Resistance
Will 2022 election outcomes be a repeat of 2018? Can Democrats keep both houses of Congress in November?
Resistance: It’s a book title… it’s a movement…and it’s trapped inside a 2-party socio-political elite mindset.
2022 and 2018: same roadmap, different drivers.
As in 2018, in 2022 women and youth hold the cards of winning, the margin to lose. (1 Rubin, cite chapter)
Are we watching?
In 2022 gender and age divides are being crossed. The news of 2020 for voters was the same old news —economic inequality, gun violence, climate change, education — except for a refusal to put Trump back into the office of the Presidency: what was left of it. As convincing was the voter turnout in 2020, do a demographic dive and the cards in the cards for winning in 2022 will be largely dealt by an emerging coalition of women and youth.
In 2020 “Uncle Joe” was a familiar face for ‘enough of America.’ Just enough to get him elected. Voters came out to vote for familiar Uncle Joe, not because of his policies which despite their rhetorical promise mongering, were arguably Progressive, ready for the Congressional slice and dice machine, but because his familiar presence in the White House and late entry into the Democratic candidate race would prove ‘familiar enough’ to be elected.
One half of the country saw the benefit of being ‘one half,’ of advocating partisanship which manifested on January 6 as mob rule; the ‘other half’ pretended it didn’t or wouldn’t last, shocked by January 6 and the depth of a conspiracy. No predicate needed: a conspiracy built on hate, fueled by and demonstrating hatred. No ideology or tea party charade needed. Just hatred and a lust for power.
This half of America relished in the minority loophole of the Senate filibuster and a relentless drumming of culture war tom toms. America learned that ‘nothing’ would be accomplished, not presumably until the next election when Congress would return to Republican hands.
The task of selling bipartisanship ‘progress’ to the public fell to white male Democrats.
In 2020 there was no compelling message except not any more years, hours, minutes, seconds of Trump. The only solution became the one solution: get rid of Trump.
It has been said that courage fills the vacuum left by chaos. America and her institutions suffered January 6. The suffering has not stopped. The suffering has metastasized. America’s future is temporarily on hold, locked in culture wars and the detritus of identity politics, the abandonment of “grass roots” democracy.
The 2020 election showed a new coalition of voters beginning to emerge. Disorganized yet vocal, a coalition whose expansion was due largely to a replacement of older organizing stratagems. There would be no short cuts, no descending on rural counties pitching visions of a “new day in America.” No ‘no shows.’ Recall the 2016 HRC campaign — skipping Wisconsin and shorting Michigan — two states that Trump narrowly carried.
This time would be different. Issues would have their own gravitational pull. In 2018 it was gun control and immigration. In 2020 it was ‘get rid of Trump.’ In 2022 in addition to guns and refugee families, it is, women’s reproductive rights and voting rights. The 2020 campaign moniker of “decency” is like yesterday’s frock.
Gloves are off.
In 2020 more women were elected to Congress than at any other time in America’s election history. In 2020 more office records were set by “the youngest elected (fill in the blank)…” than at any other time in America’s election history. A Progressive cadre of elected House Congresswomen, the “Squad,” grabbed America’s imagination, not because of their leftist position on issues — compared to most western industrial societies they are hardly what they are branded as — but because they could command the social media networks so effectively and speak to a majority of youth. Having no other political counterstrategy, Republican lawmakers physically threatened them, tried to deprive them of their rights to privacy, defamed their presence.
All the ‘Squad’ professed to accomplish was to legislate effectively on behalf of their constituents — not exactly an anti-capitalist ideological position.
With a surge in gun violence affecting entire communities, youth started speaking out and grabbing America’s attention. Emma Gonsalez, 16, a young queer activist and survivor of a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, started appearing on major cable networks. David Hogg another survivor from Parkland, aged 18, squared off against Kellyanne Conway, arbiter of misinformation and spin. (2)
There was the first nationally organized student strike since the nineteen sixties on the issue of gun control (3), started by Lane Murdock, a fifteen year-old from Connecticut, who voicing her frustration on social media, effectively mobilized hundreds of thousands of students.
