vision and values
Democrats 101 is excited to partner with the Lorain County Democratic Women’s Club (OH) and State Representative Joe Miller (OH) for this tri-state major event.
Democrats and the 4th of July
The Declaration of Independence is the soul of our party. It’s all right there at the beginning: all men are created equal … inalienable rights … life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You don’t need anything else, that is the real Democratic Party right there. That is who we are deep down, our touchstone, and we should celebrate it. The Fourth of July is our holiday, the parades, the fireworks, all of it. It’s one big celebration of what we have been striving for ever since FDR became President. We haven’t finished the job, not by a long shot, and the whole thing is under attack right now. But there is a Common Thread, a clearly visible Democratic moral purpose that runs through all of the social and economic progress of the past ninety years, and we should be proud.
am i an american?
As you watch the January 6 hearings, take a moment to reflect on the deeper issue. Horrible enough that Donald Trump and his sycophants stumbled through an attempted coup and a mob attacked Congress, but all that is the result of something, it isn’t the cause. This is what we really should be asking ourselves: how did a man like Trump become President in the first place? How did white supremacist fringe groups who used to be isolated both physically and culturally, turn into nationally organized movements capable of organizing and carrying out something as massive as storming the Capitol? (Or Charlottesville, remember that image, the parade of Hitler-torches?) How did we get to the point that in the aftermath of January 6th, more than a quarter of this country … that’s more than 80,000,000 people … viewed the mob as defending freedom or acting out of patriotism? That’s what should really scare us. This whole thing has become deeply entrenched. It’s gained an aura of legitimacy that is going to be terribly difficult to put back into the box.
WE ARE IN A MESS
We’re in a mess. Our country is in a mess, our party’s in a mess, and it’s likely to get worse next November. If we want to fix things … and we can ... then the first thing we have to do is step back and recognize what’s really going on. We’re not suffering from a failure of effort, we’re suffering from a failure of vision.
Our country is in the middle of a vast, slow-motion social revolution, a true moment in American history. We’ve had political upheaval before, economic disasters far bigger than this one, wars even, but the amount of change going on in social norms, the upheaval in the basic tenets and traditions that control our everyday lives, that has never really happened before. And it isn’t about to stop, not for a long time.