A Prescription For Our Party

Relax, I keep telling myself.  Relax.  Ann and I enjoy our health and financial security, our kids are healthy and productive, our grandkids have gotten/are getting good educations.  It’s hard to see how this new Republican era can directly and imminently hurt us.  So buck up and swallow the disappointment.  As Jacques, my Libertarian friend, counsels “get over it!” 

But . . . with each passing day and tweet, with each appointment of a federal dismantler, with each episode of power lust, my anxiety ratchets up.  

The Senate will prove to have been the key pivot point for the next few years.  I devoted all my political contributions to Senate races but the DSCC really let us down.  And looking forward, in the election of ‘18 there will be on the ballot three times as many Senate seats held by Democrats as those held by Republicans.  And in ’20, we may not face Trump, if he gets bored with being the world’s most powerful person, but Pence or Cruz or that used car salesman, Rubio.  And expect candidates -- House, Senate and Executive -- to take a lesson from Trump and Sanders and become populist panderers if not outright demagogues.  In the meantime, God knows what we will face on the Supreme Court.  We're in for a long dry spell at the Federal level.  It’s not a pretty picture.   We cannot afford to relax.

  

It’s tempting to renounce democracy and adopt the Founders’ skepticism of the mass.  But no, I have faith that wisdom and judgment reside among us regardless of our education or social station.  Our system can and will work given time.  So how do we buy that time and swing the pendulum back toward a democratic republic’s ability to forge compromise, to balance competing interests and to solve problems inclusively?

First, Democrats should not reinforce polarization.  Let’s not adopt a McConnell negativity, opposing anything coming out of the executive branch.  Instead, Democrats must clearly embrace and stand for something that works for those we lost to Trump, those who were unheard, those who are fearful and fed up, even if a program has a Trumpian stamp on it.  He says he wants to spend on transportation and communication; he wants to lower drug prices; he promises national competition among health insurers.  These are fertile fields for compromise and collaboration – for making deals with the Deal Master.

In the meantime, Democrats must adopt a clear-cut, simple-to-grasp mission, a bumper-sticker identity (take a lesson from “Make America Great Again.”) At all levels of government, local, county, state and federal, all democrats should stand for one, simple, over-arching idea. 

And wouldn’t you know – I have a suggestion: Removing Barriers.  

It ain’t original: Bill Clinton used it on occasion in the ‘90’s; Hillary talked it last April but then, unaccountably, dropped it.  I thought at the time, “Hey, what a powerful, flexible and memorable a positioning for Democrats.  What a great slogan; what a bumper sticker; what a lawn sign logo.”  This is what we should be about – locally, at state level, nationally: removing barriers to education for preschoolers and high school grads; removing barriers to equity; removing barriers to a living wage and family-wage jobs; removing barriers to health access. 

Removing barriers is not welfare but leveling the playing field and smoothing obstacles to an individual’s fulfillment of their potential.  Removing barriers is not a zero-sum game; you don’t need to deprive someone to remove someone else’s barrier  (except through equitable, progressive taxation.)

On whom should we focus?  Forget the fifty-state focus now so being talked up among aspirants to the DNC Chair.  Rather, let’s adopt a three-generation focus – the boomers and retirees, many of whom turned to Trump for answers; their middle age children locked in a stagnant middle class; and their grand-children.  Everyone wants to see their children and grand-children thrive and prosper.  Remove barriers that stand in the way of each generation.  Do that and the fifty states will sort themselves out.

Where should we focus?  At the state level.  These Republican ideologues want to weaken Federalism.  OK. Let’s take the force of their blow and turn it to our use, in the way my grandson does in his Tai Kwan Do.  Let’s remove barriers at the state level through a consortium of states, and the feds will have to follow.  Carbon pricing; climate science support; on-line public education collaborations across state lines; pooled state health insurance programs.  With assertive, pragmatic collaboration of states, we can create a new federalism centered outside the Beltway, outside Montgomery County MD, Arlington County, VA and the District of Columbia.  Listen to what Jerry Brown has to say about state responsibility and opportunity (my thanks to friend Brian who sent me this link,) Here Brown is welcoming this year’s annual meeting of climatologist and earth scientists, and he is fighting-mad: hear what progressive resistance sounds like.  (The sound track temporarily fades out at one point; just wait it out for 20 seconds or so.)

Two other suggestions.  Friend Frank always refer to “Republican President Trump.”  And use humor; nothing so demonstrates his malignant narcissism (from a second friend Frank.) Like a picador skewering a bull, madden him with humor.  The man can’t take a joke.  Where are our puppeteers when we need them?  (One of the first things the Nazis did in 1934 was to clamp down on cabarets and ban street puppet shows.)

So, those are my prescriptions for the long haul restoration of the Democratic Party: Focus on Removing Barriers, for Three Generations, through progressive State Consortia.  And in the meantime, skewer with humor Republican President Trump as often as we can.