About Tuesday’s election

For those of us who count ourselves as old-school patriots, there was a lot to be happy about in Tuesday’s off-year election. That said, it was mainly a repudiation of Trump himself. I’m not convinced it was a repudiation of right-wing extremism.

The naval-gazers continue to harp on the Democratic Party’s embrace of human rights—immigrants and refugees, gay marriage and trans rights, equality for racial minorities—as a political liability rather than the Party’s endorsement of single payer, fair wages and housing accessibility. Those are all American values, not merely liberal values. 

I get it. The right long ago seized control of the media and public discourse. Ideas and policies that were solidly conservative—getting the nanny state out of reproductive choice, same sex marriage, personal gender identity—got rebranded by a money-starved media as radical and anti-Christian.

The US is not a Christian nation. The words “God,” “Christ,” “Jesus,” and “Christian” don’t appear anywhere in the Constitution, the governing document of the United States. The US is not a socialist country, nor have any of the winning candidates proposed nationalizing any US companies.

It's long past time to call out the Trump GOP and mainstream media for using “socialist,” “communist” and “Marxist” as epithets to attack anything they disagree with. Republicans have been doing this for a hundred years. It was phony then and its phony now.

I’m glad to see the incremental progress in yesterday’s voting. I hope other blue states will join CA in redistricting to turn red seats blue. Let’s not pretend: there’s nothing democratic about either the Senate or the House. There’s nothing to be done about the Senate, other than to allow the American citizens in Washington DC and Puerto Rico to have senators. But if all House districts were equal, there would be 570 House members, and most would be from blue states. And there’s nothing sacred about the number nine for the SCOTUS. The courts should be expanded just because of the workload.

Between the electoral college, the senate, the house of representatives and the Supreme Court, we have a long way to go to be a democratic republic (or a representative democracy). For now, the GOP holds most of the cards. I’m happy to see a little movement towards representative democracy. 

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