A Call to the More Sensible Wing of the Republican Party

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 factoring in the insidious actions of the GOP leadership who are willing to go along with Trump, for expediency’s sake, regardless of whether they accept his ludicrous claims. In this, they are witting participants in Trump’s deviousness to delegitimize Biden’s election, the long-term impact of which should not be minimized.  There are too many Republicans, whether in Congress, in state government or in national media outlets, who are acting in concert to destabilize our most precious civic values, the negative consequences of which can only remain incalculable.

 To the smaller number of Republicans who take a forthright stand in repudiating Trump’s power grab, it is to that group that Democrats, in theory, can have a thoughtful dialogue with over serious policy issues.  However, it remains to be stated, it all could turn out to be naught in the not unlikely prospect that the Trump wing of the GOP, including its latest brand of looney anarchists, gains the ascendency. The political challenge the Biden administration seems to have undertaken is to negotiate with this group in developing a series of compromise-based policies on the infrastructure, police reform, and possibly a couple of other issues, while by-passing more significant issues where common ground is not likely to emerge, and to simply ignore the conspiratorial mongering Trump base.

 The real tragedy of our current politics is that the Democratic Party has presented a set of principles and practices expressly designed to confront the main challenges this nation will face over the next 20-30 years that could have a great transformative impact on the quality of our national life. This includes mastering the environmental crisis over the global impact of climate warming and creating a first-rate infrastructure to meet the transportation and communication challenges of the next several decades. The Democratic vision includes building a top-rate economic development and jobs growth program supported by an investment in education designed to provide enhanced skills to workers to assure that the US will compete effectively in an increasingly world-wide competitive economy.  This economic enhancement process needs to take place in a manner that enables more people to make a livable wage, while addressing long-standing racial and economic disparities, if justice is to prevail as a substantial national value. These goals represent the defining vision of the Biden administration for the short- and longer-term future.  This is a 20-year vision which will require substantial political capital to implement.  

 I encourage the responsible wing of the Republican Party to lay out their national agenda for the next 20-30 years and to creatively push back on aspects of the Democratic vision, where necessary, while seeking ways to work through some of the logjams that get in the way of effective, bi-partisan governance.  I, then ask the responsible segment of the GOP to identify the several national issues that truly matter and the assumptions about governing upon which they are based.  Perhaps there are four-to-five areas of truly national significance that can benefit from a serious bi-partisan dialogue—a forward looking, solutions-based approach to governing that problem solving Democrats and Republicans can work on.

 Such hard work, as proposed here, may be the only reasonable way of moving forward in meeting substantial national goals to shape what we could become as a people in the next two decades.  For this group of Republicans, both within and outside of government, to take on such a task, they will need to excise or radically transform the Trump obsessed wing of the GOP.  In the meantime, the Democratic party will need to establish a solid political base at both state and national levels to maintain the required political capital to sustain its vital power in the public square. However improbable such a transformation of this nation’s politics may seem, without some movement in this direction, this nation will find itself in a most precarious situation for the foreseeable future. There is no guarantee that such an approach will succeed. There is only hope and the search for the political fortitude necessary to make it so.

 


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