evil is evil
When are Democrats going to stop reacting? When do we stop defending? Yes, Florida Republicans used language in a bill that says somehow, some part of slavery might have benefitted slaves. Yes, it’s sneaky. Yes, it’s despicable.
Our response? To lament the action. To send the vice President down to show outrage. That, is defending.
Our response should be a powerful, public statement of just how evil slavery was. A once and for all, clear and unequivocal statement of just how destructive the institution was, for the slaves above all, but also for the country .. morally, in blood, in destroyed lives, in the endless racism we are still paying for today. Slavery was evil. Period.
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 4th of july (part 2)
This nation was founded on change. People were uprooted from the very roots of their existence to come here. Most people gave up everything and everyone they had known, then were forced to invent a completely new way of life in a virtually unknown world. Even native Americans were forced by events into adapting to endless change.
That process of change has been endless throughout our history, inventing new ways of doing things, and fighting through endless obstacles to do it. Only historians can properly mark all the turning points, but certain eras stand out. There are certain periods of time that stand out, when national events and circumstances led to major changes in our very fabric as a society.
We have a story
We have a story that begins with with FDR, a mythical figure who was actually a very real human being, a man crippled in the prime of his life, yet who found the courage to abandon the precepts of his wealthy upbringing and work for the common good. His story is our story as Democrats: leading this nation out of a national catastrophe, then through a World War, and in the process creating the vision of a government that works for the people. That story that led to Social Security and workers rights and an end to child labor, then on to Medicaid and Medicare and voting rights and every other bit of social progress inspired by his vision. FDR’s story is indeed our story, even today, the endless struggle to keep that vision of a government of and for the people alive, and to make it work. FDR did nothing less than found our party and lay the emotional foundations for the idea of a truly just society.
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.
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.