Democrats Are Gaining Ground Again by Doing Nothing
The art of letting a movement create momentum.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/d...thing.html
Doing nothing keeps working for the Democratic Party. It worked in early 2017, when women’s marches led by activists and local grassroots groups rather than elected officials prefigured a 2018 wave election highlighted by first-time female candidates. It worked for Joe Biden during the most intense weeks of the coronavirus crisis, when he made limited, online-only public appearances but gained in polls against Donald Trump anyway as the president demonstrated daily that he couldn’t understand or manage the threat of COVID-19 and speculated about the merits of injecting oneself with disinfectant. Now it is working again during the mass protests that have flowered from the pavement where police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency on a platform of law-and-order stability. But he also gave less reactionary voters signs he shared their interests, by proposing ending the military draft and presenting himself, vis-à-vis third-party segregationist George Wallace, as a supporter of incremental civil rights advancement. (He would go on to set back the cause of school integration but also to sign voting rights legislation and enact affirmative action policies.)
Nixon, of course, was a creature of pure evil whose very face was gnarled by corruption and spite, and we condemn everything about him. We are merely pointing out that the exploding protest movement—and Trump’s unwillingness to suppress his own nasty impulses—has given Biden the chance to become a sort of reverse, non-terrible Nixon, restoring “order” and balancing the demands of centrists and his party’s base in a way that advances rather than undermines democracy.
(After the 1968 election, centrist ex–Michigan Gov. George Romney agreed to join Nixon’s Cabinet as secretary of health and human services; today, his son Mitt is joining a BLM march in one of many signals that an aisle-crossing endorsement of Biden may be imminent. )
We live in uniquely bad times, but figuring out how to accommodate the righteous ambitions of an idealistic youth movement into a party whose nominee is beating a white nationalist president by landslide margins is a relatively good problem to have.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/d...thing.html
The art of letting a movement create momentum.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/d...thing.html
Doing nothing keeps working for the Democratic Party. It worked in early 2017, when women’s marches led by activists and local grassroots groups rather than elected officials prefigured a 2018 wave election highlighted by first-time female candidates. It worked for Joe Biden during the most intense weeks of the coronavirus crisis, when he made limited, online-only public appearances but gained in polls against Donald Trump anyway as the president demonstrated daily that he couldn’t understand or manage the threat of COVID-19 and speculated about the merits of injecting oneself with disinfectant. Now it is working again during the mass protests that have flowered from the pavement where police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency on a platform of law-and-order stability. But he also gave less reactionary voters signs he shared their interests, by proposing ending the military draft and presenting himself, vis-à-vis third-party segregationist George Wallace, as a supporter of incremental civil rights advancement. (He would go on to set back the cause of school integration but also to sign voting rights legislation and enact affirmative action policies.)
Nixon, of course, was a creature of pure evil whose very face was gnarled by corruption and spite, and we condemn everything about him. We are merely pointing out that the exploding protest movement—and Trump’s unwillingness to suppress his own nasty impulses—has given Biden the chance to become a sort of reverse, non-terrible Nixon, restoring “order” and balancing the demands of centrists and his party’s base in a way that advances rather than undermines democracy.
(After the 1968 election, centrist ex–Michigan Gov. George Romney agreed to join Nixon’s Cabinet as secretary of health and human services; today, his son Mitt is joining a BLM march in one of many signals that an aisle-crossing endorsement of Biden may be imminent. )
We live in uniquely bad times, but figuring out how to accommodate the righteous ambitions of an idealistic youth movement into a party whose nominee is beating a white nationalist president by landslide margins is a relatively good problem to have.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/d...thing.html
