As I've said with many articles recently, I do not believe that the problem with the democrats is that they are too far left. I mean, sometimes they are, but sometimes they're not. I do think the third wayers are responsible for many of the problems with the modern democratic party, and that the democrats need to strongly oppose the republican party. If anything, whatever the GOP is for, the democrats should be for the opposite, in a sense. The GOP in the modern era is the epitome of evil, and for me, the democrats should respond to that by being the advocate for good things, even when not popular. Rather than merely following the GOP, they should try to strongly oppose them in nearly all that they do. In this sense, I'm going to analyze the GOP's values, and I'm going to offer alternative visions for what the democrats should do instead.
If the GOP becomes more authoritarian, the democrats should stand for liberty and democracy
As I noted recently, the republican party is really realigning around authoritarianism. This authoritarianism is, in large party, driven by Christian fundamentalism. They have this belief that what we need is a strong dictator to rule over us, and that it's time for democracy to go. They've become increasingly hostile toward democratic traditions over the past 15 years or so, and now represent a threat to democracy itself. Trump wants to align us with Putin and Xi, rather than with Europe and Canada. Trump tried to overthrow the government in 2021 believing the election was stolen. His project 2025 seems to want to concentrate power within the executive branch, and the republicans are already floating a third term for Trump, in violation of the constitution (suspending term limits is often an early sign of eroding democracy, see how Putin killed Russian democracy).
These are all dangerous, and the democrats, in this time, need to rally around being being pro democracy. Pro freedom. Anti authoritarianism. They need to be the party of true American values, and to actually be the real patriots. As I said, when I left Christianity, I rejected the weirdo jingoism and the weird American civil religion stuff. The right likes to push the image of patriotism, but what they really promote is nationalism, authoritarianism, and loyalty to the state without question. NO. Being truly American is being subversive. It means standing up to wanna be dictators and wanna be kings who wanna rule over us, and to tell them "NO!". It means standing for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It means standing for a secular government that represents tolerance and liberty for all, not just beating people over the head with a certain value system. It means embracing diversity, and rejecting conformity.
The left of the 21st century needs to be the pro freedom party. it needs to be the pro democracy party. it needs to be the side that stands up to any would be authoritarian and tries to take them down a peg, to resist them, to stop them from taking power, and to refuse to consent to be governed by them. It is the side that respects elections, and will tell the other side, you may have won, and won legitimately, but you know what? We will use our power to serve as a check and a balance on you, to keep you honest, and to keep you from becoming a dictator.
Overseas, we need to stand with our allies, embrace multilateralism, and to apologize for all of the insane crap the republican party is now doing. We don't want trade war with Canada. We don't want to take greenland or the panama canal. We respect our allies. We support their autonomy. We want positive relations with them. We don't want any of this 19th century manifest destiny crap. And we give Ukraine the aid they need, recognizing that we need to keep Europe safe from the authoritarians across the atlantic and pacific too. Russia and China need to be contained. Their influence should be limited. We should support counter weights to them by drawing close to allies with similar values. make America the good guys on the world stage again. Not this weird twisted version of Rammstein's Amerika.
If the GOP stands for religious fundamentalism, we must stand for secularism
The modern GOP is driven by religious fundamentalism. At the heart of their authoritarian worldview, is the fundamentalist Christian worldview. The worldview that reflexively believes that Christianity is true, that divine command theory is a good model for morality. Such a moral system is unfit for governance, divorced from consequentialism, against good things, for bad things, and simply believes that what God says goes. As a result, these guys want to use our government to functionally force religion on people, whether indirectly or directly. Their loyalty to god is above their loyalty to the country or its values, and they will twist and subvert its values to fit their own purposes, corrupting them like everything else. They want to ban abortion, ban gay marriage, ban transgenderism. They want to force people to have more children, demonize sex out of marriage. They want to force their pathological work culture on people, believing that it is every person's lot in life to work, that work is one's purpose, and that failure to embrace the work ethic is a failure of their morality.
