For the 2020 presidential campaign, I think we need a candidate who makes the focus of his or her campaign the issues that unite Democratic and potential Democratic voters. In my view, those issues revolve around the corruption and malfeasance of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Donald Trump is not the origination of most of the major problems this country faces today, he’s the culmination of decades of problems. Since FDR and The New Deal, there has been an increasing level of corruption and unbalanced thinking on the American right and in the Republican Party.
Consider McCarthyism, and the John Birch Society, Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, the Clinton investigation, the Iraq War, the Benghazi hearings, and now the Trump-Russia affair. Those are just highlights of the deterioration into madness of the Republican Party.
The source of Republican madness is clear. They have been completely captured by a handful of right wing billionaires who seek to rule this country through a combination of massive direct spending in support of pliant Republican politicians and in opposition to Democratic politicians and any Republican politicians who dare step out of line, funding of massive right wing propaganda outlets, grooming of politicians, judges, lawyers, law enforcement, and journalists to promote their agenda, funding voter suppression initiatives, and funding domestic espionage and dirty tricks campaigns for the purpose of damaging rivals and exerting control over any dissidents within their ranks.
This is not a generalized “millionaire and billionaire” problem. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Mike Bloomberg, even the Walton family are not the problem.
The problem is a tight-knit group of right wing radical billionaires that includes, or has included, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, the Mercers, the DeVos-Prince family, and Richard Melon-Scaife.
These are billionaires who’ve made their fortunes in the shadiest sorts of ways — energy deals with corrupt foreign entities, international gambling, multi-level marketing.
I know it sounds insanely grandiose, but I also know that many of you know it’s true. Dark by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer outlines some of the lengths to which these right wing billionaires have gone in order to exert control over our system. It’s important to understand that these people are not simply trying to receive favorable treatment from our government. They literally want to run it from behind the scenes.
Which brings me to this election. In my view it is a mistake to focus on economic issues at this time. Economic issues are not even close to the most important issues that need to be addressed right now. This country is in the thrall of powerful individuals who have thoroughly corrupted our system. Investigating and rooting out their corruption and the corruption within our government, strengthening voter rights, and reforming our campaign finance laws ought to be our focus.
For two primary reasons I believe this is absolutely the wrong election for a campaign that focuses on an aggressive overhaul of the tax structure and the healthcare system. First, those issues tend to divide people who we need to vote for us. One positive thing that came out of Trump’s election is that it actually caused some long time Republican apologists, people who I thought did not have a principled political bone in their bodies, to stand up and say “enough.” Those people include William Kristol, George Will, Jennifer Ruben, Max Boot, and David Frum.
These are all people who could traditionally be counted upon to twist themselves into pretzels in order to defend whatever Republicans are doing and who have all stood up to unequivocally oppose Donald Trump.
I am reminded of something David Frum wrote shortly after Trump’s election. I am having a hard time finding it now, but basically he said that Democrats should resist the temptation to fight Trump on the same grounds they would traditionally fight any conservative Republican. That instead we should fight him on core questions of corruption because they are things that all decent, honest Americans prize above any of the issues that divide us politically. I think that’s right. And I think we risk alienating potential anti-Trump allies if we make the focus of this election implementation of ambitious new left wing policies.
This brings me to my second point: if we fail to make Trump/Republican corruption the central focus of this presidential election we run the risk of making ourselves look like hypocrites and of minimizing just how bad Trump and the Republicans are. It is my firm conviction that the most acute existential crisis we face today is a political crisis. If we don’t root out the corruption that created the conditions that enabled Trump’s rise to power and are enabling his grip on power, we run the risk of losing the ability to ever have a government that can deal with any of our other serious problems.
The message right now that can unite and energize a strong majority of Americans if consistently delivered with clarity and conviction is this: Trump’s corrupt practices must be exposed and ended, and the American people must be guaranteed the right to vote their consciences and select their leaders in free and fair elections.