The Witness Chronicles, 1/18/25

Time to take the gloves off…

Photo by Andre Benz on Unsplash

The New Dark Age, We Have Light But Ignorance is Darkness

It’s time to get lean and mean and rethink what the Dem base really is, or should be

Would be, could be. William Manchester, master historian, wrote a book called A World Lit Only By Fire, about the Middle Ages, a time when learning hid itself in monasteries, and the only light in the land came from flame, candles and fires.

Those times are long gone, fortunately, but darkness takes other forms. The good news is that it is a yin and yang thing, the dark will be balanced by the light. This morning I read two pieces in the Post, of all places, that focused on how a new tougher Democratic resistance might arise.

The first piece, titled Forget ‘they go low, we go high’: This influencer wants Democrats to get mean, profiles a TikTok influencer, Suzanne Lambert, who, as the title says, believes Democrats need to get leaner and meaner and more than little mocking at the idiocy we face daily from the right. She has a sense of dark humor and I admit that I am drawn to her mean girl approach. We have played the good guys for too long.

The second piece, an opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria, simply says we should give up on old school progressivism and embrace the idea of a more enlightened country. This goes against the grain of old Democratic ideals and says forget pursuing the under educated working class, which we have lost to Trump, and be who we are, a moderate, educated and diverse block of voters.

Both articles were thought provoking and seemed in some way to redefine how we go after the dangerous and greedy nonsense being forced on us by the Republican New Swamp in DC.

I started out life as one of those progressive idealists that somehow survived the extreme cynicism of the 1970s, but now find myself a moderate in a world of a right so far right that they can legitimately be called fascists. Our weak and ineffectual left, the Bernie and Liz crowd, has wonderful ideals that are incredibly naive given the harsh environment the Republicans are building. These guys are serious and organized this time around.

We can’t love them to death.

So, two options to think about. Go full mean girl on them and screw the old ‘party of the working class’ mythology. Zakaria notes that unions, which Biden saw as the heart of the Party, only compose 6% of the workers in this country and are hardly a power base these days. Lambert was a Young Republican who became disgusted by the Trump Republicans’ abortion policies, and the way they treat women, a party of abusers.

I know that some of my readers will read this with horror, but there is a pragmatic approach that says what we have been doing has not worked and it has not worked twice. You can put on pink hats and go out into the streets, but the reality is these guys could care less about protests.

What they love is chaos, because it offers cover while they go about destroying what’s left of democracy.

I think what we really need is to redefine the working class as what they are today, not what they were in the past. Take the trades for example. Plumbers and electricians are not just guys who solder pipes and twist wires anymore. They are highly skilled at building complex solutions using state of the art technology and engineering. Carpenters rarely swing hammers these days and the tools they use everyday would mystify a builder only thirty years ago.

It’s the same for virtually every so-called trade profession. They may not have a conventional liberal arts education, but I’d argue that most of them are better educated than many college students these days, and that divisions like ‘higher education’ are outdated and demonstrate an elitism that is unearned and counterproductive.

As for the image of Democrats as the nice guys, we all know what happens to them. But we can be good and tough at the same time. In fact that was the American mythology, the good guy who is tough as nails and rises to the aid of the downtrodden.

The fact is that we are up against actual bad guys, villains who sidestep notions like decency, respect, the truth, or being equal under the law. For all their talk of immigrant gangs, the reality is they act like gangsters on a much grander scale.

And yes, this is where I trot out the meme, that has resurfaced in multiple articles, about bringing a knife to a gunfight. Unfortunately it applies because that is exactly what we have been doing. The ultimate example was seen in the Hegseth confirmation hearings where Dems asked him about diversity issues when the really scary stuff underlying his testimony is that this guy is wildly incompetent on every level to run the armed forces.

His incompetence should have been the focus and he should have been hammered with it. Get the audits, bring in the witnesses, shame the FBI for whitewashing their background investigation. Play hardball.

The most telling aspect of how weakened the Democrats have become is the lack of a fiery leader who can wake the Party up, and understands that this is an existential war for the survival of democracy and freedom.

Maybe she will be a mean girl with a hard hat, building a semiconductor chip factory, that gets sick of this MAGA nonsense and gets mad. We can only hope. That would bring the light of day to the darkness we are wandering in.

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Thank you,

Martin Edic