Which side are you on?
The lines are drawn in America—that much is clear. There ain’t no middle ground anymore. You’re on one side, or the other.
How did we get to such a bleak place?
The cause is Donald J. Trump. It may be true that we’ve been inching closer to this point for years, but we weren’t really shoved into the breach until Trump decided to take a wrecking ball to America. Trump therefore was the tipping point. Everything prior was before. Everything since is afterward—is now.
In my lifetime I’ve seen the gap between the two sides grow ever more pronounced. Our two-party system is by definition adversarial. Washington famously warned against the formation of political parties: in his Farewell Address he said: “[Political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, [but] they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
Washington could not have known how his description of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men…usurping for themselves the reins of government” would describe a future rogue president, Trump.
By the time of the second president, John Adams, two political parties already had formed, and so it has been ever since, with the occasional appearance of a minor third party. Probably it was inevitable: the only countries that don’t have political parties are one-party authoritarian dictatorships. Political rivalry is hard-wired into the DNA of democracies.
Our two parties got along with each other, for the most part, most of the time, the exception obviously being the Civil War; and that was not so much a fight between parties as between sections of the country. Except for that unhappy period, the parties managed to find a modus operandi by which they could co-exist in relative peace, although the rhetoric could get pretty harsh.
I grew up in the post-World War II era, in a Democratic household in which I was taught to regard Republicans as little better than the nazis we had recently defeated. Suffice it to say we didn’t hold Republicans in much esteem—and vice versa!
The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, though, were pretty normal, as far as inter-party relations went. Yes, there was the Watergate scandal, which resulted in Nixon’s impeachment, but that, I think, was not particularly partisan. Nixon behaved abhorrently, and even his own Republican Party eventually realized it, and acted accordingly.
We began to reach the edge of the cliff in the late 1970s and 1980s. That’s when an unholy alliance was arranged between evangelicals (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, in particular) and the Republican National Committee. Prior to that, all political parties tended to see evangelicals for what they are: deplorable wingnuts, barely American in the sense the Founders envisioned. But activists like Lee Atwater, who was instrumental in helping get Reagan elected, saw that evangelicals could be a potent political force for Republicans. As for the evangelicals, who had traditionally been apolitical, they decided to become political whores, or were talked into it by their pimping pastors. A shotgun marriage was arranged. The offspring—diseased and debased—is today’s Republican Party.
And so here we are. Democrats could not stand aside in good conscience and watch this diabolic mélange of evangelicals and reactionary Republicans rape and pillage the country. I honestly believe that Democrats did not, and do not, want this fight. It was forced upon us, the way we had to respond to Japan bombing Pearl Harbor by fighting back. When the Republican Party allowed the evangelical party a seat at the table, Democrats realized we had to act. That was the seed of The Resistance to Trump.
Could Democrats have avoided this moment? No. The stakes were too high, the threat level too significant. You didn’t have to be a fanatical patriot to realize the dangers of evangelical power: an end to a woman’s right to choose, the demolition of whatever advances gay people had made, the persecution of religious and racial minorities, the imposition of medieval Christian rule in place of Constitutional government, an increasingly unfair corporatocracy, the rejection of science in favor of the mad superstitions of a religious cult, the overall dumbing down of governance. All of these things, if allowed to happen, would spell the end of American values: of our freedoms, our liberties, our right to self-determination. These are rights Americans have fought and died for our entire history. Had the Democratic Party sat back and allowed Republicans to crush our traditional values, Democrats would have forfeited their right to exist by their indifference and inaction.
So what Democrats have done, and are doing, is correct, morally, politically and historically. Somebody has to stand up to the thugs on the right and to the thug-in-chief, Donald J. Trump. Nobody ought to fool himself that safety lies in compromise. You might as well compromise with a rattlesnake. As the old saying goes, if you run in the middle of the road, you’re going to end up as roadkill.
Well put…my contention is that in order to have a functioning government we must shun the vocal extremes of both parties which have proven to be the stumbling block in the way of those compromises that allowed our system to work…
Yes, but how do you define “extreme”? Is it “extreme” to demand full and equal rights for trans people?
Some of those wingnuts are relatives of mine and they are already ramping up the prayer line for their kids who are being deployed right now to back up Trumps new threats. As if the history of lies that killed our young so many times never happened. No, we just find ourselves in this holy and righteous cause of defending our freedoms.
So unbelievably ignorant.
It’s horrible. America has always had that strain of religious insanity, but we kept it under control. It’s out of control now, like the wildfires in Australia and California. Must be stopped–and will be stopped in the Blue Wave 2020!