Let’s think about how much damage a lame duck Republican revenge-presidency can do.
We’ve all heard the popular bromide about how a wounded animal can be more dangerous than a healthy one. We must make no mistake. That is what we are facing. However successful the anti-authoritarian side may be in the midterm elections in November, we will be living with a lame duck Republican revenge-presidency for the next two years.
The only protection we can have from the Republican president’s party-enabled attempt to distort our democracy, crush social justice, abandon the UN, deny climate change and sell oil, coal and artificial intelligence by inflating the stock market and crypto, will be to defeat the wealthy white Republican male party in the coming midterms.
Only a Democratic Party takeover of both the House and the Senate will be able to save us from the further expansion of the Republican Party backlash against public education, public health, social justice and international law.
What we are living with right now in the United States is a third rise of the Confederacy that has been threatened ever since the Civil War, and a demonstration of what a well-planned conservative return to wealthy white male supremacy means for the war budget, international relations, civil rights at home, and even our democracy.
What the crushing impact of Reconstruction in the 1880s, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and race eugenics in the 1920s meant for American social progress is what the rise of the white male supremacy right means today.
Since the middle of the 1970s, we have been living with a backlash to Democrats’ New Deal, the Warren Court’s desegregation of public education, and the Democrats’ Voting Rights and Civil Rights presidencies, and the Democrats’ War on Poverty presidency.
It doesn’t matter who wins the midterms in November, as far as what will follow in the campaign for a white Republican revenge-presidency in 2028. Whether the current Republican scofflaw presidency can somehow hang on to power, or a more sophisticated white Republican supremacy presidency will take over; what we will face is a further evolution of the conservative Republican backlash to the Obama Democratic presidency, and every positive progressive development since the New Deal.
Anything but a Democratic Party victory in both the Senate and House elections will fail to slow the wealthy white male supremacy Republican makeover of our nation that we are currently experiencing.
This election is not about the current president, it is about the Republican Party’s drive to make the world safe for billionaires, artificial intelligence, and anything that might slow the sale of coal, oil, medical insurance and trillion-dollar war budgets.
Gary Michael Tartakov lives in Amherst.
