Team Meeting

If you remove the yoke from among you,

the pointing of the finger,

The speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry

And satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

Then your light shall rise in the darkness

and your gloom be like the noonday.

-Isaiah 58: 9b-10

Alright liberal types, it's time for a team meeting.  I would like to call particularly on those who identify as Christian, and those who hold the Hebrew Scriptures sacred, but honestly we need our atheist and agnostic folks on board as well.  We can all agree that Donald Trump is a big, obnoxious, ignorant, orange bag of lies, but that, unfortunately, is not going to get us much of anywhere over the next nine months.  I think we can also agree that every single Democrat has some strengths and weaknesses, but that pretty much all of them would be a significant upgrade in the humanity department from our current chief executive.

We have two choices going forward, we can either keep hammering at how despicable Donny and his gang of corrupt, spineless sycophants are, (which feels good, I admit) or we can do something that will actually get rid of them.  Unfortunately, stringing together all the insults in the world, even erudite and clever ones, is just playing right into his hands.  Trump has demonstrated that calling someone a big stupid head on Twitter is as effective in winning over his base as calling them a "Vesuvius of Mendacity" as George Will called him in an editorial in the Washington Post (that's my personal favorite). In fact, Trump actually gets credit among his tribe for being vulgar and un-complicated in his taunts and in pretty much everything else.  MAGA world does not know what 'mendacity' means, nor do they much care; to them it's just more elitist snob talk aimed at making them feel inferior.  Never mind that George Will is a pretty conservative type guy, he still uses too many big words to be trusted.

That's the mindset we are confronting here, and we need to do so with some level of empathy, or else we will be exactly what Trump accuses us of being: clueless, elitist, and determined to destroy all that red state folks hold dear.  These people have a deep feeling of estrangement from people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer, from places like San Francisco and New York respectively.  They read and hear about political correctness run amok and the rise of cancel culture, and to them those are the "existential threats," not Donald Trump and his ham-handed bullying of Ukraine or his boundless self-dealing.  He tells them he understands them, even as he is tweeting from a gold toilet, and by God, he might actually just understand them.  He seems to be able to keep their loyalty and maybe even their love.

I'm not naive enough to believe we will be able to win back the MAGA crowd by November, but we absolutely need to win back the folks on the edges, and we will do so most effectively if we don't go full on Lefty-Liberal.  As much love as I had for Bernie four years ago, this time around he's starting to look like four more years of Trump.  Primarily because he is what Trump would be if Trump had decided to go left instead of right.  My belief is that if we play Trump's game, fight fire with fire so to speak, we will lose.  We will lose if we lose and we will lose if we win.  We will lose if Trump gets four more years in frightening ways, but we will lose even if Bernie gets elected because he will never get any of his stuff done.

Even if we flip congress, the Democratic party is never going to fall into the kind of lockstep it would take to ram through something like Medicare for all.  There will be no bipartisan support for it at all, and we will probably even lose a bunch of Dems who already put their necks on the line for the ACA and aren't about to bail on it now that it's stable.  That's the pragmatic reality, but the spiritual danger goes even deeper.

The spiritual danger is that we will continue to dig our ideological trenches deeper and pull further back into our echo chambers and tribal identity cliques.  Each side will continue to regard the other as a dire threat to all that is holy (in their own mind), and instead of "forming a more perfect union," we will be feeding the chasm of hatred that now separates us.  Trump did not create that chasm, he has simply decided to party naked on his chosen side of it.  After four years of watching that with disdain, I cannot ignore the consequences, and I don't want us to make the same mistake on this side.  We need to start building bridges across, not spitting at the folks on the other side. It's hard work, because the stakes are high and power has a way of making a convincing argument that winning is the only thing that matters.

I guess my hope for this season of political primaries is that the person who runs against the Donald turns out to be someone who can heal and unite us.  I hope we can really be better than we have been over the past four years, being this nasty is really wearing me out.