D-Day, H-Hour: What a long, strange trip

Hidey ho, folks. 

Well. Your dual blog-lords are combining for this open thread/reflection. So settle in as we await results.

Liberal Librarian (AKA Alex)

I've been blogging in some capacity since 2012 or thereabouts. First at the Obama Diary (I hope Chipsticks is well, wherever she is), then at The People's View, then tired of running someone else's blog, Trevor and I launched this joint.

The other day I looked at the first post we published here. And I was shocked to see just how many of you have stuck with us. Some have left. Some we banned. But we've built a community of which we can all be proud.

Back when I began blogging, I was warning about the proto-fascism growing in the Republican Party. The Tea Party—precursor to today's MAGA—had wholly taken over the GOP. A Black President making sure more people had access to affordable healthcare was an affront to the very fiber of the Republic. The fracas around the Affordable Care Act was the clue that Republicans were descending into sheer nihilism. The party had no positive program to make people's lives better. It instead began exist solely to acquire and maintain power for its own sake. It was a real-life version of The Party from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four. It existed solely for its own ends, not to improve the commonwealth.

It should have surprised no one that Donald Trump essentially took leadership of the Tea Party movement, and transmogrified it to his own purposes. The difference between MAGA and the Tea Party is one of degree, not kind. MAGA is openly fascistic, whereas the Tea Party which preceded it attempted to hide behind traditional Republican pieties.

The fact of the matter is that the party which freed the slaves very soon lost its way. Bit by bit it abjured every principle it held at its founding, and now we have this: not a center-right party, but a fascist party, wishing to impose authoritarian rule on this country.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which in its late 19th- and early 20th-century incarnation, had much in common with today's GOP, went the other way. Where the GOP became insular, Democrats began to expand their base. Where the GOP took in white racists upset with the civil rights revolution, Democrats knew they would lose elections, and did the right thing anyway. Democrats went too far left, leading to years in the wilderness. But what we have now, beginning with Bill Clinton, extending through Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and now with Kamala Harris, is something special. A true center-left party which no longer "blames America first"; it recognizes this country's failings, but seeks to rectify them, and to build a more perfect union. Its candidates don't stew on culture wars; they don't keep enemies lists. Its presidents don't withhold aid to states which didn't vote for them. It lives up to this nation's motto. No, not "In God We Trust". E pluribus unum: Out of many, one. We are on the brink of electing the first female, Black, South Asian president, just sixteen years removed from electing the first male Black president. The people of color who run for the GOP nomination are nothing but window dressing for racists. There is no scenario in this current plane of existence in which Nikki Haley or Marco Rubio or Ben Carson would win the Republican presidential nomination. The GOP is a white man's party, where anyone not white or not male can be a member but expect no actual power.

History was supposed to have ended when the Soviet Union fell. That anyone thought that is an example of human short-sightedness. The pressures which the bipolar world order had kept bottled up were bound to explode with the demise of one superpower. And that's what we've seen. China wanted its place in the sun. India wanted to supplant China. And Russia wanted to reclaim its imperial status.

The nation standing in the way of those aspirations was and is the United States. We defeated one enemy; most remained undefeated. No one could match us militarily. Therefore actors like Russia, China, and North Korea turned to the dark arts. They took advantage of American openness, American democracy, and American technology to attack us from within. The internet which this country created has, for the past eight years, been its Achilles' heel. Because just as the Cold War kept conflicts abroad abated, so did it keep conflicts at home hidden against an existential enemy. Once the threat of Soviet missiles ended, so did the papered-over unity. Our foes were much quicker to realize that than our leaders. And we have discovered that this country is filled with fifth columnists, willing and eager to do a foreign enemy's bidding. There are Quislings everywhere.

The mistake we cannot make is thinking that a Kamala Harris win will be the end of the war. It will be a great battle won. But the enemy will still have its armies of bots, it's brigades of trolls, its propaganda networks. The war will continue within and without. The war may become less intense, depending on her victory and its size. But they will be back, again probing our soft spots. 

This long, strange trip will continue, because history continues, no matter our desire to will in Utopia. Building a decent world is like gardening: if you don't tend it, it goes to wrack and ruin. We are the gardeners. We will still have plenty of weeds to pull.

Trevor LaFauci

As a sixteen-year-old high school junior, I had largely been unaffected by world events. I was too young to understand the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 2000 election was confusing but I didn't really see how or why it would matter if either Al Gore or George W. Bush became president. It wasn't until September 11th that I finally saw that politics might actually impact my daily life. I remember someone in my math class putting up a poll before class asking who attacked us. I recall being confused with so many of my peers answering Middle East. Why did the Middle East hate us? Despite having taken a freshman seminar that included a history component, I lacked a basic understanding of the world in which I was a part. From that moment forward, I vowed to learn more and I would focus this learning on becoming a social studies education major with a minor in history. I never wanted my own students to feel as clueless as I did on September 11th if a major historical event were to unfold before their very eyes.

