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HELP ME HELP YOU

Why Democrats Don’t See the Dangers In the Virginia Governor’s Race and the 1/6 Commission

 

By Rick Wilson

You can only help people who want be helped. This is a lesson of long standing, and it is rarely more true than in politics. The last two weeks convinced me that many Democrats would rather lose than admit they’re off track politically. Two lessons led me here:

In Virginia, Terry McAuliffe should be blowing Glenn Youngkin out. A now-blue state with a rock-solid six-county block in Northern Virginia should deliver the margin any Democrat needs to win. But Terry is locked in a death struggle with Youngkin, who has been allowed to play one political character in Northern Virginia and one everywhere else.

The lesson here is blindingly simple, and yet Virginia Democrats to whom I’ve spoken stare at me as if I’m speaking Urdu when I explain it.

Trump is the issue. He’s the only issue. He’s profoundly unpopular with the voters McAuliffe needs to win, and if you poison Youngkin with his association (and by “association” I mean, “obsequious political fellation”) with the Worst President In History, that’s the ballgame.

So why have Virginia Democrats let Youngkin whisper to the Bannon Line voters (the 3–8% of Republicans so embarrassed by Trump that they’ll cross party lines) that he’s a normal Republican? Youngkin tells them he’s like Mitt Romney or John McCain or George Bush. Youngkin tells Fairfax voters he’s not one of those people, all while bleating about Critical Race Theory and finger-banging the anti-vax “muh freedumb” conspiracy loons everywhere else.

Democrats aren’t fully vested in killing off the next generation of Trumpist candidates. They seem blind to the dangers posed by the coming wave of Republican candidates who aren’t burdened with Trump’s cognitive and moral deficits, and who use shiny corporate and Ivy League credentials to camouflage their full adoption of the GOP’s radical nationalist authoritarianism.

The second painful lesson is the slow-motion failure of the 1/6 Committee. Two Friday’s ago, I heard from sources in Congress that the committee had been sleepwalking its way along and has little stomach for a bloody legal fight with the architects and implementers of the plan to overthrow the 2020 Presidential election. They’re not doing the work to make a case for the American people about the most serious and dangerous moment in modern political history.

Of course, online blue-check Democrats dogpiled me instantly. How dare I question the Committee? There’s no way I could know their deliberations. Bless their hearts; the Committee’s glacial pace and laconic tone isn’t a secret; it’s a feature, not a bug. (Also, my little birds are everywhere.)

The Committee’s Twitter feed weighed in. Liz Cheney tweeted at me, also saying it wasn’t true. A sternly worded statement was issued. I begged Liz and the Committee to prove me wrong.

But I fear I’m not wrong.

Last week, they talked tough about holding a vote on Steve Bannon’s defiance of the Committee’s subpoena… sometime before Thanksgiving. “Swiftly consider” was the term they used in their press statement in reaction to me calling them out.

“Swiftly” isn’t in their character. In the words of the political philosopher Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The Committee is being run by staffers and lifers, not by people who understand the battle ahead. You see, Trump and his bad guys know a secret; they know the Democrats are locked in the procedural clockwork of Washington and a profound commitment to policy as politics.

They know that Democrats believe the 1/6 Committee is a distraction from talking about — wait for it — infrastructure. If the Democratic predicate of 2022 is a race about Build Back Better and infrastructure, the Republicans will nationalize this race as culture war and conspiracy…and win on it. Democrats too often want a focus-grouped, pablum policy answer when the world is burning down around them.

Republicans know how to play them with the appearance of civility, comity, and goodwill in a kind of American political taqiyya. Bannon and his lot are revolutionaries, so for them, the lying, deception, and exploitation of a legal and political system unequipped to deal with this hacking is second nature.

They know the Democrats will play by the rules, while they play by none at all. Sure, they may couch their defiance of the law and of Congressional power in lawyer letters, but Democrats are too politically blind to see the words “Fuck You” scribbled on the page in Trumpian Sharpie.

The Committee’s progress and posture have hardly been something to put the fear of God into Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, and a host of other hostile witnesses. If the fact that a violent mob was sent to murder them doesn’t make Democrats face this with both alacrity, passion, and frankly some political venom, they deserve to lose.

I wish I were wrong. I’m begging to be wrong.

I desperately want the Committee and the Democrats to get their act in gear and understand that they’re not in a small-ball political fight; it’s a choice between an aggressive, hard-edged defense of democracy, or accepting the end of our nation as we know it. The people who executed the plan to overthrow America’s democracy aren’t done fighting to destroy this country…not by a long shot.

Letting raging normalcy bias dominate their political and strategic thinking won’t just be electorally deadly for the Democrats but also the nation. The people who want to overthrow American democracy for a shiny new authoritarian nationalism know this.

It’s time Democrats did too.

This content was originally written and posted on Rick’s Medium page.

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