trend. I think they will join us in supporting universal health coverage and a competent, less crazy State Department.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
