It Could Be a Cold Civil War. I Hope It Is.
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| Gandhi and his spinning wheel. Margaret Bourke-White, 1946. |
I've been singing this tune for a while. After Obama was elected in 2008, he sent his street army home. I was told that Rahm Emmanuel, the man he had selected to explain the inner workings of Washington to him, had told him he needed to concentrate on the inside-the-beltway game, and he no longer needed masses of people in the street, all across the country.
I don't know if that's true, but I do know that he sent us home. When we organized to support the Affordable Care Act, it was without a central directorate. I volunteered with an organization that was associated with the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) and the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers). When a group of us walked from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., our SAG (support and gear) bus was purple. We called it the Barney bus, after a cartoon character of the time who happened to be purple. Purple is the color of the SEIU.
The disappearance of the Obama field organization meant that the next, more local, elections reverted to the control of local political organizations, who in my opinion have always preferred low turnout elections - a space where the people who do turn out are probably loyal followers of the local machine. (See Politics in the Rain.)
Then the Tea Party people showed up, mimicking what we had done in Obama's election, and they caught us flat-footed. The enemy, funded indirectly by petro oligarch David Koch (1940-2019), had placed an army on the battlefield we had just vacated. It was then that we, the foot soldiers on the front line, knew we were in a war, albeit a nonviolent one, and that we needed to oppose the enemy at every turn.
This is a lesson that many senior people in the Democratic party have yet to learn. I don't have access to the kind of thinking that goes on in the Democratic party's Fortress of Solitude, but I will say that I believe I have waited patiently, and I have been disappointed in the outcome.
Let's skip ahead a few years to Merrick Garland, who I'm sure is a fine man, an excellent lawyer, and an outstanding judge. However, when it came to prosecuting the perpetrators of the January 6 insurrection when he was Attorney General, I have to say that, in my opinion, he face-planted.
He actually did pretty well with the low-level offenders. (See Riley Williams Sentenced to Three Years.) I hadn't expected him to do that, but he did. And then Trump got back in and pardoned them.
More importantly, perhaps, what happened to the mid-level people like Bannon and Stone and Giuliani and Manafort? These men are, in my opinion, traitors to their country. Who among them has received his due?
And finally, what happened to the kingpin, Donald Trump? He slipped free, got reelected, and is now trying to wreck the country and the planet.
When your opponent is fighting a war to overthrow the Constitution, and possibly civilization itself, you need to go to war as well. However uncomfortable it is for so many of the judges and lawyers and entrenched politicians and their many well-compensated consultants, you do not bring a quill pen to a knife fight.
Of course, people have been fighting against Trump all along. Many lower level judges have emphatically done the right thing, and they have tangibly slowed Trump's rush to fascism. But the movement has lacked unity and leadership. That may be beginning to change. The migration of the Texas Democratic legislators to various points out of state, the strong stand California governor Newsom has made to counter the Texas gerrymandering plot - these are good signs. We'll see what happens in Congress when it returns.
This all puts me in mind of an episode in the Revolutionary war, when a minister named John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg gave a sermon to his congregation on a theme from Ecclesiastes: "To every thing there is a season ... a time of war, a time of peace." Then he declared, "And this is the time of war," and opened his clerical robes to reveal that he was dressed in the uniform of a Revolutionary colonel. He served throughout the war, most notably at Valley Forge, the battles of the Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth, and finally at Yorktown.
It's time to fight.
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Historians debate the Muhlenberg story. It was first reported by a great-nephew well into the nineteenth century, and there does not seem to be independent evidence from the time of the event. The counter to this would be that it would have been a family story, cherished and faithfully passed on at family gatherings, with elders correcting the embellishments of impetuous youth. I will not throw aside the Muhlenberg story. A main reason is that it fits Muhlenberg's character. He was a very colorful, even theatrical, fellow. The story fits.
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For more on the picture at the beginning of this story, click here.
See also Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Having Fun Reforming Health, We Were There All Along, For Athena.
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