The Intercept - The Democratic Party Must Harness the Legitimate Rage of Americans [View all]

[Beringia]

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/05/coronavirus-american-politics-democratic-party-biden-sanders/


The political possibilities of this moment are different than anything we have ever experienced. We possess a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the United States a more humane country. But if we fail to seize it, we will face mortal danger from the right.

That’s not hyperbole. The anger of Americans, once they figure out what’s being done to them right now, is going to be volcanic. The fallout from 9/11 and the great recession of 2007-2010 will be imperceptible in comparison.

Not long from now, almost everyone will have a family member or friend who died of Covid-19, many of them suffocating in isolation wards with insufficient treatment, perhaps deprived of a ventilator that would have saved their lives. Huge swaths of the country are plummeting into desperate penury, even as they witness large corporations unlock the U.S. Treasury and help themselves to everything inside.

Blue 2021

The Democratic candidate — likely Joe Biden, but we know anything can happen in U.S. politics — beat Donald Trump going away.

The winning Democrat’s slogan was “Fighting Mad.” And that was the core of his or her campaign — both the unabashedly mad part and the demonstrated willingness to fight based on that anger.



Red 2021

Donald Trump was reelected. What stunned the Democrats, CNN, and the New York Times even more than Trump’s victory is that he ran on the slogan “Healing America” — even as voluminous, exquisitely researched media output demonstrated that his catastrophic mismanagement helped the coronavirus kill a million surplus Americans.

Yet it somehow didn’t matter. Trump and the GOP’s mighty Wurlitzer settled on a suite of hazy stories, all of which the party’s base fervently believed even though they were mutually contradictory.