Political Discourse 2020

  In his June 10 th  letter, a certain letter writer has offered us an intriguing piece of political rhetoric, which, on a substantive level fails on several accounts, some of which I take up here.  Since I have previously written on the Black Lives Matter movement in the Gazette, I will not waste ink in challenging his unsupported claim that this social movement is a “home-grown terrorist organization.” His critique of Antifa (I am anti-fascist, too) is also overblown. The following web resource provides a reasonably balanced perspective on Antifa, which is a loosely organized movement designed to confront the rabid right that in its US guise is rooted in a politics of white supremacy.  ( https://luxediteur.com/antifa-history-and-politics-explained/ ) Here is a relevant passage:  “Antifa grows out of a larger revolutionary politics that aspires toward creating a better world, but the primary motivation is to stop racists from organizing; doing that can take many forms…. The vast m

In a previous letter, I drew out the threat that the dominant, Donald Trump, wing of the Republican Party posed for the state of democracy in the United States. Whether through voter suppression laws, continuing recounts in selective states of the 2020 election on the most fraudulent of claims, additional GOP-favored redistricting, or the banning of teaching the impact of racism in US history in public schools and colleges, the cumulative impact is enormous. In short, the result is an unrelenting attack on this nation’s core political values and the political marginalization of the Democratic Party for the expressed purpose of preventing them from winning future elections.  This authoritarian impetus is compounded by the widespread belief among the GOP that the Democrats stole the election, and that Biden is not the legitimate president of the United States.   A not insignificant minority of Republicans push back against this onslaught, but it is a small number, especially when facto