One of the strongest local economy advocates I know is Michael Schuman, who publishes the Main Street Journal. Today, he took on the US president’s attempts to strongarm voters and rig the election. And then he noted that David Plouffe, a key advisor in Obama’s successful “out of nowhere”run for the presidency in 2008, has said that demographically, he can’t win.
Schuman says the way to defeat Plouffee’s defeatism is to get half a million Democrats to move to states where T narrowly squeaked by in 2024. North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana all went GOP by less than 150,000 votes. These states are contiguous with each other—so, if that shift happened, we’d have an entire new liberal REGION bordering progressive Minnesota on the east and with only a thin strip of the Idaho Panhandle separating it from progressive Washington to the northwest. And it’s worth remembering that as recently as 1979, George McGovern—probably still the most progressive major-party presidential candidate in my lifetime—was the more conservative senator from South Dakota.
I agree that Plouffe is wrong. And so are all those pundits who keep howling at us that the Dems need to move way to the right.
But I’m not convinced that Michael Schuman’s solution is the way to get there. First, it’s going to be very hard to find those half million people willing to start their lives over for a hope of shifting their new state blue. Second, it’s going to be even harder to coordinate that effort so that just enough people land in the right districts in each of the swingable states. Third, there’s no guarantee it will work. Republicans would get wind of it and work much harder to get their base out or to recruit new residents of their own.
Fourth, and most importantly, a new culture doesn’t easily impose itself on an already established culture. I am a New York City native living in a rural area, on a working dairy farm in Massachusetts. My neighbors have 600 cows. New YorkCity values and lifestyles won’t work here. You want to build quality relationships with your neighbors, and that doesn’t happen by storming in, taking over, and stomping on the opinions and values of your neighbors. I seasoned for 17 years in a small college town and learned to be “bicultural” before I made the big move to the farm. If the existing communities feel disrespected, there will be no progress.
Here’s what I suggest instead: The Dems could finally figure out how to talk about real issues that working people care about without negating the social equity and environmental justice pieces. They need a lot more candidates like AOC, Bernie, and Mamdani, who’ve shown that we can move mountains if we organize where people are, and we don’t need to sacrifice the justice agenda to do it.
I admire your constant calls for peace, Donald. I just wish I could believe them. You see, there’s this little problem: saying you want peace isn’t enough. You have to actually BE a peacemaker. And you haven’t been one.
You renamed the US Institute of Peace after yourself. You spent months telling Oslo you deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, it’s true that some recipients didn’t deserve it either: Barack Obama was new in office and hadn’t done anything significant toward peace at that point. Henry Kissinger was a war criminal responsible for much harm during the Vietnam War, the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship that followed the US-aided coup, and many other foreign policy debacles. But still, if you have to nominate yourself for the peace price and name an institution that is supposed to be independent after yourself, it doesn’t scream “qualified.” It actually says “laughably insecure and demanding.” Grade: D-.
Then there’s Ukraine. You’ve been so inconsistent that nobody knows where you stand. You berate the Ukrainian president in person on national TV. Next, you tell Putin to negotiate. Then you bring forward a proposal so lopsidedly Russia-centric that even Mitch McConnell dismissed the plan and said Putin had made a fool of you. One key principle of peacemaking: It has to include all the sides and let all of them at least claim some small victory, which this plan utterly fails to do. Grade: F.
Your energy policies, pushing the most destructive, resource-intensive, and economically unworkable energy options, will lead to resource conflicts, which will lead to more wars. Grade: F.
Finally, your public language is the opposite of a peacemaker’s. You issue all sorts of smears against people of color, non-Christians, people with disabilities, even those who happen to belong to a different political party, as well as people you have specifically named and declared they are your enemies. You are an attack dog with a remarkably thin skin who insults others but has zero tolerance for dissent. To paraphrase Three Dog Night, “That ain’t the way to make peace, please.” Grade: F.
So if you want to be seen as a peacemaker, you have to become one. That’s going to take major restructuring of your whole way of being president. Are you up to the challenge? I’d love to see you succeed at embracing peace and would cheer you on publicly if you’re sincere. I’m not optimistic that you’re up to it—but I’d love to be proven wrong.
Americans think of ourselves as a “can-do” people. Over the course of its history, the US has often been in the vanguard, with the rest of the world playing catch-up later. The US was especially good at technology, pioneering innovations ranging from the interchangeable parts that made mass production possible to the amazing moon missions that took less than seven years from JFK’s speech at Rice University to Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” as he became the first person ever to set foot on the lunar surface, to enormous leadership in green energy from the 1970s into the 1990s.
And Americans often see ourselves as the greatest country in the world. In many ways, that image is correct. We have amazing natural and scenic resources, a wide diversity of people, cultures, ecosystems, and more. We are very resilient, even scrappy at times. We have a democracy that has not only lasted but expanded. We’ve birthed may popular movements for justice and liberation, and experiments in new ways to form community, that went around the world.
And despite the perception of American exceptionalism–that we’re a beacon to the rest of the world–there are many areas where the US is far, far below “the best in the world.” This could be a much longer list, but here are a few examples:
Although US police forces are far more heavily armed than those in many other countries, our crime levels are worse than most countries; we are the 50th most dangerous out of 132 countries ranked.
59.5 percent stemmed from a race/ethnicity/ancestry bias.
18.6 percent were motivated by religious bias.
16.9 percent resulted from sexual-orientation bias.
2.2 percent stemmed from gender-identity bias.
2.1 percent resulted from bias against disabilities.
0.7 percent (58 offenses) were prompted by gender bias.
My guess is that these terrible statistics don’t even count police murders of people of color.
What is the Real America?
Technically, America is much more than the US. It’s everything from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina–and Americans live anywhere within. But right now, I’m just talking about the US.
And the answer is…all of the above, and more. Our diversity is part of our resilience and our strength. But our education (in school and out, and that includes social media) tends to sharpen our existing divisions and make it hard to find people who disagree with us–let alone have those meaningful, structured conversations that explore how we can work together with people who are not like us.
And it hasn’t helped that the current president has repeatedly and publicly embraced racism, misogyny, ableism, and difference, while promoting suppression of real news and science, monolithic social mores that ignore or (sometimes even physically) attack different perspectives, and dictatorships in other countries. A president who has put children in cages, essentially closed the borders to legitimate asylum seekers (long before COVID), slashed the safety net, appointed a likely child abuser to the Supreme Court, and made a mockery of our cherished democracy.
This Moment: A Time for Action
Many things are changing in our society this year:
The pandemic has changed the way we interact–and created a ridiculous ideologically based divide between those who take precautions and those who don’t
Anger around police mistreatment has created a mass movement
COVID has shown that our entire society can pivot, that all those “impossible”changes around issues from climate change to racism are actually less drastic than what we’ve already changed
In short, the cauldron is bubbling. What emerges depends on what we put in–but this could be a time to Make America Great, finally.
