I do not know if I can survive three more years of Democrats stumbling over themselves to disavow the Democratic platform in a doomed attempt to win bad-faith culture wars. It is too painful, like watching ruthless hunters herding panicked animals over the side of a cliff. The poor, dumb beasts inevitably go extinct if they are not able to outthink such a rudimentary strategy.
Message to Democrats: embrace economic bread-and-butter issues to win | Matthew Karp and Dustin Guastella
Walk around your town. Explore a major American city. Drive across the country. What are the most important problems you see? There is poverty. Homelessness. A lack of affordable housing. Vast and jaw-dropping economic and racial inequality. There is a lack of public transportation, a broken healthcare system, environmental degradation, and a climate crisis that threatens to upend our way of life. These are real problems. These are the things that we need our government to fix. These are what we need to hear politicians talk about. These are what we must debate and focus on, if we are really concerned about human rights and our children’s future and all the other big things we claim to value.
I guarantee you that neither “cancel culture” nor “critical race theory” nor, worse of all, “wokeness” will grab you as enormous problems after your exploration of America, unless that exploration ranges only from a college faculty lounge to a cable TV studio to the office of a rightwing thinktank. These are all words that mean nothing. To the extent that they are real at all, they are niche concerns that plague such a small subset of Americans that they deserve to be addressed only after we have solved the many other, realer problems.
All these terms function primarily as empty vessels into which bad-faith actors can pour racism, so that it may appear more palatable when it hits the public airwaves. Common sense tells us we should spend most of our time talking about the biggest problems, and less time on the lesser problems, and no time on the mythical problems. To engage in long and tortured debates over these slippery and indefinable culture war terms is to violate that rule, with awful consequences for everyone.
Republicans will push these culture wars as far as they can, but it takes Democrats to make the strategy work
Let’s not bullshit about this. Racism is a wonderfully effective political tool for Republicans, yet explicit racism is frowned upon in polite society now, so there is a constant flow of new issues to stand in for racism in political discourse. Lee Atwater, who invented Nixon’s “southern strategy”, explained this all decades ago, and it is still true. George Wallace could be outright racist, but subsequent generations of politicians have had to cloak it in “welfare reform” or being “tough on crime” or, now, opposition to “wokeness” and “critical race theory” – things which mean, by the way, “caring about racism”.
Three-quarters of a million Americans are dead from a pandemic. We have a Democratic president and a booming economy. So we will get culture wars, and more culture wars, all of which are built on stoking various forms of hate. This is a game that serious leaders should not play. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many serious leaders. We have the Democratic party.
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Read the complete article at the link. Nobody manipulated “stand in racism” more skillfully than incoming Virginia GOP Governor Glenn Younkin. So, we can expect a steady onslaught of these sleazy, yet highly effective, tactics over the next three years.
By now, a Dem Administration could have eliminated Title 42 restrictions, regularized asylum processing at the border, instituted a robust refugee program near the Northern Triangle to “incentivize” applications abroad, slashed the Immigration Court backlog to a manageable size, and replaced unsuitable Immigration Judges and Appellate Immigration Judges with competent ones who would do the right thing and issue the necessary positive guidance to end systemic abuses by both EOIR and DHS.
As an added bonus, unnecessary and expensive litigation in the Circuits resulting from EOIR‘s poor performance could be reduced. The savings on both sides could be “repurposed” into increasing Immigration Court representation.
Sure, Repubs would drum up racist myths and carry out an energetic campaign of hate and xenophobia to rally their base. They undoubtedly would make the outrageously false claim that complying with the Refugee Act of 1980, the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the Convention Against Torture amounts to “open borders.” But, in case the Dems haven’t noticed, that’s already happening!
The Biden Administration could shoot everyone approaching our border dead and the GOP would still say “open borders.” Honesty, reality, and human decency simply aren’t part of the GOP game plan. Yet, the Dems keep falling for the bait!
The Administration is basically carrying out a “Miller Lite” restrictionist immigration policy and demeaning themselves by violating statutory and constitutional requirements right and left. But, that hasn’t stopped the GOP from dishonestly claiming “open borders,” nor has it deterred the so-called “mainstream media” from repeating this BS.
What the Dems have done is “de-energized” an important segment of their own base as well as dis-served the nation by continuing illegal anti-immigrant policies at a time when we could and should be admitting more immigrants through a revived legal immigration system and much more honest and robust refugee and asylum programs. In other words, Dems have shot themselves in both feet!
Following the asylum and refugee laws and giving applicants due process isn’t actually a “policy option.” It’s the law!
Dem spinelessness and intransigence on immigration have created the worst of all worlds. Even with truth, logic, justice, and common sense potentially on their side, the Dems cluelessly are helping the GOP succeed on their toxic agenda of stupidity, dishonesty, hate, and “deconstruction of democracy.”
There is, of course, no guarantee that any particular actions will bring electoral victory in the future. But, rather than being the GOP’s foil, why not do the right thing? Even if they ultimately lose, the Dems would save some lives, improve the situation of millions of Americans, and, at the very worst, go down fighting for something worthwhile, rather than being “herded over the cliff” by the GOP racists.
🇺🇸Due Process Forever!
PWS
11-12-21