Last week had the feel of one of the later Harry Potter films. Dark forces are afoot.
But before we burrow into this fall’s election, flash cuts of just how dark politics has become and a more encouraging perspective on where we may be headed.
Another person is dead after a shooting Saturday night in Portland. Details are sketchy at this hour. Police have not said whether the victim is related to street clashes that broke out downtown between “Trump 2020 Cruise Rally in Portland” caravanners and Black Lives Matter counterdemonstrators.
It is as if two oppositely charged worlds are colliding violently. Matter and antimatter.
Police in Kenosha, Wisc. last week charged 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in the shooting deaths of two men and the wounding of another during protests of police violence. Rittenhouse’s supporters rushed to justify the killings. They viewed videos the rest of the country viewed and declared the rifle-toting teen the real victim. It was self-defense, declared a Christian crowdfunding site after GoFundMe refused to host the campaign:
Kyle Rittenhouse just defended himself from a brutal attack by multiple members of the far-leftist group ANTIFA – the experience was undoubtedly a brutal one, as he was forced to take two lives to defend his own.
Now, Kyle is being unfairly charged with murder 1, by a DA who seems determined only to capitalize on the political angle of the situation. The situation was clearly self-defense, and Kyle and his family will undoubtedly need money to pay for the legal fees.
We have been here before, Heather Cox Richardson wrote last week. Each time, the country faced a crisis as reactionary forces fought to maintain a hierarchical past they saw slipping away, one weighted heavily in their favor. But Americans true to its founding principles corrected imbalances in political and economic power and pushed America into the future. Under Abraham Lincoln. Under Theodore Roosevelt. And under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Boston College historian wrote after last week’s RNC spectacle:
Tonight’s event at the White House demonstrated that we are in another great crisis in American history. A reactionary group of older white men look at a global future in which questions of clean energy, climate change, economic fairness, and human equality are uppermost, and their reaction is to cling to a world they control.
But that world is passing, whether they like it or not. Even if Trump wins in 2020, he cannot stop the future from coming. And while the United States will not meet that future with the power we had even four years ago, we will have to meet it nonetheless. It will be no less exciting and offer no fewer opportunities than the dramatic changes of the 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s, and at some point, Americans will want to meet those challenges.
If history is any guide, when that happens, we will restore the principle of equality before the law, and push America into the future.
Much is at stake in this election. Perhaps even the fate of the Republic. Let’s look at what you can do about it.
“If you are a political party, you never want to have a really bad election,” Charlie Cook of the Cook Report once wrote. “But if you’re going to have one, you really don’t want to have it in a year that ends in a zero.” Democrats losing big in North Carolina in 2010 meant a decade of litigation over the most egregious gerrymandering in the country. That was a mid-term election. This year’s includes the presidency, but much more than that:
With both the redistricting process and many of the details of the once-arcane world of election administration becoming increasingly partisan, who is sitting in a governor, state-attorney-general, or secretary-of-state office can matter a lot, to say nothing of who controls the state legislative chambers.
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But beyond the implications of downballot offices for policy, the election process, and redistricting, it should be remembered that a party’s health and future is dependent on the development of a farm team. Far more often than not, those who hold the highest political offices came up the ranks of elective office (Trump is a notable exception). A wipeout or near-wipeout election can cost a party the better part of a generation of future leaders. For Democrats, 1980, 1994, 2010, and 2014 were massacres, just as Republicans took big hits in 1974, 2006, and 2018. Like a farmer losing seed corn, it’s a costly loss.
Rather than focusing on horcruxes and throwing all our resources against Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell, Paul Rosenburg recommends a “Moneyball” approach to rebalancing power based on the famous by Michael Lewis book. There are hidden-gem races out there where your limited money and effort can yield much higher returns than the marquee races. Because it is not enough to defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden. Republicans this year need to suffer a wipeout election.
I’m going to explore that in second post to follow this morning.
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