The point of this letter is unmistakeable, the reasons are just as recognizable, and both are as important as anything this republic has ever faced. The point of this very brief letter to my fellow progressives is this: Get behind Joe Biden, and use your organizational networks to their fullest capacity to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It’s as simple as that.
Why? Here’s why. In January of 2018, I published an essay on my blog-site, overwhelmingweirdness.com (which I highly suggest for insightful essays on Politics, Society, and a host of other subjects, There’s also a nice selection of my short fiction). Anyway, enough about that. The title of the essay is “It’s not About Policy Anymore.” I wrote and published that essay a couple of days after donald trump stood next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, and demonstrated in both word and deed, that he would do anything to please Putin, including denouncing this country’s entire intelligence community, because Putin supposedly “strongly denied” having meddled in the 2016 presidential election, when supposedly asked about the matter by donald trump during their hour-long, non-recorded meeting. Trump made it clear, in that absolutely humiliating display in Finland, who’s interests he would pursue in the world: Putin’s.
The point of that essay was that even though I have had disagreements with conservatives all of my adult life, all of us wanted the same thing, a better America, and we have been able to discuss our differences on various issues like adults. We continue to want the same thing, but we differ on what is the best path to the “more perfect union” spoken of in the preamble of the Constitution of the United States.
This is no longer the case, and it’s not about policy anymore. It’s about the survival of this republic, and the very clear and present threat donald trump’s political career poses to it. The situation with donald trump was bad when he stood next to his boss in Finland, now it is an incredibly real threat to our republic that not only serves the interests of Vladimir Putin, but also supports and encourages vigilante violence by his supporters to not only subdue dissent in this country, but to simply eliminate calls for changes to aspects of American culture that really shouldn’t concern him.
That’s the truth of the matter. As progressive citizens, we all want the Democratic Party to be further to the left. I, personally, want a Biden/Harris Administration to support and pursue: single-payer health care, a massive increase in funding for our educational systems, an immediate 30% reduction in the military budget, the annihilation of “qualified immunity” for police officers who shoot people, the adoption of a green energy initiative for the country that is in line with, and supports, the efforts of our European allies, the reestablishment of our alliances before 2017, true liberty and true justice for the true all in this country, and a host of other policies.
Maybe a Biden/Harris Administration will pursue these policies, and maybe they won’t, but we have to play the long game, here. If we must wait, then we must wait, and as we wait, we must build our strength, and our organizational foundations and networks. However, let me be crystal clear, we have to set our policy squabbles with the centrist forces in the Democratic Party aside for right now, and fight the fight that must be fought in order to rid this country of donald trump.
In very real terms, if you have been fooled into disbelieving donald trump’s very basic, very real, and very active evil, because he acts, at times, like a complete imbecile, then you are, well, a fool. Donald trump is playing a very real, and very violent game with our democracy, and we must all unite to put a stop to it. Know this, the Republican Party’s voter suppression efforts of the last thirty years are nothing compared to what donald trump has planned for the United States if he can pull it off.
We must unite, as citizens: with the center of the Democratic Party, and all actual patriotic Americans of what used to be the Republican Party who stand against the tumor that has taken what they loved from them, and rid this country of any influence from the trump family. We can resume our debates with these other groups later, but right now, the survival of this country, and all for which it has hoped to stand is at stake.
We must not fail.
Christoph Niemand