Freedom, Justice and Opportunity
We are thrilled that the Harris campaign has picked up Freedom, Justice, and Opportunity as a major campaign theme. Thrilled, but not surprised. Those three words hold power, but the ideas that underly them are even more powerful. And they’re ours. The values in the Democratic Creed, the definitions of Freedom, Justice, and Opportunity that are embedded with it are powerful. The vision of a just society .. as long as it takes appeals to everybody. These things inspire universally because they stem from the opening words of the Declaration of Independence. And those words .. those ideas .. have been empowering our party since 1932. They are literally the soul of our party.
a special message from dems101
It’s time for women, and men, to stand up and celebrate .. celebrate and demand. August 26th is the 104th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. That event establishing the right to vote for women was historic, one in a line of historic American moments in our march towards true Democracy, towards the goal of a just society .. as long as it takes.
That century-old concept of fundamental rights is under attack. Dobbs is just the latest example of what has become a relentless assault, an attempt to turn back the clock. The moment to stand up for these rights .. for women’s rights and everyone else’s .. is now, and there is no better opportunity than August 26th, the very symbol of a woman’s basic right to equality.
how we changed the vote
There are 35,000 registered voters in Huron County, Ohio. 20,000 are unaffiliated, and it’s getting worse. Vitriol .. the constant barrage of phone calls and texts and direct mail that filled 2020 .. drove away more than 3,000 of those Democrats, right into the ranks of the unaffiliated.
And then there’s 2023. Democrats comprise just 9.4% of the registered voters, yet last November, 44% of all registered voters in the county voted Yes for Issue One, Ohio’s protection for Reproductive Rights. That happened because everyone worked together, tirelessly. But most of all, this victory happened because the special election was about basic rights, about the kind of core values that are held by most Americans, the kind they recognize and care deeply about.
words, words, words
“… 80% of people in this country who share the ideals of our founding, who share the idea that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness .. at least 80% of this country shares the same basic values that we do.”
Quick, who said that?
Abraham Lincoln 2. Barack Obama 3. Joe Biden
or 4. Vivek Ramaswamy
Yes! Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump wannabe did. He said it just the other day, and you shouldn’t be surprised. It’s what’s been going on for decades .. decades .. right in front of our noses, the theft of language. We have, in fact, all but helped them do it.
That quote is accurate, of course, he just mixed up the parties. But to his listeners, he didn’t get it wrong at all, he hit the nail on the head. Why? Because it sounded good. It made them feel good. And that’s what happens when messaging has no purpose beyond gaining power.
Freedom, Justice, and Opportunity are what we stand for as Democrats, what we all feel is in our hearts. But we have never written it down. We have never stood up and declared it in simple, unequivocal English that everyone can understand. And we have never gone on to declare it, over and over again, until every American in this nation has started to believe it. That’s the problem. Our sensing it is not enough. That so many of us assume it isn’t, either. These things, these ideas, have to be made public, and they have to dominate.
our moment
We are standing at a true moment in American history, a fork in the road that will decide our future as a nation. This fork isn’t about Donald Trump, and it isn’t about the next election. It’s about something much, much deeper. For the first time ever as a nation, we are actually facing up to the fundamental principal American democracy: are all people created equal? Do all of us .. everywhere .. have the same right to equal Freedom, equal Justice, and equal Opportunity? That is what’s really going on.
We have nibbled at the concept of equality for nearly 250 years. Back in 1776, of course, we had virtually none. Wealthy white males didn’t just dominate society, it was considered normal. Women didn’t count at all. Blacks and Native Americans were considered subhuman. Being born gay was considered an aberration worthy of either prison or death, and Catholics were considered spawn of the Devil.
The urge
America was born into an ideal: that all people were created equal. That ideal was immediately submerged in a world that was very unequal. In 1776, most injustice wasn’t even considered injustice, just the way of things. But that founding ideal of innate equality persisted. It endured, and it spread, because it represented a very human urge to seek Freedom, Justice, and Opportunity, the same urge that had caused so many of those early Americans to come in the first place.
This idea of the innate equality of people spread rapidly among the common people during the Revolution. Few of us have even heard about this, just how many people began to look at the lofty Enlightenment sentiments being voiced by the elite white men leading the revolution, and began wondering “why not me, too?”
FILLINg a hole
The Supreme Court has spoken, and it’s going to go on speaking for a long time. But what is it really saying? That decision on gay rights isn’t really about gay rights, and the decision on affirmative action isn’t really about race. Deep down, these decisions … all of them, including Dobbs and those endless ones yet to come … are really a statement about a giant hole in this country, a spiritual hole: the lack of commonly accepted, fundamental American values. We don’t have those values written down anywhere, the basic beliefs that say who we are.
America has never had such a statement of values. Ever. For the first two hundred plus years, it didn’t matter. Nobody agreed on national values, so basically there weren’t any. Racism and injustice were ingrained in society. They were accepted. As a result, social progress was tough. It was bought very, very slowly, one agonizing issue at a time.
The Real Meaning of the Fourth of July - Part 1
We own values. Our core beliefs are who we are, and they’re powerful. Yet, we Democrats never seem to recognize it, we never seem to look deeper. We cling to policies, and purity tests, and squabbling. We divide ourselves endlessly. We take apparent victory and turn it into defeat, and we do it over and over again. And each time we scratch our heads and ask “why?”
The Republicans understand we own values, that’s why they have spend so much time and money demonizing us. It’s why they’ve had a giant organization working in the background for decades, just to destroy our identity. They fear our values because they’re American values, because they stand for this country’s future, because deep down most Americans want to believe in them.
But these core values are never going to really be seen as our values … as our identity … until we stand up and declare them, till we own them. And there’s no better example than the Fourth of July.
Memorial day a time to reflect
Memorial Day is a time to reflect, not just about those that have died, but about why.
The original Memorial Day was born out of a terrible inferno that was fought to resolve that other terrible inferno: slavery. Slavery died, but of course it was replaced with Jim Crow, which yielded yet another national struggle, the Civil Rights Movement.
All of this, every bit of every struggle back through our entire history has been part of America’s endless quest to match the ideals of the Declaration of Independence with the realities of our lives.
We sit at a fork in the road here in America, a moment as historic as 1860. One path leads forward toward a just society, a time when all Americans share equally in Freedom, Justice, and Opportunity. The other path leads off to division, chaos, and pain.