The 3rd Day After

  Friday's posts are usually a review of a Christian article. But today's post will be different because of the recent elections.

Today is the 3rd day after the Midterm elections and there is hope in one sense. Those election deniers who were in league with Trump did not perform as well as feared or expected. As of the writing of this article, it looks like the Republicans will flip the House while it is way too close to call the Senate results. And thus, while the Dems are not worth bragging about, they are still the lesser of two evils.

But the news is not all terrible because of the plight of the many election deniers who ran for their state's governor's office or Secretary of State office. And that gives hope for the 2024 election. The hope it gives is that if a Democrat wins the 2024 Presidential election, we have a better chance of not ending up with a Constitutional crisis.

However, we are not out of the woods yet. Though the good news is that it appears that Trump's personal power over the Republican Party might be diminishing, Trumpublicanism in the form of other Republicans who share his agenda might still be alive and kicking.

Trumpublicanism, in the form of MAGA, that chants the America First mantra, is Climate Change denying, is pandemic denying and being skeptical of medical science, is denying the existence of systemic racism, promotes the domestic side of neoliberal capitalism, and passionately embraces authoritarian rule might have more life than Trump's personal political power. As mentioned before in a previous blog article (click here for the article), DeSantis could be the new front runner and figure head for Trumpublicanism. And for those who voted blue to protect democracy,  DeSantis could be a more ominous and formidable foe than Trump.

DeSantis has already proven that he can do an adequate job as governor, which is an executive position--that is if we don't count his political agenda as a criteria. Though not without blemish, DeSantis does not the PR baggage that Trump has. But there is one characteristic which DeSantis has displayed to a comparable level with Trump: authoritarian rule. That authoritarian rule can be seen the vengeance he is currently seeking on Disney World for their public opposition to one of his proposals on LGBT and education. In addition, he has waged war on wokism both in the public and private sectors by trying to censor certain perspectives of racism in America from being taught. Though the courts struck down his efforts to prohibit wokism from being taught in the private sector, he has succeeded in prohibiting them from being taught in schools.

It's not that DeSantis is free from PR problems. His recent stunt that lured undocumented people to fly to Massachusetts could have legal consequences on him personally. And his recent advertisement claiming that God created him on the 8th day as a fighter to protect the people from Florida could, and should, turn off religiously conservative Christians who have an adequate amount of religious education. Even for those without any serious religious education, such an ad should remind them of the pathological level of narcissism that we saw in Trump.

So as John Oliver would ask at this point: What can we do now or where do we go from here? What we can do is to first encourage the establishment Republicans to split from the Trumpublicans even if Trump's political power is starting to wane. The spirit of Trumpublicanism is still alive in the Republican Party. DeSantis is an example of the influence of Trumpublicanism. The splitting of the party would become a lethal blow to Trumpublicanism regardless of Trump's political prowess. Of course, the split would also hurt establishment Republicans so their splitting the party up would make them into political kamikazes. We have already seen that Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. 

As for the Dems, they need to initiate contact with and eagerly work with establishment Republicans to first collaborate as a general principle, and to repair the prestige of the establishment Republicans. That would make establishment Republicans more competitive among conservative voters.

While the Democratic Party must become more progressive in terms of defending and protecting the marginalized in society and protecting the environment from pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases, they need to learn the lesson the lesson that Vlad Lenin learned all to late. The Dems have to temper the speed at which they promote the progressive agenda so that it does not bring too fast of a change for people to take. That means that progressives themselves will have to be patient with measures that either morally or practically require immediate action and resolution.

From the Marxist perspective, we need to empower workers both at the workplace, especially in publicly owned businesses, and in government. Currently many workers favor the GOP; but they do so because of culture war concerns. In the meantime, their contribution to the workplace remains reduced to just production and only rewarded with pay. Workers are given little to no opportunity to influence the decisions and direction of the businesses they work in on a large scale. 

And since The Constitution prevents us from having a governmental structure that allows Americans to be represented by vocation, the Biden Administration must make extra efforts to incorporate input from workers of all stripes so as to empower them in government. But an even better suggestion than that is for the Biden Administration to push an American version of Germany's codetermination laws. Those laws require businesses to have a certain percentage of workers on their executive boards based on the total number of workers in the company.

We must continue to battle the Big Lie that says that Biden was elected because of fraud. Even though Big Lie candidates didn't do that well, the Big Lie's promoters and apologists will be diligent at persevering. And that lie could take off if the nation's economy takes a major hit or there is some other major crisis that makes people feel desperate.

Finally, the Democratic Party must open to welcoming balanced pro-life supporters into their party. Besides for the moral reasons, a practical reason would be that doing so would reduce the Republican Party's exploitation of religiously conservative Christians.

Are there other actions to be taken. Yes, but I will quit here because I am out of time and ideas.