gracchusdixit

In 1964, the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater of Arizona as their candidate for President.  In accepting the nomination, he famously proclaimed: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”  Goldwater and his party went on suffer one of the greatest electoral bloodbaths in our history.  Innumerable pundits and prognosticators declared the Republican Party all but dead, hobbled forever by the extreme conservatism Goldwater embodied.

Yet here we are, exactly fifty years later, and a national election has been won by a Republican Party more extreme than anything Barry Goldwater could have imagined or would have wanted.  All across the land, liberals are wringing their hands and shaking their heads in numb disbelief.  How could this have happened, they ask?  How is it possible that the promise of “change” which swept Barack Obama into office six short years ago evaporated so quickly?  Is there any hope left that our country can ever, someday, become the decent, tolerant, generous place they wish it to be?

In responding to the results of this election, the President of the United States struck a conciliatory note.  “I hear you,” he said.  I suppose that was the only politic or polite thing he could have said.  But it wasn’t what needed saying.  For the truth is, the American people never heard him.  They did not see or hear Democratic candidates step up, stand up, and—with a single voice—speak up for the fundamental principles they believe in.  Instead, they got conciliation, compromise, and confusion.

Allison Grimes in Kentucky criticized the so-called “war on coal” instead of telling her constituents the truth:  the coal industry isn’t worth saving, and the sooner it dies, the better off we will be.  Michelle Nunn in Georgia talked about “fixing” the Affordable Care Act instead of telling voters that the Act, however imperfect it may be, was designed to “fix” the worst flaws of the utterly bankrupt system it replaced.  Mark Pryor of Arkansas jumped on the right-wing band wagon of fear by demanding a travel ban against West African countries instead stating the obvious truth that such a ban would achieve nothing except to make it harder to control the disease in the one part of the world where there actually is an Ebola epidemic.

Worst of all, one Democratic candidate after another pretended that the President of the United States didn’t exist.  The aforementioned Grimes even refused to say whether she had voted for the man, a transparent and embarrassing dodge that probably ended her candidacy there and then.

Did Democrats honestly think this would work?  Did they expect voters to believe they had been hiding under a rock during the last six years of the Obama presidency?  Did they imagine they could win an election by running away from the principles of their party and its elected leader?  In the end, their only reward for this hair-splitting evasion was humiliating defeat.

I, for one, greet this election, not with despair, but with combative joy—because liberals in general and Democrats in particular need to wake up.  They have an all-or-nothing fight on their hands, and it’s not going to be won with “conciliation” and “compromise”.  The Republicans swept to victory Tuesday night not by compromising but by standing their ground.  I abhor everything they stand for, but I respect their spine.

When Mitch McConnell talks about “working together to get things done,” he isn’t being gracious; he is laying yet another trap.  The Republican agenda hasn’t changed, and it isn’t going to change now that they control both houses of Congress. In the name of “getting things done,” they intend to impose that agenda on the country and will smear anyone who stands in their way for being unwilling to “compromise”.  They are out to lower taxes on the rich, deregulate corporations, gut environmental protections, destroy unions, scale back and privatize Social Security, eliminate Medicaid, and, if they can, repeal the Affordable Care Act.

This is not an agenda that very many Americans support, and it is not an agenda that calls for one inch of conciliation or concession by Democrats.  Either Democrats stand up for their principles or they stand for nothing.  And if they aren’t going to fight for those principles tooth and claw, they don’t deserve to be elected or to govern.

Barry Goldwater said something else in 1964 that people now barely remember:  “And let me remind you,” he told Republican convention delegates, “that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”  It is now up to Democrats to defend social and economic justice against those who intend to destroy it .  In waging that fight, let them heed the words of Barry Goldwater: moderation is no virtue.