By Aswad Walker
During an MSNBC analysis of the second GOP Debate featuring wanna-be Republican Party 2024 presidential candidates, Joy-Ann Reid, host of “The ReidOut,” said there’s a bigger conversation that we need to be having, and then posed a chilling question to her fellow panelists: “Are we at the end of politics?”
Reid then went on to break down why she thinks the ominous answer to her question is “Yes.”
NUMBERS GAME
“The Republican Party exists in a world in which demographically, six out of the last seven presidential elections, they can’t win the popular vote. Because demographically and the dispersion of multi-racial communities makes it very hard for them to win through conventional politics,” said Reid.
And because demographically the U.S. is getting darker and younger and more progressive by the day (actually, by the second), with communities of color experiencing positive growth numbers, while whites are experiencing a decline (higher death rates coupled with lower birth rates), future prospects for majority support of Republican positions on issues, which are already wildly unpopular, are decreasing with every tick of the clock.
THEIR MESSAGE SUCKS
“The things they want to do – ban abortion –highly unpopular. When you put it through politics, you put it through an election, they can’t win that. The things they want to do on guns; 70-some-odd percent of Americans don’t agree with it,” added Reid.
But she could have hit on any number of other issues. Most Americans think the attacks of CRT and the banning of books smells too much like Nazi tactics from the 1930s and 40s. The majority of U.S. citizens don’t think governments (local or federal) should tell folk who they can marry or discriminate against folk because of who and how they love. Most folk recognize the existence of white privilege, criminal justice system inequities, global warming and a rigged economic/political system that favors the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everybody else. And the GOP is on the wrong side of all those positions.
So, then, how can they win elections?
GOP ANTI-DEMOCRACY STRATEGIES
Reid said what countless other media pundits and social scientists have concluded: “So, they have to force these things through through anti-democratic means. Voter suppression is the only way. Gerrymandering is the only way they can actually get what they want, because what they want is so unpopular that when you put their ideas through the political process they can’t win.”
WHITE NATIONALIST ANGER & VIOLENCE
She added, “And the frustration and the rage, not being able to ban all immigrants and get all of the quote-unquote illegals out, you can’t do it because it’s logistically impossible. It’s also unpopular. It ruins businesses in Florida. So, when you think about it, all of politics has enraged a certain group of Americans who cannot win through politics. So, what do you go to? You go to autocracy.”
Reid then answered her own question: “What do you do when like 40% of American adults have given up on politics and say, ‘Politics isn’t the answer; give me a strong man who can impose my minority positions on the rest of you, on women – we’re gonna make women give birth; we’re gonna make you do it. Because you don’t wanna do it, and politics won’t allow me to make you do it.’”
In other words, they say “To hell with democracy; give me a dictator who wants what I want.” and the numbers bear this out. Violent attacks on Blacks has skyrocketed since 2016, especially from whites and Hispanics who believe Black voters and their votes are illegitimate (i.e. the Jan. 6 insurrection seeking to overthrow votes of four states that Biden won because of Black voter turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta).
DEMOCRATS’ CLUELESSNESS
Reid and others believe politics as we know it is in peril for another reason – Democratic Party cluelessness.
“But I’m not sure that Democrats have an answer… I’m not sure that Biden and Democrats have an answer to ‘What do you do when like 40% of American adults have given up on politics’ and say ‘Politics isn’t the answer; give me a strong man who can impose my minority positions on the rest of you, on women – we’re gonna make women give birth; we’re gonna make you do it. Because you don’t wanna do it, and politics won’t allow me to make you do it,’ said Reid.
She contends, this cluelessness will lead Democrats to run a regular, traditional 2024 Presidential campaign even as democracy is on the brink of dying – an approach Reid and others believe will not energize enough voters to block anti-democratic, anti-voting rights, anti-women’s rights, from winning at the local, state and federal level in spite of the fact that their anti-everybody policies are not popular with most Americans.
BILLIONAIRES WHO PROFIT OFF A BROKEN SYSTEM
The MSNBC panel upon which Reid made her comments also included Stephanie Ruhle, host of MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle.” Ruhle said Republicans aren’t “participating in politics and policy in the same way that Fox News is no longer covering news or politics. It’s grievance media. And this takes us back to who is standing behind Donald Trump, Who was the mastermind behind his first campaign?’ It was Steve Bannon who very clearly said, ‘Let’s just break the system.’ And that’s what they’re doing.”
And she’s right. Bannon, Roger Stone and others believed fully in the idea of destroying governmental institutions to the point where they didn’t serve the interests of the American people. But what Ruhle didn’t mention was the Dark Money behind it all. What’s Dark Money: political spending meant to influence the decision of a voter, where the donor is not disclosed and the source of the money is unknown. Gazillionaires who profit from the current status quo, broken system, and the chaos and dysfunction it causes, have and continue to invest heavily in keeping the dysfunction dysfunctional. In fact, the more broken the system, the better – for them.
MEDIA MELTDOWN
Reid believes a media unable or unwilling to call out the nation’s most dire threats is literally a threat in and of itself to the country’s well-being.
“The media hasn’t figured it out either. Let’s just be honest. The ‘mainstream media’ can’t figure out how to do something other than conventional politics from like the 90s. And so they’re like, ‘Both sides, both sides, both sides. If we say Donald Trump is corrupt, well then we must cover Hunter Biden equally. We have to ‘Even-Steven’ it. We have to find something to say because we have to say Trump is corrupt, Trump is violent, so let’s talk about Biden’s sneakers [and] Biden is old.’ They’re the same age, but we act as if Biden’s age is equal to Donald Trump’s threat, and the media hasn’t figured out how to do this either. So, it’s like the whole system is busted.
Why is this “Even-Steven,” traditional way of media coverage outdated? Because one political party of fighting to save the little piece of democracy the U.S. has left, while the other is trying to strangle it to death. So, attempting to give both sides equal play and equal airtime is actually a disservice. It would be like the media interviewing Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey or Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass to get their opinion on the vile, inhumane and insidious institution of slavery and all of its evils, then the media saying, “Well, to be fair, we have to give ‘Massa Mo’ and his beliefs the same time and attention.”
No. No, you don’t.
