Don’t lose sight of the big picture
David Kurtz at Morning Memo lays out the 2024 stakes:
The rule of law is on the ballot in 2024, and it trumps every other political and policy consideration.
It is the umbrella under which every other issue is addressed: Want to restore abortion rights? Want to openly debate Israel and Palestine? Want to accelerate the energy revolution to head off the worst of climate change?
Good luck. Because if Trump, as promised, harnesses the power of the federal government to attack his perceived political enemies, exact retribution for slights, overturn elections, eviscerate the right to vote, and continue the effort to lock in GOP minority rule, he will break the democratic mechanisms for adjudicating policy preferences, enacting new laws, and enforcing them.
Trump is promising a fundamental break with the rule of law and from that will flow a fundamental breakdown in democratic processes and institutions. It is as simple as it is hard to stay at maximum threat level for years on end.
If elections don’t count, if Trump and the GOP won’t accept defeat as an option, if a majority of the electorate can’t make its voice heard at the ballot box, then nothing else really matters. It’s as stark a choice as the United States has ever faced.
We are too easily distracted by side issues. The left would rather sell the process than the outcome (the brownie, what the process delivers). A friend once insisted that the goal of the local Democratic committee is to have organized precincts. No, it’s to elect Democrats. Electing its members is literally why a political party exists. Focus.
Over the holiday weekend, another friend stated displeasure with Joe Biden. It wasn’t age this time. It was Biden’s public support for Israel in its assault on Gaza. Granted, it’s not a good look. Even worse for Netanyahu. But that specific complaint flattens a 3-dimensional issue to two. Biden’s proximate responsibility is to the American hostages. Are their lives more important than those of the slain Israelis or the thousands of Palestinians killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza or the hostages from other countries? Absolutely not. But securing the safety of the American hostages is Biden’s responsibility. It’s his job. Hostages from other countries are their leaders’. That’s harsh, but real. How Hamas and Israel conduct their war is not Biden’s responsibility, not directly anyway. How Biden’s posture changes once all the Americans are freed remains to be seen.
Point being, it’s a side issue in the 2024 election, although not to those intimately impacted. Kurtz and others know that. “Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics,” E.J. Dionne writes this morning. ” To insist on this is to be a realist, not an alarmist.” If we lose the country, our displeasures won’t matter and the world will be worse. See Luckovitch cartoon above.