EARTHQUAKE UNDERWAY
Do you feel the political ground moving under your feet? I do. The tectonic plates made a major shift in little more than a blink of the eye. They are still moving at breath-taking speed.
Only a couple of weeks ago, Trump was all but guaranteed of a landslide victory in the presidential race. It appeared to be over, a done deal. The Democrats were in despair, tearing themselves apart over the viability of their too-old candidate, Biden. The counter-revolution seemed to be in control.
Suddenly, on 21 July, Biden announced he was dropping out of the race and endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris, as his heir. In a flash, everything changed. All of a sudden one tectonic plate crashed over the top of the other catapulting Harris into the night sky with unheard of new momentum. The dead party came to life. People looked up to see a comet flashing across the gloom, in the form of a woman, a woman of color, and a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. Her explosion onto the scene is simply un-paralleled in American history.
The Republicans counted their chickens before they hatched. Now they are back on their heels flailing about on how to run against Harris. It did not help that in their arrogance they nominated a vice presidential candidate woefully unprepared for the job. The Dems gleefully rolled out the video tape of J.D. putting his foot n his mouth time and again. Only yesterday, Trump appeared before a black audience to play one of the few cards in is hand, racism. The crowd he was playing to was not the crowd in the room.
Let's get back to the big picture, my running thesis on this blog. What we have at hand is a great culture war. The Great Democratic Revolution on the 1950's and 60's gave us rights, equality, and inclusion to the social elements historically ignored, marginalized, and even tortured (think lynching). (In fact, we are presently celebrating in the Episcopal Church the first ordinations of women to the priesthood, fifty years on.) Blacks, women, the disabled, and homosexuals arose to share power with the traditional white patriarchy for the first time in American history.
With every revolution in history, there is a subsequent counter-revolution. It is the backlash of people who feel most threatened by the changes of the revolution. In America, a counter-revolution began in earnest in 1968 and has built up ever since reaching a crescendo with the election, and reelection of the first African American president. The Angry White Working Class Man pushed back, some even formed armed gangs to resist the revolution. Trump became the Great White Hope in 2016 only to lose out in 2020. Even so, he sent an armed mob to attack the Capitol and overthrow the government. They came close.
Trump is back, once again running a blatantly counter-revolutionary campaign with scarcely veiled racism, and now misogyny. It is the white man demonizing "the other." It remains to be seen if using the same old playbook as in 2016 and 2020 will work. However, the picture is beginning to emerge that times have changed and the same old attacks on immigrants, blacks, and women do not have the same punch. In my neck of the woods, there is little enthusiasm for Trump as compared to the races of the past.
Fellow citizens, we must support the democratic revolution. We must defend the rights of all people. We must defend our precious democratic and constitutional republic.
I must confess, I am feeling a lot better about this than I was only a few days ago. I do not want to make any predictions but I sense the democratic revolution's tectonic plate has crashed over the counter-revolutionary plate which is now struggling to find a way out of the unexpected crushing weight.