Despite this, we should recognize that in opposing religious fundamentalism, that our goal is not to demonize all Christians. Rather, it's to enforce a separation of church and state. It's to embrace the first Amendment, recognizing that every person has a right to pursue their own happiness, and to follow their own religion, but that no one has a right to use the state to force their religion on others. The establishment clause keeps religion out of government, the free exercise clause ensures religious liberty. Christians (and everyone else for that matter) are free to pursue that which makes them happy insofar as they don't harm others. But the morality that we are all subjected to, the one that is subject in law, should be secular. We should embrace the lemon test mindset with this issue. Law should have a secular purpose. it should neither advance nor inhibit religion, and it should avoid excessive entanglement with religion.
It literally is that simple. In doing so, we advance religious liberty, and liberty for all.
If the GOP stands for fascism, we must be at least a little "woke"
So, as I really say, no one actually likes wokeness. Wokeness is obnoxious, it's self righteous, it's in your face. It's abrasive. We shouldn't lean into it hard. But at the same time, the right and its anti woke mindset seems to embrace a lot of bad stuff themselves. They are leaning toward being a white supremacist party, the party of the confederates, the ones who are still fighting that last war from 160 years ago. They are embracing neo nazism, they are doing heil hitler salutes, they are militarizing. Fascism is very much at the core of modern republican ideology. And the democrats do need to be on the side of the minorities, the underprivileged, etc.
All I really ask is that we kind of tone down the rhetoric and make it less central to the conversation. It's a loser on optics. But ultimately, the parties are coalitions and our coalitions must include women, minorities, LGBT+, etc. So we gotta appeal to their issues. We just have to do it intelligently and in ways that are less abrasive than we've been doing. Ditch the aesthetics of wokeism, keep the message, is my approach. Relegate it to a side issue.
If the GOP stands for small government, we must stand for bigger government
The GOP has this idea that small government is a good thing. That government is slow, and inefficient, and doesn't do anything right. They want to cut the government, and reduce it to the smallest size possible due to sheer ideology. They claim that this is to prevent tyranny similar to what happened in russia, while running full steam toward authoritarianism.
Quite frankly, the size of government is not really a large factor in whether a state is authoritarian or not. I mean, we shouldn't want to repeat the dangerous of communism and their cringey command economy style economy, but at the same time, given the right seems to be heading toward a form of techno feudalism where their idea of economy liberty is freedom for rich people to tell everyone else what to do, and de facto slavery for everyone else.
The democratic party should be in favor of government though, because government helps people. Our safety nets, while flawed in their current state, help keep millions of people afloat. Without them, we would have rampant poverty as the employment system truly fails to ensure that everyone can meet their needs. If we think capitalism is bad now, try taking social security, medicare, medicaid, and welfare away from people. Our system would be completely screwed then.
Republicans don't care, because republicans are cruel. They are authoritarians. They believe that you should work or die, and even if you do work, you're not entitled to meet you needs because you're not entitled to food or shelter unless you prove your worth to your employers. They are sick people, and their sickness should be called out as such, not coddled.
If anything, democrats should try to improve government, not compromise with the republicans in cutting it. We should be expanding and streamlining our safety nets to do a better job. And ironically, a larger government that does more in terms of dollars will actually be more efficient since it helps everyone, and it will improve liberty, because it wont subject people to BS arbitrary requirements that tell them what to do with their lives. Big government sometimes can mean more freedom, it depends how the government is used.
If the GOP stands for the top 1%, we must stand with the 99%
The GOP ultimately stands for the wealthy. Their pathological obsession with cutting government is allegedly about the national debt, but republicans don't care about the debt. They are actually responsible for much of it that exists. This is because they want to cut safety nets to give tax cuts to their rich buddies.
They claim to do this because they believe in trickle down economics. They believe that businesses should create jobs. And then everyone else should earn a living working for them. Again, because they believe in work ethic to their core, going back to their Christian roots. But...if the democrats want to stand for everyone else in society, they need to be for more regulations to encourage businesses to pay and treat workers better. They should support unions. They should support safety net expansions like universal basic income and medicare for all.
If the GOP stands for trickle down economics, we should stand for trickle UP economics. Our economic model should be about giving as much money to the bottom 99% (and more specifically the bottom 80%) as possible, and to have the wealth trickle up by having the wealthy offer goods and services. And then they get money, and then we tax them to make it trickle down again, as well as encourage them strongly to pass on the wealth to others through jobs, rather than keeping it for themselves.
