It’s going to take a lot of work. This is basically a six year plan, and everyone who wants the country to pull out of this nonsense has to commit to it – including people who will, of necessity, be on the losing side of a lot of votes based on their party affiliation. It’s going to require committing to the bit, not allowing the usual nonsense bullshit distractions. No emails, no weird laughs, no getting bent about a trans volleyball player or a furry pilot (what the HELL is that about anyway) or allowing the catamites of the White House press corps to do their usual stenography. This is what has to happen:
1) The Democrats have to take control of Congress, handily, by a sufficient margin that it won’t matter that Fetterman is an unreliable sasquatch with a traumatic brain injury or that there are independents from rectilniear states who you can’t count on every time. You need a hard core of 218 + 51 that won’t shift. And as soon as you do, you have to break the filibuster, because it’s not doing any good for anything that matters and it allows a minority to grind everything to a halt except one budget bill and judge nominations. And that can’t last, and it’s best to take it out now.
2) Bills. Lots of bills. Lots of messaging. Remember how the Republicans voted fifty times to kill Obamacare? It’s like that. Vote every week to defund the war in Iran. Vote every week to investigate the Epstein files. Vote every week to probe the self-dealing and corruption of the Trump Administration. It’s not a witch hunt when the witches are all sitting on a branch pissing on you. You know where they are. Get to it.
3) Laserlike focus. This is all about Trump. Trump is the reason you’re paying $6 a gallon for gas. Trump is the reason diesel is $9 a gallon and everything that moves by truck is going through the roof. Trump promised you cheap eggs and no wars and look where we are. Trump is lining his pockets and putting his name on everything that moves and building an inheritance for his failsons out of your tax dollars. Trump tore down half the White House. Trump shut down the Kennedy Center. Trump thinks he’s King of America and what does America do with kings? EVERY. DAMN. DAY. Do not let him up. Do not compromise. Do not give him a win. Do not give anyone the opportunity to both-sides this.
3) Figure out who it’s going to be. Pritzker? Another shot for Walz? Ossoff or AOC? (Probably not, they are both needed worse where they are, and AOC should absolutely be Speaker because we need someone who can work AND fight.) But once we figure out who it’s going to be, back them to the HILT. Have the fight early if you need to but if the person is so much as one degree left of Obama, the centrists and the Clinton alums and the aging catamites of bipartisanship need to shut the fuck up and take their own medicine. BLUE NO MATTER WHO. No more triangulation, no more splitting the difference, no more pretending that the mythical white working class male is the only voter that matters. The working class these days means you start with what Black women want and work out from there, and it’s going to get you a Hell of a lot further than chasing Ed Earl Brown’s ignorant ass. And above all, show what you’ll do. You’ll take the magnifying glass away from the school locker room gender detectives. You’ll take the money away from the people who think they can buy the press and buy the White House. You’ll break the back of people who want a computer to take your job, daddy. You’ll start to make things right, once that man and his boot-lickers are gone.
4) Win in 2028. Nothing else can be accomplished without this.
5) After that comes the hardest part: using the power of the Presidency to diminish the power of the Presidency. Expand the Supreme Court, fill it up, and then start doing the things you have to do in black-letter law to make it impossible for another Trump to happen again. Black letter law that restricts what an executive order is, that makes it impossible to just not spend money, that expressly forbids that kind of self-indulgence in the face of a supine Congress. Become Newt Gingrich’s worst nightmare: all power focused on a Congress that is ten times the size of his and solidly Democratic. 3500 members of the House, one for every 100K people, which simultaneously strikes a blow to the Electoral College as a Republican lock. Granularity means proportionality, means local representation, means democracy.
6) No going back. Expanding the House and the Court means that the old ways are gone. They won’t work any more. Modify the rules so that we don’t have to live like it’s 1929, or 1869, or whatever. THEN, and only then, can you do things like abolishing ICE and breaking up DHS and joining the ICC and etc and etc and so forth et al. There is so much to do, but you have to make sure you aren’t pissing in the wind doing it.
7) Make it stand up. Make it clear that a vote for a Republican is a vote for Trumpism, for the rest of the 21st century. Make him like Hoover, or McGovern, or Carter. Make the GOP synonymous with pedophile fascism for the rest of our lives. And theirs. Do you want an egg to cost $5? Vote Republican. Do you want people inspecting your children’s genitals to play Little League? Vote Republican. Do you want to be snatched off the street? Vote Republican. Do you want billionaires to do whatever they want in the world without consequence? Vote Republican. Otherwise, get on board. Win big in 2030, win solid in 2032, make it clear that Trumpism is dead and not allowed to get hold of power ever again. Isolate it, cut it off, let it burn out, but Republicans cannot be allowed to hold power at a federal level for at least a generation or more, until every single person for whom segregation is living memory and every person who thinks “Reagan Democrats” are a vital constituency – and their children, myself incuded – are dead and mouldering in the grave.
We are burning our lives to build a sunrise we’ll never live to see. That’s what faith means when you can’t see the sun. And if you don’t start now, and keep going, you’ll never make it to the dawn.
Let’s do this.