EDITOR’S NOTE: Democrats and independents: Listen up! The fate of the country and the world are in your hands.

Before I go off on a stream of consciousness rant here many average IQ Americans will never understand, I need to say this one thing everyone should be able to get. It doesn’t take much abstract thinking to realize this.

The Republicans can’t save us. Donald Trump has corrupted that party so badly it may never recover.

Yes, the Democratic Party leadership is also badly corrupt and nearly hopelessly incompetent (more about that later).

That’s not what matters. The only thing that will save us now is a massive wave of people showing up at the polls in November and pulling a lever or checking a box for a Democrat. Any Democrat!

We can deal with the incompetence later. At least the Democrats will listen to and respond to public pressure from the left and the middle. The Republicans only listen to the far right now, and they are all as ignorant and crazy as Trump and Sarah Palin.

I know many of you are pissed off and feel disillusioned. Many people new to political activism got involved in the presidential race of 2016 only to be brutally disappointed with the outcome. The system seems so rigged, and in many ways it was and is, but not exactly like some people think it’s rigged.

If you just can’t stomach the day-to-day horse shit we call politics in this mixed up country, do what you have to do to make a living and keep your families safe.

But on November 8, please get your asses up off the damn couch and make it to a voting place and VOTE. PLEASE!

Now for the rant.

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — So I woke up this cool morning in the campground feeling stuck in between two worlds. On one hand I’m living a simple life in the woods in semi-retirement. On the other hand, I still feel compelled to try to help explain the world to at least some actively engaged members of the public as a journalist in a way that might make a difference.

Some days I feel empowered in the second goal. Other days it feels hopeless, like people are not listening or grasping what’s going on here — no matter how hard I work or how many explanatory words I crank out and share.

Like every person on the planet, I am a flawed human being. Yet I do have something to offer humanity. I will not be disappeared.

While I’ve long covered the natural environment as a specialty beat, for instance, I’m not some pure disciple of vegetarianism who lives a totally spartan life. It’s absolutely true that because of the way I choose to live I use far less energy than the vast majority of Americans. In that sense I practice what I preach.

But just like the first day I walked into a newspaper newsroom back in the days of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan, I find it difficult to write a word without a lit cigarette burning within easy reach of my writing desk.

Hunter S. Thompson had much worse habits than mine and he was considered a hero in the political writing world, even though he rarely actually covered the stories he was assigned to cover. His rants were all personal, but sometimes people on Facebook don’t understand why I interject myself into my own stories. They must be new to paying attention to such things, since “new journalism” was a big thing 50 years ago. I guess many of today’s news readers were not born yet — or were simply not paying attention to anything but some local newspaper like the Alexander City Outlook or what we in my home town called the Birmingham Ruse or the Birmingham Snooze.

I suppose if I had to work in an institutional newsroom at a capitalist, corporate chain online newspaper, I might be able to get by some of the time with an e-cig and the occasional smoke break outside. But here in the campground in the media van, I am the boss. My beautiful and loyal English Springer Spaniel Jefferson sometimes complains, but he can’t fire me. If he wants to, he can hang out on the ground outside.

This morning, as soon as I got the coffee going and turned on the HD TV to CBS “This Morning,” there was Trump at a live press conference denying that he criticized Prime Minister Theresa May, even though there was already a wire story going around all over the world for anyone with half a brain and an internet connection to see.

Then as I continued to consume the morning coffee and the news online, there was this smart piece by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, in many ways the direct descendent of Hunter Thompson, yet smarter and less crazy. He has some words of wisdom for Democrats that they should consume, study and share.

Just yesterday, I was thinking the same thing and had several telephone conversations with old and new political sources after taking part in a press conference call with Alabama’s newest U.S. Senator Doug Jones. I’m working on a book chapter on what actually happened in his winning campaign over old sex fiend judge Roy Moore. But until that work is finished, I can say for now that I think Democrats in Alabama and across the country seem to be taking the wrong lessons away from that victory.

TIMEOUT for breaking news: U.S. grand jury indicts 12 Russian spies in 2016 election hacking.

Now back to the rant.

Without getting too specific and local here, let’s just say for Democrats to try to play it safe and use a Republican-style playbook to try to win elections in November WILL NOT WORK!

Even if a few Democrats win and take over the House, they will not have the moral superiority to fix the problems we need to tackle.

As Taibbi writes:

The notion that Democrats need to look and act more like Republicans to win elections has been practically a religious tenet in Washington for more than 30 years. From the embrace of NAFTA to welfare reform to triangulation to repealing the Glass-Steagall Act to slobbering over Wesley Clark (instead of opposing the Iraq war) to hiring infamous Republican media hitman David Brock, this soul-sucking drift has been sold to voters as an electorally necessary compromise. Now we’re supposed to understand that it’s sexy, too? (He was referring to a New York Times editorial column. See his link).

This is the Democratic Party that lost the presidency in 2016 to a crypto-fascist game-show host with near-record negatives – only ex-Klansman David Duke in 1992 was a more roundly-despised candidate than Trump – and legislatively has for a decade now suffered mass losses on the national and state levels.

Why? Because, as noted here previously, “centrists” don’t really exist. There may be individuals who self-identify that way, but the demographic is mostly a fiction. There’s donor money to be had there, but not many votes.

When the Democrats abandoned their reliance on labor in the Eighties, and began to be funded by the same big companies that backed Republicans, our politics devolved into a contest between two employer-supported factions. Neither really cared about the numerical majority of poor or working-class voters, so they had to get creative with their politics.

The Republican pitch was an open con: the CEO sect hoovering Middle American votes by trotting out xenophobic Bible-thumpers who waved the flag and pretended to love beer, chainsaws, snowmobiles and shooting foreigners, while mostly just deregulating the economy.