If the GOP prides themselves on work and work ethic, we should actually embrace redistribution
A lot of the work fetishization of our society comes from Christianity. it also exists in order to gaslight and brainwash the working class into being good little obedient wage slaves who don't question the system. Work is an inherent negative in life. No one should want to work. The point of work is to make the goods and services that we want and need. We shouldnt fetishize it or romanticize it. Whenever I hear politicians talk about "creating jobs" I cringe, because it baffles me that we literally create work in order to satisfy the arbitrary values of our value system, rather than thinking about what they do for us. But the republican party is driven by religion and divine command theory, so it makes sense why they would think that people should conform to arbitrary ideals than to think about how those ideals serve us.
The democratic party should think beyond work, and think about moving our society away from the fetishization of work. They should be the party of "handouts", and they should own it. They should say, yeah, I want everyone to have money to survive. No, it shouldn't always be tied to jobs. if it has to be tied to jobs to get the work that needs to be done, done, so be it, but we shouldn't embrace work fetishization and jobs for their own sake. We should support economic freedom from workers that only a UBI can provide, we should give people medicare for all. Free education. Affordable housing. We should do things for our citizens, rather than just imposing social darwinism on them to appease some angry bronze age god in the sky and some weird 16th century interpretation of that religion created by some guy who was literally against enjoying life.
Again, humanistic capitalism. The economy exists for humans, not humans for the economy. Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Work, productivity, and GDP should be balanced with other priorities that lead to people actually LIVING and ENJOYING life. More freedom. More work life balance. Again, be for good things, it baffles me that this is actually controversial. But that's our brain on conservative ideology, with the democratic party being so weak they'd rather reflect the same values.
The democrats should consider economic democracy as well
And finally, in order to really drive home the populist pro 99% pro worker messaging, perhaps we should embrace a mildly democratic socialist ethos. I dont prioritize economic democracy or socialism myself as the logistics are a bit questionable, and my views on economics don't really see socialism as the end all be all of economic progress anyway, but yeah. Given the popularity of bernie sanders and his democratic socialism, we should embrace that ethos to some extent. The problem with society IS the ultra rich. Reaganism ruined the middle class. And conservative ideas are dragging us into the gilded age. We need to embrace a populist message for the people that involves putting power in peoples' hands. Businesses are dictatorships. They are dictatorships that workers are forced to be subject to by virtue of needing to acquire property from them in order to stay alive. While ultimately, most of my solutions are about liberating people from economic coercion in the first place, yes, we should also consider democraticizing economic structures.
This does not mean the command economies of the USSR. It means worker cooperatives and market socialism within a market system. Perhaps workers should, in some ways, own the means of production. Perhaps, at the very least, an oppositional model through unions is favorable, or workers having representation on the board of directors via codetermination is desirable. And yes, I do support freedom as the power to say no. The best way to stop economic tyranny is by giving workers their freedom to opt out of the entire process.
Let the right embrace authoritarianism, let us embrace freedom and democracy, including in the work place!
Conclusion
It seems obvious here that I'm onto something. And so are millions of other Americans. In the age of economic populism and Trump, the democrats need a strong, compelling alternative to Trumpism and the GOP's brand of politics. We shouldnt just embrace a softer form of conservatism like the third way wants us to do, but actually embrace something entirely different, something that is oppositional and stands up and opposes the GOP's values. I don't necessarily support FULLY embracing all themes I talk about. For example, I'm not really a huge fan of "socialism", aka economic democracy, nor "wokeism." However, there should be elements of those themes in our response to the GOP.
At the end of the day though, it comes down to this. The GOP wants to embrace religious authoritarianism, we gotta embrace secular liberty. That's how I see it. The rest of the platform writes itself, and I explained how it works in foreign policy, social, and economic contexts. The right wants to literally be the bad guys as I see them. We should be the good guys, and have a value system that reflects that. The reason the democrats lose elections in the 21st century, is they lack a cohesive vision. They lack a vision because they're too busy trying to appeal to moderate right wingers who don't actually exist. We need to do better. People don't want republican lite. The reason for all the craziness since 2016 is people are chomping at the bit for change, and because the democrats are refusing to deliver, people are drawn to the republicans and their faux populism. If we want to win them back, we need to offer our own vision to counter theirs. I suspect if we do, younger generations will embrace it overwhelmingly, and the democrats will be in position to be the sun party again, instead of the moon party.
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