When people are trying to make it harder for you to vote, what they’re really doing is trying to make it harder for you to live.
I’m writing this on Election Day. Election Day is also not an official holiday. I mean, it should be. And yet, if people had Election Day off, more people might vote. And we can’t have that.
Or, rather, Republicans can’t have that. They’ve been working furiously for decades to make it harder to vote. But only for some people. If they had their way, only rich white cis males would be allowed to cast a ballot.
And, sure, there are Republicans who are not, in fact, rich white cis men. Black Republicans? Trans Republicans? Cis female Republicans? Poor Republicans? Yep. They all exist, even if Republican policies, by and large, do not serve their interests.
In fact, Republican policies do the opposite. Perpetuate racism? Check. Dehumanize trans people? Check. Strip away reproductive rights? Check. Worsen income inequality? Check.
It’s a good thing we have Democrats, a party that is basically the complete opposite of Republicans on these issues, right?
Right?
If all goes well, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani will become the next mayor of New York City on Nov. 4. (Editor’s note: Mamdani won the mayoral election with just over 50 percent of the vote.) And it will be a very big deal. Because he will have won by running on things like affordable housing, free public transportation, no-cost child care, raising the minimum wage, taxing the rich and protecting LGBTQ+ people.
“But D’Anne,” you may be asking, “Isn’t that basically the Democratic Party platform?”
If only.
These are, at best, Democratic talking points. They are things that people want. And things that Democrats have been promising in one form or another for years. But they aren’t things that Democrats as of late seem to care about actually doing. I mean, just look at the “support” that Mamdani has gotten from Democratic leaders. Where it exists at all it is tepid at best.
“But D’Anne,” you say, “that’s unfair! The Democratic Party is very different from the Republican Party especially since Republicans have gone all-in on fascism!”
And you’re right. The Republicans have gone all-in on fascism. They keep lurching further and further rightward. It’s horrifying the kind of shit they support: starving SNAP recipients, banning gender-affirming care for trans people, snatching anyone with brown skin off the street, shooting protesters in the face with pepper balls, extrajudicially murdering people in fishing boats. The list goes on and on.
But instead of rejecting this fascist violence outright, Democrats have decided that Republicans just might be on to something. Maybe if Democrats became more like Republicans they’d win more elections.
That’s what “a who’s who of top Democratic consultants” apparently believes, anyway.
According to Politico, David Axelrod, James Carville, David Plouffe and others calling themselves the WelcomePAC say that the “party should be running to the center and focusing on kitchen table issues,” according to Politico.
Now, if you don’t know who Axelrod, Carville, and Plouffe are, that’s fine. In fact, it probably speaks to your healthy distance from Democratic insider-politics. So let’s just say these men have had their hands in every major Democratic presidential win since at least Clinton. And every major Democratic loss since then, too. In fact, when you gesture wildly at the absolute shitshow that is American politics right now, these guys helped us get to where we are now.
And for some reason, they still think everybody should listen to them.
Anyway, to hear the WelcomePAC tell it, there are a lot of people who shouldn’t be welcome in the Democratic Party in an effort to get votes from people who rank fascism on a scale of “not that bad” to “not my problem.”
In their report, which is titled “Deciding to Win,” WelcomePAC claims that Democrats need to “Moderate our positions where our agenda is unpopular, including on issues like immigration, public safety, energy production, and some identity and cultural issues.”
Now, keep in mind that this report is being issued at a time when Republicans’ immigration policies are blatantly racist and violent, ICE is being transformed into an unaccountable super army, Republicans are horny for fossil fuels, and the Trump administration is laser-focused on making transgender people so miserable that they either go back into the closet or die.
These positions are so far to the right that there is no morally defensible “centrist” position to be found.
My hope is that Mamdani wins in New York by a landslide and that those pushing the Democratic Party to the right see the error of their ways. It’s time to stop trying to find the sweet spot of transphobia and start condemning it altogether.
