IT’S BETTER TO DIE ON YOUR FEET THAN LIVE ON YOUR KNEES

Recent events over the months since President Biden took office all point to one thing: the non-peaceful transfer of power in 2020 may not be a once-in-222-years event. There is every possibility that 2024 could see a second - more violent - attempt to take power, an attempt that has the potential to end the experiment in democracy this country has conducted since its founding. There is also the potential for even worse violence, on a level not seen in the United States since 1861 - and this time a civil war would not see the violence limited to a particular geographic region; it if happens, it would be the kind of civil war played out on the TV that happens in places like Syria, or Lebanon, or God help us, Libya.

It all depends on what happens next year, 2022.

We now effectively live in two Americas: in one, somewhere between 55-75% of the population - depending on the specific issue - think President Biden is doing a good job and that the country as a whole is essentially on the right track. The other America is a matter/antimatter mirror image of the first one, with 55-75% of the people there believing that not only is the country on the wrong track but it is led by a president not legitimately elected to office. The first America is where the 34% who are Democrats and the 27% of independents who “lean Democratic” live, while the second is populated by the 25% who are Republicans and the 14% of independents who “lean Republican.” Effectively, the country is split about 60/40 between Reality America and Mirror Image America. Unfortunately, given the way the country is organized politically, that 40% has effective control of the majority of states, and a nearly-equal division of legislative power in Congress.

They are also more dedicated to their cause than is the 60% living in Reality America. That matters.

Traditionally, Republicans are more likely to vote in any given election than are Democrats, with Democrats far less likely to vote in “off year” elections than in presidential election years. This led in 2010 to a Republican sweep of state legislatures in the year of the decennial census, which gave them the power to redistrict their political representation and gave us the last ten years of national politics. In 2020, despite winning the Presidency and holding a slim majority in the House of Representatives along with a one-vote majority in the Senate by vote of the Vice President, the Democrats failed on the state level to take any power. This second failure in a reapportionment election is the potential bomb that could explode with such devastating consequences in 2024. The 2020 Census shifted enough seats in Congress from Democratic-controlled state to Republican-controlled states - which will be reflected in the redistricting done this year - to allow the Republicans to retake control of the House of Representativs in 2022. In a recent poll of senior congressional staffers by Punchbowl News, 73% - down from 75% six months ago - of those knowledgeable observers believe the Republicans are more likely to retake the House than the Democrats are to maintain control. History is on the side of that analysis, since the only time in 100 years where the party that won the presidency managed to maintain a congressional majority in the following off-year election was 2002, when the Republicans pulled off that feat.

Not only are the winds of political history blowing in the wrong direction, but the machinery of political choice is being manipulated to provide an even stronger advantage to the opposition party. Gerrymandering on a level never before seen is underway in the redistricting done by Republican-controlled state legislatures, and the Supreme Court has taken the position that the power of redistricting is a political choice not subject to judicial review. The courts are not going to help level the playing field - they’re more likely to tilt it even more. When that is coupled with the voter-suppression laws being passed in Republican-controlled states, aimed directly at those voters most likely to be Democrats, well - it’s easy to see why three-quarters of those who make their living working in politics see the Republicans retaking the House next year.

What is maddening to any informed observer is the fact that enough of the Democrats in national office cannot bring themselves to understand how dangerous the future is and take the action necessary to allow national legislation to be enacted that blocks these planned assaults on the small-d democratic political system. Senators Manchin and Sinema are as dangerous in their inability or unwillingness to see what must be done and join in taking that action as were French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 when they faced Adolf Hitler at Munich. Had they held together and stood up to Hitler, he would have backed down and it is likely that he would have been overthrown by the planned revolt of the German Army at some point in the year following. The two men are directly responsible, through their unwillingness to take the necessary action the situation required, for the deaths of 75 million people around the planet in the war that followed.

The stakes for the future are just as high now as they were in 1938. The election of 2020 was the most important for the country since 1860, and the election of 2022 is more important than that.

The Republican Party is now the Trump Party. Personal allegiance and loyalty to The Leader is the first requirement for anyone in that party planning to run for political office in 2022 as it was in Germany in 1934 when Hitler forced the German officer corps to take an oath of personal loyalty to him as leader of Germany. The organizing principle today, as it was in Germany then, is The Big Lie. In both cases The Big Lie is the same, differing only in specific details: the Dolchstosse Legende - the “Stab in the Back.” According to recent polling, 80+% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen and the President Biden is not the legitimate president. That belief is the strongest possible motivation to energize their electorate next year.

As Amy Gardner at the Washington Post points out, “Dozens of [Republican] candidates promoting the baseless notion that the election was rigged are seeking powerful statewide offices—such as governor, attorney general and secretary of state, which would give them authority over the administration of elections—in several of the decisive states where Trump and his allies sought to overturn the outcome and engineer his return to the White House.” We can be certain there’s no one among these possible office holders who would act with any of the courage of a Brad Raffensperger or any of the other Repblicans who followed the law last fall.

History, as they say, doesn’t repeat itself, but often it rhymes. The possible outcome of the elections of 2022 and 2024 have the potential of rhyming with this country’s darkest history.

Consider:

The Republicans gerrymander their representation and increase their majority even more than just the seats that change states from the Census, and take full control of the House of Representatives in 2022, with Qevin McQarthy elected Speaker, leading a party that operates in lockstep. The voter suppression laws are not struck down in the courts or stopped by national legislation. Even with turnout like Democrats did in 2020, the election of 2024 will be close without those “thumbs on the scales,” and it will be close indeed if nothing changes. Close enough to allow the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to not certify the election on January 6, 2025, throwing it into the House of Representatives, where each of the 50 states have one vote, and Republicans already control 27 of those votes as of the 2020 election. It won’t matter what the national popular vote was. If this situation had existed - Republican control of the House - on January 6, 2021, there would have been no need of the insurrection that happened; Trump would have remained in office as a result of the election being decided in the House. And everything the Republicans are doing - right out in the open and proclaiming their goal in the mass media! - is to set the stage for that to happen in 2024. They aren’t interested in whether or not they win the majority; they plan to take power regardless.

Democrats as a whole need to “get it” that we aren’t playing political tiddly-winks anymore. The old idea that one needs only vote every four years for president and can let others take care of who gets sent to congress in the “less interesting election” has to end. The courts aren’t going to save us, and the only way Congress can save us is if two idiots experience a “come to Jesus” moment that doesn’t look likely.

I don’t think the situation is hopeless and I’m not saying it is, and even if I did think it was I wouldn’t say so. Nobody can foretell the future. But the future can happen if people believe that probabilities are likelihoods.

We need to organize now like our life depended on it, and vote next year that way. Because it does.

The future is unknown. Our history is filled with times when everything could have changed for the worst: Crossing the Delaware on Christmas Eve 1775. On Little Round Top at Gettysburg. The morning of June 4, 1942 over the Japanese fleet at Midway. At Fox Hill on the road from Yudam-ni to Hagaru at the Chosin Reservoir. In every one of these situations, people who refused to bow to the “inevitable” snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

And even if the worst happens, remember this: It. Is. Better. To. Die. On. Your. Feet. Than. Live. On. Your. Knees.