It's the Weakness, Stupid

Issue 88

This is the best of political times. There, I said it. It’s out there. For small d democrats across the political spectrum who want to see America reach its full potential as a healthy, functioning, mature, thriving, equitable, multiracial, multicultural democracy, a country of laws with rights granted equally to everyone born here, everyone who becomes a naturalized citizen, and everyone who chooses to live here under whatever visa schemes are ever in existence — regardless, of course, of race, gender or non-gender, religion, age, nationality, ethnicity, physical ability, or sexual identity — I dare say we have never been closer.

With an eye toward the midterm elections this November, I am personally starting from the premise that, with far too few exceptions, the current crop of Republican incumbents at the federal level is a collection of cowards — also known as weaklings. This blatantly obvious fact is being constituted anew right now by the reporting of a couple of New York Times journalists (book due May 3) and various other outlets with “obtained copies” and the usual pre-publication release of juicy tidbits. The subject is gaining steam as I write and, if desired, you’ll find no shortage of material about it, but I start with this knowing: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) plus their leadership teams plus most every one of their rank and file members — elected officials all — are weaklings of the highest order deserving of no power in our federal government. (This entire piece could also have been written without last week’s reporting.)

Initially, appropriately, they mostly recoiled at the former president’s role in the insurrection on January 6, 2021. Then, in a stunning display of cowardice — specifically, fear of retribution — one after another after another of them rapidly capitulated to the former president and his/their antidemocratic constituents. They consciously went from genuine dismay to displaying a dearth of every single quality needed in a federal officeholder if our republic is to function: integrity, fealty to our Constitution, respect for the electorate, vision, transparency, courage. Their actions betray their weaknesses as human beings, rendering them unfit for this work. And everyone expects this crowd to win the House and Senate this November? I call b.s.

It’s stupid to believe that the voices of Black, LGBTQ+ and other Americans we call marginalized, abhorred by the Republican party writ large, can somehow be suppressed in any way by humans too weak to confront the mere reality of their existences.

I say these are the best of political times because of how stunningly clear the landscape is. Gone are the days when craven political opportunists operated in the shadows and played nice in public. There are no shadows and nobody’s trying be nice to anyone. There is simply a Republican caucus of cowards, led by cowards, cowering from and genuflecting before a violent-enough political base that is undemocratic through and through, unwilling to make room in their America for not-White, not-Christian, not-heterosexual, not-gender-normative American citizens. This clarity is/should be rocket fuel for those on team democracy. Forget “It’s the economy, Stupid.” How about, “It’s the weakness, Stupid?”

Wanna play? It’s stupid to believe that a healthy democracy can exist when its elected representatives are weaklings steeped in fear of, as noted, their own antidemocratic constituency. Think about that for a moment. Meanwhile, everything is energy, like attracts like, birds of a feather flock together, the law of attraction is always on. So what, exactly, can a weak human being acting from fear ever attract to itself? It is also downright stupid to believe something that is patently false: that federal Republican officeholders with the word leader in their titles are leading anything at all when — in actual fact — their weaknesses have them following a twice-impeached former president and his/their antidemocratic constituents. Following. It’s stupid to believe that the voices of Black, LGBTQ+ and other Americans we call marginalized, abhorred by the Republican party writ large, can somehow be suppressed in any way by humans too weak to confront the mere reality of their existences. It’s math and physics, it’s the law of conservation of energy and mass, it’s what says energy can’t be created or destroyed, it can only change form. Suppress a vote here and oh look over there.

It’s quite smart, on the other hand, to cultivate multiculturalism for a number of conscious politics reasons. We belong to the planet, not the planet to us and much of its strength is derived from biodiversity and multiculturalism is biodiversity in human form and strength is a byproduct of biodiversity. More science, so there. Cultivating multiculturalism in America is also smart because it means accepting what is — like, say, every human being who’s already here. No resistance. No judgment. That’s being present, a position of the utmost strength as everyone knows — the place to which the best ideas flow and from which shiny, clear intentions are launched. It’s also smart to cultivate multiculturalism because it requires listening to and welcoming everyone, also known as being compassionate. Mimicking the nature of Nature, accepting reality as it is, and offering compassion instead of judgment requires degrees of strength that congressional Republican incumbents cannot summon from where they are. It’s energetically, mathematically impossible.

And it is not judgment, by the way, to call Rep. McCarthy weak or Republicans the party of weakness because they’ve laid bare by their actions that that is who and what they are — factually speaking. It renders him/them unfit for Congress as a blind person would be unfit to be a driving instructor. No judgment at all. But if his district isn’t flooded with a relentless combination of messages about 1) his inherent weaknesses as a man, rendering him utterly unfit for office and 2) the inherent strengths of any small d democrat challenger from anywhere on the political spectrum running on strength of character and as a champion of things like multiculturalism and compassion, which strengthen us — it would be a missed opportunity of historic proportions. Same for the districts and states of any of his congressional compatriots running for reelection this fall. These, of course, are just a few variations on a theme. This should be easy.

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