An Obvious Way Forward: Ohio and a Necessary Realignment

A couple of things before we get going: I had the privilege of hosting Sarah Kendzior on my Mucrake Podcast this week and, if you haven’t had a chance you should give it a listen. Also, this is a free post, but most of DISPATCHES FROM A COLLAPSING STATE now exists behind a paywall. If you appreciate my writing and work, please become a subscriber in order to support it.

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Roughly a year ago the reliably Republican state of Kansas showed up to defeat an amendment to the constitution banning abortion. When the ballots were counted, it wasn’t even particularly close. Voters preferred keeping a woman’s right to choose by an 18 point margin.

Yesterday, in the state of Ohio, a similar initiative went down in flames. Issue 1, a backdoor means of making their constitution nearly un-amendable, lost by 14 points. Turnout was massive. Young people voted “no” overwhelmingly. And now, the morning after, we’re looking at Ohio, a state the Democratic Party has more or less forfeited into perpetuity, and things are pretty obvious.

Let us be clear about what is exactly happening: it turns out people don’t like it when a historically unpopular party powered by out-there conspiracy theories steals a Supreme Court and then begins to whittle away at all the hard-earned protections, rights, and liberties of the past century, creating an apartheid state in which minorities and women are second-class citizens and children are being prepped for hard and painful labor.

There has developed a small window of opportunity. While the GOP continues to core out every state it controls with the help and direction of their donors and their array of institutes and think-tanks, there is a glaring way forward. Time is of the essence to seize it, because the assault on our rights, our elections, our educational system, and reality itself, is a systemic operation designed to cut off any democratic movement or response. It is an intentional attack and every day that it goes without response is another lost moment.

The parties have shifted before. As I chronicled in my books AMERICAN RULE: HOW A NATION CONQUERED THE WORLD BUT FAILED ITS PEOPLE and THE MIDNIGHT KINGDOM: A HISTORY OF POWER, PARANOIA, AND THE COMING CRISIS, the most recent shifts took place in the 1960’s and then the handoff between the Eighties and Nineties. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Republican Party took advantage of white resentment as a matter of strategy and took over control of the South and pockets around the country. Over time, the Democratic Party had an ideological shift when faced with the juggernaut of Ronald Reagan and developed “Reaganism With a Human Face,” moving the party toward the center and stressing market-driven governance, leaving behind the interests of labor unions, minorities, and the exploited. What emerged was a new Neoliberal consensus that began the dirty job of dismantling all the hard-fought progress created by the New Deal and the activist work of the 20th century.

Now it’s time for another shift. Trumpism and the MAGA Movement are faux-populist movements that have given authoritarian elements cover and momentum to carry out a decidedly unpopular and dangerous agenda. The protections and progress being destroyed are a means of furthering the power of a very, very small economic elite that has corrupted and relegated government to the status of an insurance fund should their ventures bottom out and a means of force should their labor force get out of hand. It is historically unpopular because, again, it is for the benefit of a very, very small group of people and at a tremendous cost for…everyone else.

The backlash against the Supreme Court, a laughably corrupted institution, and this hideous Republican agenda that is only acceptable to a fraction of the electorate that cannot escape Fox News for a moment lest they miss more coverage of Hunter Biden’s dick or what new and insidious shape the “Woke Mind Virus” has taken now, is a roadmap for a fresh realignment. It combines what the Democratic Party has become - guardian of the status quo - with what it could be - a body by which that progress is maintained and extended as a matter of course.

Here, the calculations are simple.

Rights like abortion, protections against discrimination, and protections for voting and against economic discrimination are popular.

Pushes to eliminate those rights, all while screaming about kids using litter boxes in kindergarten classrooms, or whatever the overcooked online Right is yelling about today, are not.

It reckons that getting behind an agenda pushing the former over the latter would not only win elections, but if properly formulated could create an agenda for a future in which a tolerant society might thrive. Mix that with growing labor concerns and re-embracing the roots of the party in the process - a move the Democrats have long touted but fallen well short of - could very well provide a necessary realignment. An actual, legitimately populist party dedicated to both protecting the past but also the future from an oligarchical attack, fueled by vehement and widespread dissatisfaction, is a clear and undeniable winner.

The problem, as it stands, is that the Democratic Party has very little in the way of a vision of the future. When there’s an attempt to communicate it, sometimes we hear about green energy or investment in electric vehicles, but there’s not much on an individual level. Activists concerned voter repressions targeting people of color are told to “out-organize” the attacks, which is insulting considering…they’ve had to organize against them since the Civil War ended and Reconstruction failed. It’s a message to keep pushing a boulder up a mountain.

Instead, the party should spotlight the stolen Supreme Court, providing necessary reform to cut the influence of donors and dark money, while reserving the right to expand the court. Basing the 2024 Campaign across the board on this issue, with uniformity and purpose, is a no-brainer.

States like Ohio have been given up on in the wake of Howard Dean’s fifty state strategy that helped Barack Obama win states like Indiana in 2008. Instead, the party has joined the GOP in a deadly and frustrating game of trench warfare in which only a handful of toss-up states are left to determine every presidential election. The rejection of Issue 1, and the landslide in Kansas, gesture toward a new horizon, if only the party were willing to seize it.

The GOP is, again, historically unpopular. The people they serve are incredibly limited in number and the agenda is explicitly elitist. This isn’t hard. Simply telling people “the economy is actually great!” isn’t going to make any of this better. Results show an electorate that is fed up with this garbage and ready to vote against it and for a future that looks even marginally better than this muddled and disturbing present. They’re ready to show up and support something with meaning and purpose. Telling them to standby and defend what we’ve got simply isn’t enough.