I remember my mentor teacher in the spring of 2007 beginning each class with a simple phrase: The study of history is the study of changes over time. It was his way of relating the material to his students. Sure, certain periods in history felt like a long time ago. But it was important to learn about them to see how history has evolved to the present day. Everything happened for a reason and those reasons were intrinsically attached to history. In this way, my mentor teacher successfully set the stage to engage students on ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, the Crusades, the Middle Ages, and everything else on down the line. It was this evolution that led us to where we are today. Studying the past helped us understand the present and in turn, would help us better prepare for our future. By viewing teaching through this lens, I felt confident that I could make history come alive in the classroom.

For seven years I tried. Lord knows, I tried. But while I loved the possibility of molding young minds through the teaching of history, a new passion had emerged: politics. Yes, I'll admit part of this passion comes from having viewed Aaron Sorkin's overly idealistic The West Wing. But the other part was starting to understand that national events were starting to impact me personally. In graduate school in 2009, I learned of a group called Border Angels that would cross the southern border and leave water for migrants. I met a former lawyer named Mo Jourdane who worked to advocate for farm workers and helped ban the short-handled hoe in the mid-1970s. I met a man named Carlos LeGerrette who served as Cesar Chavez's personal photographer. I even attended my first political rally the next year which was a local pro-immigration event in response to the growing xenophobia we were seeing in 2010 with legislation like Arizona's SB 1070 making national news. How could I stay in the classroom when so much of the action and so much of the politics was going on in the outside world?

As an introvert, I've always needed to write down what I wanted to say. So it made sense that as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be in my life I would turn to blogging. I initially blogged about my teaching experience but wanted to find a way to get into the political arena, a space that I felt lacked a coherent millennial voice. Around 2014, I began writing for a blog called PoliticusUSA which was starting its first-ever sports section. After several months of doing this, I asked my editor for the opportunity to do a weekly politics column to which he agreed. For roughly a year I would compose articles based on the Friday night "news dump" trying to capture underreported stories that major media would neglect or ignore. Toward the end of my tenure, I saw the site gravitating toward more tabloidy articles and I felt that my style and voice were no longer a good fit. In mid-2015, I reached out to Spandan of The People's View to see if he and LL could use a third author. He agreed and the rest, as they say, is history.

While LL has once again brilliantly captured the historical context of the last three decades in his summation, what I'll share is that we millennials have begun to finally understand our role in all of this. We're a generation that has had politics forced upon us. It started with September 11th but continued through the 2008 Great Recession, an event that immediately put those of us entering the workforce at a disadvantage. We had some hope through the Obama years and in the summer of 2015 we had two huge wins when the Roberts Court (shocked face) actually ruled in favor of both Obamacare and marriage equality in massive back-to-back victories for the historically disadvantaged. Since 2016 it has become glaringly apparent how the person in the White House impacts our lives in a myriad of ways and how much damage someone who is incompetent can truly do. While I do come from privilege and I do come from an affluent community, I still am grateful that so many of my peers are engaged politically and at the very least are voting regularly during the presidential elections. My friends with children are especially engaged knowing that decisions being made today will impact their children's lives down the road. My friends with daughters, even more so.

I wish it weren't this way. I wish my generation would be engaged year-round and would be just as active at their local PTA meetings as they are during presidential elections. But sometimes it takes a wake-up call to kick one's butt into gear. For millennials, Donald Trump has been that call. After September 11th, we never thought we'd see our country attacked again. We sure as hell didn't think we'd see a domestic attack against the United States Capitol. But we did. And it was a domestic attack perpetrated by someone who refused to follow 244 years of tradition and agree to the peaceful transition of power. Our grandparents were part of the Greatest Generation. We heard stories about fighting Nazis overseas. Never in our lifetime did we think we'd be the ones fighting Nazis here at home and the Nazis would be right out in the open running for office under the banner of today's Republican Party.

Nobody gets to choose the time in which she or he lives. We millennials grew up with the world at our fingertips from Encyclopedia.com on dial-up internet to now having smartphones that can do so much with the touch of a button. Yes, we overshare on social media. But we have an empathy that has emerged from being the first truly global generation. We helped move the needle on marriage equality. Younger millennials are leading on gun violence prevention. We've endured not one but two recessions and we've still somehow managed to retain employment, purchase homes, and start families. September 11th showed us history can force itself upon us. The 2024 election will show us that we can force ourselves upon history by voting at record levels.

And making it possible for all of us to have the first Madam President in the Oval Office.

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