Compared to the Women’s March of 2017, the Dobbs SCOTUS decision protests of late spring 2022, drew hundreds of thousands of young women, queer women, brown and black women, too young to vote barely 5 years ago. They were present in 2017, but not like 2022. Today’s protest signs may be the same but the bodies carrying the signs are different — younger, differences paused — a solid voice, more a movement than a weekend protest. Reflecting on the Kansas Abortion Amendment defeat, Peter Slevin writes,
What started small, with a core group of well-known advocates, including Planned Parenthood, the A.C.L.U., and a Wichita abortion clinic called Trust Women, grew to a coalition of roughly forty organizations that spent more than six million dollars and knocked on tens of thousands of doors. Partners did not agree on everything — far from it, All said — but they framed the effort as nonpartisan. The campaign reached beyond Democrats to Republican moderates, especially women, who had been pivotal in the Democratic takeover of the U.S. House, in 2018. Organizers talked with rural conservatives, too, taking time to door-knock in counties that, in the past, might’ve been ignored. “If we want to build back access to abortion in places like the Midwest and the South, then we have to do it differently,” All told me. “You have to be willing to communicate with people who have different opinions than you do.” (3)
If 2017 was the clarion call, 2022 will be voices of the recruits.
Take a close look at the above picture — what do we see? Women, black, brown, queer (albeit, cropped in this photo), hands, clapping and raised. No fists. They are celebrating. Young women, a notable characteristic. Lurking in the background is a collection of men, predominantly white, of various ages.
Together, a demographic cross section of the Resistance.
It's a cross section of opinions and passions as well. When MSNBC reporter Yasmin Vossoughian (4) interviewed protestors in front of the Supreme Court, in July, after the decision in Dobbs was announced, she picked four women, in years not over twenty-five, and asked them why they were protesting. Vossoughian got four different answers. One was there in tribute to her grandfather, a social activist. One was there in solidarity with women unable to leave their state to get medical care. One was there for her younger sister whose future would be shorted. One was there to protest inequality, and in solidarity with other protestors.
The message was clear: the anti-abortion protestors were not rallying around a common identifying issue, but a shared experience and passion.
This time it’s about them.
For the party establishments, and the sanctity of the two-party political system, the Kansas amendment defeat put the emphasis on political change back to where it belongs — the voters.
Kansan voters showed America how democracy works. And “identity politics” is not how democracy works. Nor is triangulation a winning vote getting strategy in 2022. (cite own article)
‘Identity’ politics lost in Kansas. Pitching the argument of abortion rights as a ‘women’s’ issue — what was proposed as a viable strategy in 2020 — didn’t deliver voters in Kansas. Freedoms curtailed by government interference delivered voters. Women and their families saw past the identity-excluding pitch: this amendment would hurt everyone, not exclusively women.
In another sense, the Kansas decision buys the Democrats much needed time, for it flies in the face of a political strategy that has been quietly failing for the past fifty years: the notion that in a two-party system, the most viable strategy is to take votes away from the opposing side. This is the formula for winning, based on a zero-sum game outlook.
Kansas proved that folks like being listened to, not lumped into made-up coalitions to force the political opposition on the defensive.
As Kansas showed, grassroots struggle remains the sine qua non for defeating the white supremacist nationalists. It was hardly the work of the party establishment that achieved the ballot win. Organizers on the ground worked day and night to alert voters of the ballot measure, raise funds, build support, and counter heavy-handed manipulations from the Republican side. (The ballot’s wording was misleading, and the vote was scheduled on a key primary day for Republican candidates.)
Instead of taking the grassroots approach, though, centrist Democrats have until now been all too happy to compromise with the far right. Purportedly in the name of the “average American,” popular measures like universal health care, climate protections, student debt forgiveness, and minimum wage hikes, among other policies, have been sacrificed at the altar of bipartisan pandering and fealty to moribund institutions.
Part of the failure of imagination, of course, lies in the Democrats’ projection of the mythologized “average American” itself — invariably pictured as white and right-leaning. Among establishment Democrats, this figure has taken consistent precedence over living Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, as well as trans and nonbinary people, from whom Democrats presume support. (5)
To paraphrase the late author-activist, James Baldwin, “I am not your Democrat.”
The notion that the 2022 election is the Democrats to lose was echoed on August 16, “primary night,” when primary results from six states were tallied. The Republican candidates who voted for Trump’s impeachment lost their bid, victims of Trumpist ideologues and election deniers. That is, except for two races, whose election voting process shared a common characteristic: the primary “winner” was decided by “ranked choice,” meaning a subsequent run-off election would be held, as in Georgia.
Remember Georgia, the state that brought America the Inflation Reduction Act?
And the deciding vote, cast by America’s first woman of color Vice President.
August 18–22
Notes
2- p. 116, Jennifer Rubin, Resistance
3- “Blueprinting the Kansas Abortion-Rights Victory,” Peter Slevin, The New Yorker, August 7
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