The Democratic pitch revolved around social issues like choice and was far less transparently fraudulent. But the party’s proponents had one bad habit that kept putting them in a hole. Repeatedly, when asked to make policy changes favored by sizable majorities of Democratic voters (and often by majorities of all voters), party leaders said: We can’t do that: we need to win!

Now for some local background for Democrats in my home state of Alabama.

Many if not most of the people who were scared into political involvement because of Trump’s election in 2016, or were simply pissed off that their female hero Hillary Clinton lost, actually got involved in working on the 2017 campaign by putting up signs, canvassing, donating money or at least engaging in social media to fight off the prospect of Roy Moore being elected to the United States Senate.

The problem is, many do not possess the institutional and historical background to even remember how the Republicans took over the Alabama Legislature in 2010. So some of the new candidates who have come forward to run and will be on the ballot in November seem to be making the same mistakes in 2018.

A big part of the problem in Alabama is that there really is no Democratic Party infrastructure to lead the way. With Joe Reed and Nancy Worley still in charge of the little party committee left in Montgomery, Democrats mainly in Birmingham and Huntsville have gone rogue.

In a very pragmatic sense, Doug Jones IS the Democratic Party in Alabama now as the only national office holder and the only statewide elected Democrat. But his instincts are to play it safe like his mentor Howell Heflin, and that may prove to be a fatal election strategy for 2020. We live in an entirely different world now and Democrats need real leaders and champions to fire up enough voters to show up at the polls and stop the Republicans from winning.

Just look at what happened in 2010. At that time, Joe Turnham was chair of the Alabama Democratic Party. His advice and strategy for Democrats was to try to prove to church going Christians that Democrats were not devil worshipers by putting out a little book of Bible verses and putting up a daily Bible verse on Facebook, which was still new to most people in the state back then.

That turned into a political disaster when the Republican Party not only took over both houses of the state Legislature, they swept into power with a so-called Super Majority. They still hold that position, even though all three branches of government suffered a constitutional crisis when Roy Moore was kicked off the state Supreme Court again, the Speaker of the House was indicted and removed from office and the Governor left office under a corrupt financial cloud related to a sex scandal.

I am here to tell you that there are enough people in the state willing to vote for a competent Democrat. Ask Doug Jones. His campaign in the 2017 election turned into a national phenomenon, generating an unprecedented 40 percent voter turnout. But that may not repeat itself in 2018 or 2020 because there most likely won’t be a crazy radical like Roy Moore to make fun of or teams of national reporters investigating sex charges at the height of the #MeToo movement.

So campaigning in churches and posting bland political messages on Facebook and Twitter are not going to be enough in November. Bland, mainstream political speak was not enough for Hillary Clinton to defeat Trump in 2016. The new activism was over with the Bernie Sanders campaign. If Democrats can’t learn that lesson and figure out how to incorporate it into their campaigns in 2018 and 2020, we may all be doomed.

I was going to write a separate piece on this, but for now take a hard look at this data just out this week from JMC Analytics.

Decision 2018: Is a Democratic wave forming (or dissipating)?

Let’s summarize.

“While the political climate, interim election results, and partisan enthusiasm have favored the Democrats thus far, voter registration changes throughout last year haven’t shown a perceptible shift towards the Democrats. So while the climate looks nearly as favorable for the Democrats as it did in 2006 or 2008, the ultimate result depends on party turnout on Election Day.”

Here’s the key factor: People are not going to be fired up to register and vote for bland Democrats who sound like Republicans. They are simply called DINOs, Democrats in Name Only.

I’m not saying any of this simply because I am a liberal or a Democrat. My point is not a politically partisan one.

As a patriotic American citizen and a stakeholder in the national enterprise of democracy, it is clear that the Republican Party has drifted too far to the radical right to solve any of our most pressing real problems. If we continue to let them run this crazy idiocracy, we will all end up drowning in the rising seas from climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels or trying to stay alive in a crashed economic system far worse than any of the stories that were told about the Great Depression.

Don’t be fooled by today’s stock market numbers with things going up, up and up. It looked that way too in 1929 and 2006. All bubbles burst. That’s inevitable.

But we don’t have to face it totally unprepared. Just saying “make America great again” and other such foolishness is not enough. We need smart, hard working people in government committed to planning for the worst, not people who get elected on the basis of sensational rhetoric and crass self interest and go about crashing the government like Scott Pruitt.

As I explained in my book Jump On The Bus, what we have here is a very real social competition between something that is also genetic. It’s nature AND nurture. The fight is between the selfish gene and the altruistic gene. The selfish gene may be important for human survival, but so is the altruistic gene. Trump and the Republicans only know the game of selfishness. At least some Democrats believe in cooperating to ensure our survival.

We need to elect more of them, NOW! Time is no longer on our side. The ultimate disaster is closing in on us. Just ask the people of Puerto Rico who still don’t have a house to live in or power, water and sewer. We all live on islands. Some are just bigger than others.

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The other thing we need, as I have preached for the past two decades, is a new online press, one that is well funded and courageously independent. While some in the mainstream media have gotten a bump thanks to Trump, the ink on paper press delivered in trucks and on bicycles is no longer a sustainable business model. On top of that, while TV news will be around for a long time to come, the broadcasters need print style reporters who can cover things, gather facts and explain stories.

I am still here and willing to help in this struggle, but I cannot keep doing it for free or cheap. We are still searching for the right liberal billionaire to grant us the resources we need to ramp this platform up. More advertising and more individual donations would help to keep us going until everybody realizes what I’m saying is true. Liking, sharing and engaging with us on social media with comments also helps.

Thanks for all you do. Won’t you please help us help us all?

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