Dear Dr. Democrat,
I have very mixed feelings about cheering on the end of the Republican party. Not because I don’t want to see it shrunken and changed, but because I don’t see encouraging signs of declining power. I think the country is experiencing what we in Florida have gone through for years, which is minority rule based on gaming the system.
Republicans have gotten so good at this that it’s all they need to stay in power. They don’t need to convince the electorate of their rightness, they don’t need to win hearts or minds, they just need to keep suppressing the vote that would go against them and playing to their base. And if they all stick together, as McConnell has trained them to do, they not only win, they keep all the power and make all the decisions.
We got rid of Trump, maybe, but we are still in trouble. The work we still need to do is crushing and I don’t know if it’s even possible to succeed at it.
Please give me some encouragement that all is not lost.
Worried in Wakulla
Dear Worried,
I think you’re right on all counts, but I also see the Republican Party as weak and crumbling, which may be a product of my learned environment. But it’s difficult to operate politically for very long based on lies, which was the point of Tom Nichols’ recent piece in The Atlantic.
One of their biggest runs before now were the GOP’s anticommunist witch hunts. They started in the House around 1947-48, moved to the Senate in 1950 and then were obliterated with the “Have you no sense of decency?” episode in June 1954. A tremendous amount of damage was done in those few years – even though the lies were not promoted from the White House, either by Truman or Eisenhower (unlike Trump). And they didn’t have Fox News.
My point is, something will happen that will expose them or pop the bubble, but it’s going to have to be something irrefutable that even Fox, et. al., can’t ignore or spin – something like a Bush-Katrina moment that brings them down.
Crushing them at the polls would be a start. I thought we were going to do it last year, but … SOCIALISM! Thanks, Bernie and AOC.
I might sound like Paul E. Anna here, but I really believe it can’t last.
Sincerely,
Dr. Democrat
