What hit the Republican party on Election Day last November was . . . well, the Republican Party.
Blow number one, of course, was from the party’s leader and cult boss, Donald Trump, who wields his narcissism like a political bludgeon. But then Republicans got an even more damaging gut punch from the party’s own Supreme Court majority of six partisan hacks. They chose the latest election year to assert their personal ideological view that the government should control every person’s reproductive decisions. Not popular!
Then, like a karate chop to the party’s own neck, its Congressional leaders let loose with a pre-election announcement that, if put in charge, the Grand Old Party would go after people’s Social Security and Medicare benefits.
But Republicans also were hit with something beyond their control: a bevy of new, unabashedly progressive Democratic candidates running on real populist issues that matter to workaday people, backed up by legions of energized grassroots activists. Candidates like Summer Lee, who is the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania. Championed by the Working Families Party, Our Revolution, and other little-D democratic groups, Lee beat back concerted attempts by corporate powers from both major parties that tried to demonize and defeat her, including a last-minute dump of $1 million into her GOP opponent’s campaign by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
U.S. Representative Summer Lee, Democrat of Pennsylvania.
Another is Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the feisty people’s advocate who is the top county official in Houston, Texas. She faced down a pack of ultrarich oil magnates, developers, and other corporate interests who put up $9 million in a failed effort to boot her.
The Republican Party has put its future on the rutted road of rightwing extremism and corporate sovereignty. Grassroots progressives, however, showed in the last election a promising path to democratic rejuvenation: run aggressive campaigns offering real change from the business-as-usual politics and policies of both parties.
America’s political, corporate, and media establishments were cocksure about their prognostications, repeated for weeks before the midterm elections, that a powerful Red Wave was going to hit the country. It would sweep Democrats out and push Republicans into office all across the United States, they exclaimed.
Judge Lina Hidalgo
How shocking and embarrassing, then, that on November 8, 2022, their raging wave turned out to be just a little ripple. Republicans ran poorly, and many Democrats ran well. Still, the Democratic Party as a whole could have done even better if its meek, don’t-rock-the-boat leadership had been gutsier, more progressive, and, yes, more Democratic—in the FDR mold. Well, murmur the party’s Washington hierarchy, we can’t get too far ahead of the people.
Really? Why not ask the people themselves? That’s the virtue of the ballot initiative process, which allows grassroots groups to put issues up for a vote, rather than letting the public agenda be controlled by a clique of lobbyists, legislators, and party-line followers. In 2022, 140 such initiatives were on the ballots in thirty-eight states, and even more were on local ballots. And vote after vote showed that the people are way ahead of the political insiders in support of strong progressive policies.
By big margins, three states—California, Michigan, and Vermont—said “to hell with the Republican Supreme Court” by enshrining in their state constitutions. South Dakota, supposedly a rightwing bastion, shoved their GOP governor and legislators aside to to the state’s low-income families. In bright red Nebraska, nearly 60 percent of voters said yes to a . A big majority in Illinois amended the state constitution to for workers. Seventy percent of New Mexico voters made the a constitutional requirement.
It’s not easy, but when politicians fail us, We The People can act.