About a month ago, I started to chew on thoughts of how the tea party became a force to be reckoned with. Please know that I am not paying this group any respect other then recognizing that they became known and started to exercise some power. Obviously, the tea party was not a true political party, rather a political movement within the Republican party. The tea party was like some alien being that grew inside the Republican body and became a threat to the Republican Party from within, not from outside. Like a virus that attaches to the DNA of cells in an organism. Instead of warding off the invading aliens, the body was affected by the invaders and changed and in that way stayed alive.
It occurred to me that this was very effective. As I am often want to say, "the proof is in the pudding". Now, I'm very willing to keep an open mind and learn from anyone or any point in history. Closing off our minds because we detest something, limits our abilities to learn. It's a simple numbers game. The more we are exposed to the more possibilities there are to learn.
Yesterday while going to do my grocery shopping I was listening to the NPR program Here and Now. I was only tuned in for a short part of the program, but was lucky enough to have it be an interview segment with Matt Kibby. I had never heard of him, but it turns out that he was one of the founders of the tea party. One of the brilliant things I heard him say was that in those early days, there was a saying that they had to "deal with the Republican Party before they could deal with the Democratic Party". This was no great aha moment, but the way that the idea was phrased made the idea crystal clear.
If we are going to be able to reverse the damage that has been done to our country, we are going to have to change the Democratic Party from within. Forming some kind of resistance party, some third party is not the answer. I have watched third parties attempt to form throughout my lifetime and not one has been successful with reference to becoming a force to be reckoned with. Yes, these third parties have given those that have aligned themselves with any particular party a voice, but none have garnered the power that is needed to dislodge the current scourge in our country. Yes, the Democratic Party has let us down. Yes it needs to be overhauled so it can continue to carry the banner of decency and morality forward. No, we cannot afford to abandon it.
When I was at the protest site that I chose to attend on inauguration day, the group that organized the event was critical of the Democrats. Criticism is good. Criticism is necessary. What I was hearing though was a lumping of the Democrats in the same boat as trump, by way of drawing parallels between Democrats and Republicans. This was not a constructive comparison. We need to stay away from demonizing Democrats and republicans for that matter. trump is to be demonized. he and those he surrounds himself with are as close to Beelzebub as I've ever seen.
As corny as it might seem. I propose that we work within our local and state Democratic Parties and label ourselves The American Party. We need to decide on a few core issues and values rather than the wide ranging grab bag of the many groups that are resisting trump. Of course that leads us to the position of who's issues and values are the ones we're going to go with. This is why I have written to Warren Buffett with a passionate request to be the financial force that enables all of the dispirit groups to come together, coalesce around the core that we need to operate from and then "deal with the Democratic party".
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