I publish an op/ed every week in newspapers in the congressional district in which I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012, running to alert as many people as possible to the destructive and ugly thing the Republican Party had already become (and had been “becoming” since Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich began their campaign of fascistic propaganda). It’s a 2:1 Republican District— immediately red on every map on election night.
(A district that even voted 60% against a great Senator like Tim Kaine and in favor of an absolute creep of a Republican.)
Into that political world, I hurl messages every week, trying in every way to reach the conservative people I knew when I did a decade’s worth of talk radio conversations with them in the Shenandoah Valley on the same station on which Rush Limbaugh broadcast for three hours. Back in the 90s, many of these people came across to me as sincerely good people with conservative values worthy of my respect.
(On the radio, I tried to frame questions that would allow us to search for common ground as human beings, and in our understanding. I really believed that the liberal view had some defects that could be overcome with the help of some conservative insights and values. And vice versa for the conservatives. That there was a “higher wisdom” that brought together the half-truths of both sides.)
But then came a transformation of the Republican base into something that was a blatant betrayal of the good conservative values they’d expressed before: betraying Christian values, values of law and order and the Constitution, values regarding the centrality of good moral character.
How that transformation could have happened is a question that has preoccupied me for years. I am not satisfied with the answers I’ve come up with, which means I also have no clear idea of how to move them back to the right side of the Good-vs-Evil teeter totter. But I have some faith, deep in my heart, that the goodness I knew in them in the 90s can be brought back into the political sphere.
And every week I put the best message I can come up with to bring those good people I knew in the 90s to where the “better angels of their natures” in their role in America’s political system, where the people get to choose in what spirit power will be wielded in the United States of America.
This week, I ventured one of my more practical arguments: it calls for a change in how our president gets chosen. The piece had the title,
The Electoral College: All Costs, No Benefits
The text of that piece will be in #2 of this little series.
Then the third and final installment will consist of an exchange between me and one of my Republican readers— who is a retired Navy colonel, and who is also a friend (we and our wives agree not to discuss politics.
He and I had agreed also to not engage in online debate as we had before. The exchanges seemed to be deteriorating in ways that interfered with the friendship. But here he was, this morning, coming onto the stage to argue that I’m wrong about the Electoral College.
And I came out to do battle-as-argument in response to what I considered an unsupportable position that he took.
So that is this week’s version of my attempt to help detach good people from a Republican Party whose fascistic unworthiness is clear even to Dick Cheney.*********************************************
Installment # 2 — # 2 My Weekly Op/Ed Challenging to My Red Region (on the Electoral College Issue, and More) — will present the text of that piece.
Installment # 3 will present an exchange between me and a Republican, a retired Navy colonel and fellow columnist, who is also a friend (in a no-political-talk relationship. (The system is blocking me from posting it now.)