I should start this diary with an apology for some of my recent entries. While I at times intend to be provocative, I never intend to justify racism, nationalism or other forms of behavior that are clearly plagues upon humanity. As with most posters here, my politics are firmly left of center (realizing the fallibility of testing; -5,-5 on www.politicalcompass.org & my results on the implicit bias test: implicit.harvard.edu/… suggested negligible bias {for what it is worth}). Where I probably differ from many Daily Kos readers is that my sympathy for many of the goals promoted here are balanced by my belief that large societies move best in increments not in grand impositions. Sometimes a Civil War is unavoidable but the results are never tidy & the damage done often lasts for generations. let’s face it, many of today’s evils are the result of the aftermath of 160 years ago trying to correct this nation’s founding evil. Some of them exist because we never resolved the underlying problems & others resulted from the aftermath of the actual conflict from 160 years in our past. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s finally eliminated the most overt racism in our culture but you cannot legislate mind control, nor should we try (as that would be yet a greater evil). We need to convince people of the superiority of our ideals & our methods for implementing those ideals. Many revolutions began with admirable ideals only to end up with worse tyranny than they overthrew. we cannot allow that to happen to us!
I readily acknowledge that my personal history doesn’t make me a worthy standard bearer. My Jewish heritage has made me more aware of humanity’s injustices than some but my life has been privileged & my body has not suffered the slings & arrows suffered by many activists. However, I am careful student of history & have observed that revolutions mostly fail to achieve their stated goals. Evolution is much more effective at achieving lasting change. As Barack Obama has repeatedly stated, the reality of America is extraordinarily flawed but the ideal of America is still a goal worthy of pursuit. America’s foundational ideology is worthy of our support even if the physical foundations were (& in too many ways still are) deeply flawed.
To the point of today’s diary & it’s provocative title. We should consider ourselves blessed that we have had four years of a president whose failures are so obvious, whose character is so blatantly flawed & whose corruption & turpitudes are so obvious that it should be possible to illuminate to many of the 74 million people who voted for him just how poor a choice they made.
If the Republicans had managed to pull of the election of someone with real political skill & true subtlety, we might now be doomed to have fallen off of a cliff without hope of recovery.
Before going further, let me share the core of my philosophy of leadership, as taken from the Tao Te Ching:
When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.
If you don't trust the people, you make them untrustworthy. The Master doesn't talk, he acts. When his work is done, the people say, "Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!"
The point of my previous diary entry was to consider how people can come to support a Donald Trump with all of his obvious failings. The importance of this is to protect ourselves from the next right wing demagogue who may rise to power w/o so many obvious flaws.
What leaders like Donald Trump harness is to take justifiable pride in one’s heritage & nudge it into nationalism (under the cover of patriotism) from which it is much too small a step to overt racism.
The challenge for those of us on the left is to keep our impatience with what we perceive to be stupidity in check. As so many of you who have experienced real suffering as a result of the evils of our fellow citizens.
In order to avoid the next tyrant, we need to more carefully craft our message. In 2020, a deeply flawed Donald Trump was, in spite of his profound turpitude, still able to craft a message of fear that motivated a great many people to vote for himself & other Republicans. Yeah, some of them voted for his “economic program” because they were too ignorant to realize that he took Obama’s economy & goosed it with tax cuts (mostly) for the rich whose stock buybacks then goosed the stock market. However, too many of them voted out of fear Trump ginned up from the BLM protests. What should have been a clearly winning movement was corrupted through violence. the fact that the worst of the violence was undoubtedly created by right wing agent provocateurs was not relevant to the many Americans who are too preoccupied with their lives to go beyond the headlines of their news feeds. This actual violence was not helped by the blunt messaging of “defund the police.” Daily Kos readers are inherently more engaged than average Americans. I’m sure that most supporters of that slogan are not advocates of anarchy but nonetheless, that is how it got branded. You do not sell a program by marketing the destruction of institutions that many people still admire. When those institutions are flawed (as many police departments clearly are) you have to market (in simple enough terms to get through to the uninformed) with what you will build, not what you will destroy.
Remember the Beatles song “Revolution”?
genius.com/…
Tell people how Community Policing is superior to our current large city police forces.
theihs.org/…
Tell them that our current police are not given the resources to properly deal with the problems we force upon them. Tell them how our mental health system should be handling the problems of many policing victims & how it is also lacking the resources to adequately cope with society’s issues. Hold up examples of where programs exist that would better handle the issues than our current system.
www.cnn.com/…
Yes, these ideas have been promoted before & not managed to percolate past the corporate media to the people who can get the decision makers to implement them. However, that is no excuse for giving up & advocating for radical approaches which will invariably not produce the results advocated for my their well meaning promoters. We need to hold Biden’s feet to the fire but we must be careful to not push him off a cliff. I know a lot of Trump supporters & I honestly believe that many can come to realize what a poor choice they made & that the activists on the left are not actually promoting stupidity & evil but we are promoting worthy ideas that can create positive change for America.
Donald Trump’s one actual area of genius has been in his ability to market his ideas, even ideas which mostly are completely deplorable. He marketed his immigration policies as trying to eliminate the breaking of laws. Even though his policy had nothing to do with crafting & enforcing better legal processes, his supporters who weren’t blatantly racist were still able to rationalize that his immigration policies were good for America & for immigrants. We don’t need better ideas, what we need is better marketing of our ideas.
Patience is hard, particularly for those who have already suffered so much. But please remember how lucky we were that it was an imbecile like Trump who was able to rise to the top of the GOP. Next time we may not be so lucky.