It is no secret that I am generally despondent about our political future. Republicans have made a general, calculated decision to go insane and found it a winning political strategy. Maximum insanity is essential to winning the primary and does not seem to be a serious handicap in the general election. The presence of a few progressive activists in the Democratic Party allows Republicans to paint the entire party as dangerous radicals. But so much of the Republican Party is completely nuts that any attempt to point this out is seen as elitist and disrespectful to a vast swath of Real Americans.
During the Bush II Administration, Republicans tended to see any narrow Democratic victory as evidence of fraud and demand an investigation. But they were prepared to accept Democrats winning if the margin was wide enough. Those were the good old days! Today, many Republicans are dismissing all Democratic victories as fraud, no matter how high the margin. A narrow Democratic victory proves that just a little funny business could have changed the outcome. A wide Democratic victory proves just how outrageous the fraud is.
Other people talk about the attempts to restrict voting that we can expect Republicans to make -- no longer even pretending that the purpose is anything other than ensuring their victory. But I fear Republicans going further -- using control of the vote counting to throw out enough Democratic ballots as fraudulent to ensure that Republicans always win. Or maybe transferring choice of electors from the people directly to the state legislatures, all without losing any support. This will make little difference in solidly Republican states where a Republican win was a certainty anyhow. Nor will it make much difference in solidly Democratic states where Democrats control the vote counting. But in closely divided states, expect Republicans to resort to any means, fair or foul, to lock in a monopoly of power.
So is there any hope at all? I see a little. For one thing, division and dysfunction will probably make the federal government so dysfunctional that it will be significantly weakened. More and more government will take place at the state and local level. (Trump has discovered this and found it frustrating). Democrats need to stop putting all their eggs in the federal basket and focus more on state and local government. In solidly Democratic states, Republicans will not be able to control the vote counting or to prevent Democrats from winning.
But more than that, it is time to acknowledge that conservatives are right, and that for too long we have put all our eggs in the governmental basket. This came as a revelation to me attending Indivisibles meetings. We have had discussions of attempts to reform the Albuquerque Police Department, which is notoriously abusive. All have gone nowhere. Changing the names at the top, and changing training for new recruits does nothing to to affect the culture of mid-level management. A thick cloud of despair is coming over would-be reformers.
The next week we heard from a speaker who specialized in non-violent conflict de-escalation. She described how in potential tense situations -- street harassment, demonstrations, confrontations with police, even police brutality -- they could intervene to calm things down. Someone asked about training police in that. The speaker said that the training is never effective if compulsory; it has to be voluntary to work. She also said that police start out hating conflict de-escalators and see them as interfering, but over time they come to appreciate the help and police start showing up for training individually. She gave many individual instances of success. Less clear -- whether the approach scales up and has actually worked to reduce incidence of police brutality or community conflict. We also heard about private initiatives to fight homelessness and provide other services.
And the more I hear that, the more I think, that maybe conservatives are right that we have relied too much on government for too long. Maybe actions take outside of government, and even outside of a political or ideological framework, are the best approach now.
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