I meant to write a policy-post about women’s reproductive health and rights.
When I started to think about my next blog-post last week, I wanted it to be about really important policies, like reproductive rights and women’s health. I wanted to draw attention to the unacceptably high rates of maternal mortality in Texas caused by reduced access to health care for women, especially low-income women.
I wanted to talk about the skyrocketing rates of teen-pregnancy in Texas—we have the highest rate of repeat teen-pregnancy in the country. Teenagers who’ve already had a child get pregnant again in Texas in large part because they are not allowed to get their own birth control—even though they’re allowed raise a child—without the red tape of their parents signing off on it. In Lubbock County, the overall rate of teen births is more than one in every 20 teenage girls. That’s about the same as places like Eritrea, or Papua New Guinea. When half of all high school students in Texas are having sex, the approach of abstinence-only sex-ed, cutting of access not only to contraceptives, but even to information about them, has shown itself to be an abject failure.
I wanted to write about that, and about how we need to bring back Planned Parenthood, the gold standard of women’s reproductive health care and a leader in lowering teen birth rates, to our part of Texas. I wanted to write about my policy ideas for expanding access to health care, enshrining it as a universal right, which would help teenagers-being-teenagers avoid unplanned motherhood years before they’re ready.
But then, Nazis happened
As we all know, Nazi White Supremacists invaded Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend. They came to advertise their hatred, to push it into the mainstream. They came to intimidate the mostly liberal population of this college town, a small city where progressive politics thrives, and where I used to live.
They came to use violence on people of color (graphic), to call for the killing of Jews, to send 19 people to the hospital, and to murder a young woman from nearby Greene County.
Although I never met Heather Heyer, I got to know Greene County a little bit when I lived in Charlottesville, first as a volunteer, and then working as a Field Organizer for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Greene county is pretty small and rural compared to suburban Albemarle and Charlottesville—I lived right across the county line from Greene. It’s a lot like the 27 counties in my Congressional district here in Texas that lie outside of Lubbock and Abilene. I met a lot of nice people who helped on the Bernie campaign, and indeed, Greene County went for Bernie in the primary as did Charlottesville, which meant a lot to me and my friends who had worked hard volunteering.
Living and working with the progressive activists of Central Virginia was a wonderful, exhilarating (and also exhausting—like any election is) experience. I met lots of wonderful people, old and young, people like Nic McCarthy, who were there last weekend going eyeball-to-eyeball with Nazis, never raising a hand of violence. People like my friend Mike, a father of two grown daughters and one of the gentlest people I know, who told me on the phone this week what it was like being at a church meeting which he later found out Nazis surrounded, walking though the once-peaceful liberal town that had now been assaulted by gun-toting Nazis and White Supremacists who came looking for war and violence.
And then the man in the White House had the effrontery to speak up on behalf of the Nazi White Supremacists!
Not “How do we feel?” But “What must we Do?”
There’s no way to express the emotions I’ve been feeling about this. But more important than those current feelings is my long-term conviction about defeating the Nazi White Supremacists. No amount of admiration could be sufficient for friends like Lena who self-sacrificially put their bodies on the line to show the Nazis that they do not own Charlottesville (as they claimed, screaming and chanting down its streets, when in fact they invaded from Ohio, North Carolina and other points distant), and they can’t control what its democratically elected local government does with its parks.
But to fight Nazism and White Supremacy, to defeat these horrific causes, the fundamental thing we need to do is not to confront them in the streets:
It is to make sure they don’t get what they want.
What they want is more than just to scream and beat and murder counter-protesters while carrying around guns so big that they look like the army. They want to be the army. They want to take over the power of the state and create a Nazi White Supremacist America. This may seem far-fetched, but they think they are already well on their way, since America elected—and put its army in the charge of—a president who speaks up for them. A president whose party allies dominate all institutions of federal power today. The American Nazis seek victory by taking over the Republican party from the top, and to use the power of the state to repress the oceanic majority of Americans who reject Nazis. They use this party’s gerrymandering to whittle away Americans’ ability to elect representatives who stand full-throatedly against Nazism. They use it to even deny access to the ballot, through laws making it harder for some groups of people to vote.
Now, some Republicans have spoken out against Nazis, and against their party's president, who speaks up for the Nazis and White Supremacists. But too many have responded like Lubbock's own Congressman, Jodey Arrington—the Republican I am running against. He took seven minutes on local TV to spinelessly equivocate about Trump speaking up for the Nazis in that Tuesday press conference. He extolled his party’s president:
"We're tired of the political-correct politician that goes up there and it is just status quo. I think he's exactly what the people wanted, and I don't think he's operating any differently than what they wanted. These times that we're in call for a strong leader."
If the status quo is that Nazi ideas are unacceptable in mainstream American politics, it is not a status quo that West Texans, or any Americans with a shred of morality or ethics, want changed. So, what do we do about this? How do we defeat the Nazi White Supremacists and the man in the White House who speaks up for them, and whom they revere as their “God Emperor”?
We must Win Elections
The answer is simple, and can be found, among other places, in the words of Janis Ian, from one of the most memorable films about political power in the current generation: To bring down a dictator, you “cut off [his] resources.”
Trump and the Nazi White Supremacists may appear to derive their power from money, guns, or enormous reservoirs of young white men full of energy and willing to both do and suffer violence.
But their main resource is political power: allies in positions that allow them to pass laws which, for example, legally enshrine Confederate monuments in places like North Carolina, so that the only way to get rid of them is to break the law and get arrested. Their allies empower them by calling for immigration laws and enforcement designed to target and expel people not of the preferred “ethnos” of the Nazis.
Their allies also empower them by refusing to use the seats of authority they do occupy for justice, whether the just action is removing Confederate monuments from the US Capitol or prosecuting those agents of the state (like certain police officers) who engage in racial profiling and violence against African-Americans, Hispanics or other people. Those who have the power to act for justice but remain inert, unwilling wield it, make themselves accomplices of the Nazis and White Supremacists.
Nothing will be done to stop or reverse all of the most destructive, anti-social phenomena in America as long as the enemies of justice can depend on their allies who hold the authority of elective office to sit silent and let their outrages fester and multiply.
Putting our Money—and Time, and Effort—where our Mouth is
For those of us who would bend the arc of history towards justice, that means that all of the protesting, speaking out, sacrificing of bodies to defend physical space against Nazis must aim ultimately to cut off their power by replacing their allies and sympathizers at the ballot-box.
It is not too early to start, and there is no sacrifice too great. Maybe it's your time registering voters; maybe it's your bureaucratic skills helping figure out forms, organize lists, and cold-call potential volunteers for a little-known campaign.
Or your people-skills, drawing willing donors to a fundraiser in your living room, or convincing others to spend evenings and weekends working for some unsung Democrat. Maybe it's your own dollars, whether locally or arcing out across America from a “blue” to a “red” district, droplets in the sea-change that must come to American electoral politics if we are ever going to prove to Nazis that American rejects them.
Right now, when they judge by the messages from our president, and some of his co-partisans in Congress, like Jodey Arrington, the Nazis feel not rejected, but accepted, even encouraged.
We need a new president. And a new Congress. It won't happen all at once, or even in the next few months—but it is already in the making. As I run for Congress, my family, and my volunteers here in West Texas, and I are all Walking the Talk. I hope you'll join us.